Crop-busters go to ground

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The man on the other end of the phone does not give his name.

So when you say, "Who am I speaking to?" he says, "Who am I speaking to?"

He tells me to call him Ross - "the name I use when I don't know who the hell I'm talking to". Or, through the e-mail address he creates so that we can communicate, DA Dude. The DA stands for direct action. The Dude is a Christchurch-based, full-time activist.

The reason we're speaking at all is because we would both like to know the answer to the same question: who broke into a greenhouse at the Lincoln Science and Agriculture Centre and destroyed 1334 potato plants?

The trail begins here. If it is known at all, it is known as greenhouse PC2.

It sits on around 1ha at Lincoln. It is one facility, roughly 20m by 50m, made up of five interconnected parts: three glasshouse areas, a shadehouse and a fully designated laboratory area. The greenhouse complex is surrounded by other buildings which look much alike to the casual observer. Only PC2 is different.

The PC2 label refers to its status as a second-level designated area of containment. Which means that this greenhouse is certified to house genetically modified plants for research.

It is supposed to be secure. PC2 status means that even the air is filtered. It has a double-lock entry system: you enter through an anteroom, put on protective clothing and are sprayed for insects before moving through into the glasshouse proper.

It is a restricted area: you need a swipe card to gain access. There are staff at Lincoln who have worked at the complex for many years and who don't know which greenhouse is PC2.

Late on January 9 or early on January 10, a person, very likely more than one, got into the greenhouse without a security card. If they wore protective clothing, it's likely it wasn't white lab coveralls. The moon, in its last quarter, would have offered no light until it rose in the east at 2.30 am.

Black, it is safe to assume, would have been de rigueur evening wear, perhaps with colour-coordinated balaclavas. And gumboots.

They cut a neat square, large enough to squeeze through, in one of the panels of stainless steel netting which sits above the 1m-high concrete base. Tin snips would have done the job.

Once inside, they set about destroying the potato plants. They carefully cut most of them close to ground level. Some they pulled out, other larger plants were tipped upside down. The debris was carefully placed in plastic rubbish bags believed to be official Christchurch City Council bags.

The visitors don't appear to have been in any hurry, or in any panic. It was a methodical operation. And they knew what they were looking for.

PC2 houses four other types of plants. The centre is reluctant to identify them. There were certainly plenty of specimens with the unlovely name, arabidopsis, for the plucking. Known as the lab rat of the plant world, this weed is one of the few plants to have been completely genetically mapped. It survived the cut.

At 9.20 am on the Thursday the break-in was discovered by technical staff due to carry out routine maintenance work. The police were called minutes later. The media were not called until late in the day. This has taken on an ominous significance in the eyes of some of the more paranoid of watchers: was Lincoln using the time to cover up GM experiments it didn't have permission for? If so, they must have enormous faith in the powers of the media to spot such experiments.

Lincoln spokesman Howard Bezar says they expected someone to claim responsibility. Nobody has. Nobody knows, but everybody's got a theory.

Here are a few of them: it was anti-GM activists. Or pro-GM activists. It was students. Or insiders. It was the eco-Taleban. Or it was concerned citizens. That rustling you can hear is the sound of whispering in the corn; of scuttlebutt and conspiracy theories travelling up and down the country.

"To be honest," says Ross, the man on the phone, "the activist community probably doesn't know much about it at all. Something in the way of direct action obviously is done on a need-to-know basis. Nobody's running around asking blatant questions."

The majority of fingers have been pointed, predictably, at the anti-GM movement. Except, again predictably, by the anti-GM movement. Less predictably, the more vocal, well-known anti groups would like to get hold of the perpetrators and, says one member of a green group who doesn't wanted to be identified, "give them a kick up the bum".

It's a public relations disaster. There is no way of knowing, either, if GM material was carried out of the greenhouse.

If anyone does know, it's likely Ross would. He says he might have expected to have been invited to join in. He is experienced in direct action. He is also ex-Army. He has "been trained by the NZ Government in certain skills like camouflage and, um, sort of sneaking around places".

He's security-conscious to the point, you might think, of paranoia. He would call it cautious. He won't talk on landlines, ever. He won't talk about direct-action campaigns on any phone. He meets people in crowded pubs or cafes, where you can't be overheard easily.

He has a "personal rule that I know people for a minimum of three years before I trust them enough to discuss any sort of direct action with them".

He doesn't trust me enough to point me in the direction of the really interesting websites ("here are some of the semi-interesting ones ... ") but he is more than happy to talk generally about rules of engagement. "If I was going to do something similar, which of course I wouldn't, [but] theoretically ... "

Theoretically, it is of no surprise to the activist community that nobody has heard who was behind the raid. Direct-action groups operate in cells, says Ross. The inner group would consist of as few as three or four people, the larger group never knowing who they are.

Forget about a spokesperson for a group having any knowledge of an action. They'll often be activists who have been publicly identified with direct action - and therefore are of little use for future forays. When questioned by the police, they can't give anything away because they don't know anything. They never ask questions: "If you need to ask, you don't need to know." They know how to carry out surveillance, how to build up a picture of the patrolling habits of what Ross calls "rent-a-cops".

If they want to know how to disable a security camera, all they have to do is to look it up on one of the "semi-interesting" websites.

There are less secret-squirrel ways of obtaining information. Trials such as the potato ones at Lincoln have to be registered, they're on the public record. As is the location of PC2.

As the week lengthens, whodunit theories grow like arabidopsis.

A guy who knows a guy who is a horticulture student at Lincoln says his flatmate doesn't want to talk because "he'd probably be beaten up", but reckons he saw a group of six balaclava-clad people in a grey van wearing black heading towards Lincoln at 8.30 pm on January 9. He followed the van but says they seemed to realise they had been spotted and lost him.

People I've never called start ringing, talking conspiratorially about the suspicion that this a giant publicity stunt carried out by pro-GM activists to discredit the antis.

Tremane Barr, a spokesman for the anti-GM lobby Groundswell Canterbury (he admits he might be thought a prime suspect), is beginning to get very suspicious indeed.

Why would a pro-GM lobby carry out an action that was always going to be perceived as anti-science? It provides the perfect opportunity, he says, to give weight to the argument that GM trials should be carried out in secret.

Lincoln has just received permission to remove the PC2 signage as part of its security review. Says Barr: "From the public relations perspective it's worth gold."

Take a look, he suggests, at a Life Science Network discussion paper of November 27. The author of the paper, Francis Weevers, writes "eco-activists carrying out their public intentions to rip up crops ... present us with a clear opportunity to marginalise the Green arguments against GM with the general public".

Weevers admits that "anything which gives us a platform to produce positive coverage about the responsible use of GM technology in New Zealand is good for us".

But he dismisses as "fairyland stuff"any idea that a pro-GM group could have been involved in the raid.

As is the idea that his organisation might have received a tip-off, despite his instruction that "a key to the ability to manage our way through the next two years will be the intelligence we can gather about the intentions of the anti-GM activists".

Another phone call. Why don't you call the Libertarianz? Oh well, why not. Peter Creswell, Libertarianz leader issued a statement in November announcing "Libz Declare War on Activists". Cresswell refers to anti-GM activists as the "eco-Taleban". He doesn't think bin Laden had a hand in this raid.

Inside PC2, the saboteurs left behind the plastic bags (they have been sent for forensic examination) and a bloke-sized gumboot print.

Police are looking, says Constable Rob Stuart of Lincoln, "for a one-footed man".