Marcus Alden Whitfield
On a December morning in 1969, Chicago police stormed an apartment on the West Side and killed a twenty one year old man in his bed. The floor plan that guided them to his exact room had been drawn by his own bodyguard, a man who had eaten at his table and sworn loyalty to his cause for three years.This is the true story of that betrayal, and of hundreds like it.For eighty years, from the coal camps of Colorado to the picket lines of British construction sites, governments and corporations built a hidden machine for watching the people who dared to organize. They paid informants to join unions as trusted friends. They planted spies inside picket lines, church basements, and civil rights meetings. They drugged a sleeping man before his own murder, framed an innocent activist for a killing he did not commit, and mailed a letter urging a Nobel laureate to take his own life.Drawing on declassified FBI files, congressional testimony, and records only recently forced into daylight by British courts, this book reconstructs, for the first time in a single sweeping narrative, exactly how domestic intelligence services turned ordinary trust into their most effective weapon. Meet the Pinkerton operative who spent three years undercover to hang ten miners. Follow the twenty four year old lawyer who built a card index of half a million Americans and never stopped growing it. Sit inside the Senate hearing room where a suppressed newsreel finally proved that police had shot unarmed strikers in the back. And watch, informant by informant, decade by decade, as a pattern repeats itself with chilling consistency: infiltrate, disrupt, expose, deny, and begin again under a new name.This is not a story confined to the past. The blacklist that destroyed construction workers careers in Britain operated, under one name or another, for nearly ninety years. The techniques perfected against the Communist Party in the 1940s reappeared against the Black Panthers in the 1960s and against a new generation of activists decades after that. Every reform this book documents was won by ordinary people: a stenographer who could not stay silent, a Senate committee that refused to look away, eight private citizens who broke into an FBI office armed with nothing but crowbars and conviction.Written with the pace and clarity of the finest narrative nonfiction, The Informant in the Union will change how you understand the word informant, and how you look at the quiet, trusted person standing at the back of every meeting.
