Spying on the far left
* Denmark In 1982 the Danish intelligence service infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SAP). The scandal was only exposed last month. Äge Skovrind + Bodil Rasmussen
The agent collected membership details, and reports about political debates within the Socialistiese Arbeiderspartij SAP - Danish section of the Fourth International. It seems that he was particularly interested in the party's international links.
Television exposure of this and other intelligence activity came suddenly, in the midst of the election campaign, and provoked a national debate about intelligence work and political control.
The exposure was made in a two-part programme by one of the two national TV channels. The former SAP agent explained how he was ordered to apply for membership in order to infiltrate the party and get information about its members and party activities. When the mission was concluded, in 1984, he copied the keys to the SAP national office and gave them to the intelligence service.
In 1981 and 1984, SAP ran for the first time in parliamentary elections. The intelligence service copied and recorded most of the 20,000 signatures gathered to enable the party to present a national slate. This contravenes a 1968 government ruling forbidding the registration of legal political activities. "No real damage"
Long-standing SAP member Søren Søndergaard, currently a Member of Parliament for the Red-Green Alliance, told television journalists that he "was not taken by surprise, given that this was a confirmation of the SAP's analysis of the role played by the intelligence practice to protect the capitalist system even by illegal methods." He added that. SAP has always worked inside a legal
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Netherlands. e-mail <iire @ antenna.nl> framework, there is no reason to fear any damage to the party." Nevertheless, Søndergaard and other SAP members are "worried about possible intelligence information about SAP relations to organisations in countries where the political struggle, and communist commitment is a question of life and death."
According to Søndergaard, the risks of infiltration do not, in a country like Denmark, justify secret organisation of anticapitalist parties. Work in the mass movement can best be carried out by genuinely non-secret organisations - like SAP, he
The intelligence service agent assigned to SAP also spied against legal activity by militant trade unionists. His targets included striking bus drivers, union activity during the Easter 1985 general strike, and solidarity actions related to boycott campaigns against the South African apartheid
Since the television programmes the press have uncovered further cases of intelligence service spying against the trade unions. The telephones of the National Union of Unskilled Workers (SiD) were tapped during the 1994 bus drivers' strike, and there was close monitoring of the striking Ri-bus drivers in 1995.
Another agent has admitted recorded a 1996 meeting about the Kurdish question, sponsored by the national union confederation and featuring a Social Democratic leader as speaker. The same agent told one newspaper that he supplied the intelligence service with a tape recording containing threats by a far-right leader to implement an assassination plan against the revolutionary organisation International Socialists. The intelligence service never informed the organisation itself about this warning. Two months later, on March 16, 1992, the secretary of IS was kılled by a bomb attack which remains
The TV and press debate has focused on the way government and parliament are informed - or not - of the activities of the intelligence service. The Social Democrat ex-Minister of Justice told television journalists that he had never authorised the infiltration of SAP. A few day after that programme was aired, the press revealed that the chief of the intelligence service, Birgitte Stampe, had misinformed another Social Democratic Minister of Justice about the supervision of the Kurdish solidarity meeting.
In response, SAP member and Red Green Alliance MP Søren Søndergaard demanded Stampe's resignation. It seems increasingly clear that successive Social Democratic governments have been misınformed more than informed about intelligence service activities. A right-wing exMinister of Justice admitted and still defends the intelligence operation against the trade unions in the early 80s. stopped the society by their strikes and pickets lines and were throwing bottles at the police. It was surely a task for the intelligence service",
The initial revelations were televised on March Ist, just after Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen unexpectedly called a general election for March Ilth. So all political parties were forced to comment on the question of intelligence
The Red-Green Alliance - and SAP -proposed the appointment of an independent commission of inquiry to investigate the activities of the intelligence services since the start in the forties. The results of the commission should - according to SAP - be public and form the basis of a discussion about the future of the intelligence
This proposal was supported by the Social Liberal Party, a small party in the government coalition, and, more surprisingly, by a leading member of the conservative party, who argued that an independent commission was necessary to rebuild public trust in the intelligence services. Several leading member of the trade union movement have supported the idea of an independent commission, and the chairman of the National trade union confederation (LO) has asked the minister of justice to take immediate steps to make a new and more strict law ensuring parliamentary control of the intelligence services. Several political parties have also demanded more parliamentary control of and information about the intelligence
So far, however, the absence of public knowledge, political regulations and budget limits for parliamentary work enables the Danish intelligence service to operate as an even stronger "state inside the state" than their Norwegian and German counterparts.
Despite the anger and demands from trade unions and other social democratic victims of intelligence activities, the current Social Democratic Minister of Justice has merely asked the intelligence service to make an internal review of its activities since the late seventies. And even this request came only after a week of debates in which more and more social democrats and others began to ask for a closer control over the intelligence services. Allegations, slurs and prejudices
From the beginning of this scandal, the main right wing opposition party, the Liberals, have defended the intelligence
parliament. Of the five, three are dual strategy will be a central part of the members or former members of the Left Alliance's work in the new parliament. * service and justified the infiltration of SAP. Like some of the editorials in the big bourgeois newspapers, the chairman of the Liberals has argued that it was necessary to survey the far left, "not because of the activities of SAP or others, but because vou never know what people who talk about revolution will do!'
Like a number of journalists, he suggested that the SAP may have had similar plans to the "Blekingegade group" which robbed a bank in the late 80s, planning to give the money to guerrilla groups in the third world.
Other journalists have tried to justify the infiltration of SAP by throwing suspicion on the party's international solidarity work. Their difficulty has been that, during the period of deep infiltration, SAP's main solidarity activities were solidarity with the Sandinista revolution in
Nicaragua, and support for political prisoners in Czecho-Slovakia. As a result, there have been some quite absurd articles in the press, trying to link SAP to the bomb attack against Eden Pastora in Nicaragua in 1984. One - anonymous - former member of SAP, was quoted as saying "there have always been open doors between SAP and terrorism" examples or evidence.
Nevertheless, accusations of this kind have not been the general picture in the press, and the SAP has been able to explain its open style of work, particularly during the period in question, as well as publicising the general views of the party about how to fight for social and democratic rights through mass-organisation.
Though the attempts to represent SAP as some kind of international terrorist organisation have failed, it is likely that exactly the international work of SAP, particularly its membership of the Fourth International, were one of the real reasons for the infiltration. On the 15th of March a leading newspaper wrote that "according to our information, NATO decided in the eighties to keep an eye on the Fourth International." The reason, apparently, was that "The Fourth International had contacts to guerrilla movements in Latin America and Africa"
Though there has been wide debate about the nature and context of intelligence service work, there has not yet been much political activity and organising around the issue. This may change now that the elections are over. Frede Jakobsen, former editor of the SAP weekly Klassekampen (Class Struggle) is only one of the people now demanding to see their intelligence service files.
More of the same from Rasmussen?
Denmark's social democratic government has been re-elected
On March 11th Danes re-elected Prime the Conservatives losing 11 seats and Socialists, one is a member of the Com-
Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's centre- left government of Social Democrats and
Social Liberals. To maintain his majority,
Rasmussen needs the support of the
Socialist Peoples Party and the Red-
Green Alliance.
Thomas Eisler
The mass media focused on the choice between the two candidates for prime-minister: Uffe Ellemann Jensen from the Liberal Party and Poul Nyrup
Rasmussen from the Social Democrats.
Opinion polls and "political commentators" wrongly predicted a victory for the
Liberals, who promised large tax cuts
The total vote for the four parties the Liberals stopping their progress. In defence of social rights
There was a 6% swing to the Social Democrats during the last days before the election, according to the polls. The government and the lett opposition parties successfully confronted the right's promises of massive tax reductions by focusing on the defence of
This might seem strange, since the outgoing Social Democratic government had removed taxes on capital and reduced unemployment benefit for youth. Nevertheless, voter behaviour shows that the liberals' "free choice" policies - in reality austerity politics - no longer have munist Party and Søren Søndergaard is a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SAP-Fourth International) Some voters presumably switched to the Socialist Peoples Party or the Social Democrats, concerned conservative and liberal parties could replace the social democrats in
Nevertheless, this election proves that the Red-Green Alliance, formed before the 1994 elections, has a stable base of support. The election campaign was a success, with more people active than ever before - including many young people. During the 2 1/2 week election campaign the Alliance signed up about 200 new members, bringing the total to backing the government rose 0.6% to growing support. The Social Democrats over 1,800. 50.1%. For technical reasons this didn't result in more representatives. The two centre parties outside the government both gained votes, with Christian democrats passing the 2% limit to be represented in parliament again. The big loser was the more traditional right wing with Votes and seats Red-Green Alliance i Socialist Peoples Party 13 Christian Democrats are still seen as the basic defenders of
The Far Right, represented by the Progress Party and especially the younger Danish Peoples Party won 9.8%, up from 6.4% in 1994. Their success was the result of a xenophobic debate last autumn on immigrants and refugees But since then they havent received support. What is more frightening is the acceptance of xenophobic propaganda by the mainstream parties. The Liberals put forward some of the same proposals as the far right, and before the election the Minister of Interior proposed a programme including giving immigrants less social rights than Danish citizens. Red-Green Alliance
The Red-Green Alliance vote fell by
0.4%, giving the party deputies, down from six in the last