Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Move within faceless masses, or far from the madding crowd and the surveillance cameras that attend it?never in between. Give your credit cards and cell phone to a friend to make a misleading paper txail far away, if you're ready to back that alibi up under scrutiny. When you go undercover, you should be like Santa Glaus: you have a mission, you're never seen, and you're in and out with the cookies and soymilk before anyone knows what happened.

While I'm not exactly the most organized of revolutionaries, I knew something had to be done when I got wind that a group of fascists were having their national conference just a few hours away The Anti-Racist Action email listserv to which I subscribe announced that the Gouncil of Gonservative Gitizens was having their national meeting just down the road from my hometown. The Gouncil of Gonservative Gitizens was the aboveground political organ of the racist ultra-right wing, known for wining and dining senators and holding public anti-immigrant rallies. Historically, they were descended from the White Citizens' Councils that were set up to oppose integration and aid the Klan. This was an opportunity to make their work more difficult, but it came with a hitch: while the webpage to which the email had directed me announced what city the meeting was in, it also proclaimed, "Because of extremist Lefties, the exact location of our meeting will only be announced to members." "Lefiy" or not, I was one extremist who would not be put off. Clearly, I had to join the Council, and to do this I had only one month to transform myself from a black-clad scraggly anarchist into a passable good-ole-boy racist.

Luckily I was bom and bred a Southerner. My family on one side was descended from farmers and cops, full of women named Bonnie?I even had an Uncle Buddy. I had spent my childhood going around to Civil War reenactments dressed as a miniature Confederate sohder, and worshipping at a back-to-the-roots apocalyptic church in which

the United Nations were regarded as the Antichrist and the black heUcopters were spoken of more often than Jesus' love of all His little children. 1 had been fortunate enough to come of age in a multiracial neighborhood, which gave me the perspective to realize that some of my parent's viewpoints about race were unwholesome and uninformed. All the same, whenever I spent enough time wdth my older aunts and uncles, who were former tobacco farmers with Southern accents as thick as grits, I could not only talk the talk, but talk it with the proper accent! I may be a raging antifascist anarchist, but I'm also a Southerner by the Grace of. . . hm, let's not say God, but definitely genealogy. Anyway, I did what every self-respecting revolutionary would have done: I went home and hung out with my family for a few days.

I spent an afternoon catching up with an old friend from my pre-radical high school days, who was working construction. It happened that he looked more or less like me. Despite my best attempts, he still had some ideas that I considered mildly racist?"I don't mind Mexicans, but there's so many of them coming over the border it makes it tough for me"?but even mildly racist people often bear a deep and abiding hatred of fascist groups like the Klan. When I confided to him that 1 was trying to infiltrate a group of neo-Nazis and Klan members, he was down, to play a supporting role. He was too busy at work to take time off to help me infiltrate personally, so I asked if I could use his name, and possibly his address or I.D. if it was absolutely necessary. He agreed, on the condition that I promise not to bring too much heat down on him. Presto, an instant new identity: I was now "Bob Noble" (names changed to protect the innocent). A simple, unpretentious name, and not even imaginary. Remember, your enemies vnll often do a background check on you, or at least see if you exist in the phone book.

The Council of Conservative Citizens had a national contact number listed on their website. Since there was still a month to go, a call to it by a complete stranger would not infiltration be a dead giveaway that antiracists were trying to infiltrate their conference, so I gave 315

them a ring. After a few rings, an answering machine picked up and asked for my name and phone number. I was not interested in leaving my friend's contact information on the answering machine of hatemongers, and as I was calling from a payphone at a deserted gas station, Caller I.D. could have blovm my cover quite easily. So I started out vrith a grumbly drawl: "Well, I've just been reading your webpage for a long time and I agree with your views, especially those about states' rights and freedom of speech, and I was wondering ..."