Sean Dungan

The man who thought he knew too much: Barry Clausen, captured on film at Lake Shasta, California, July 24, 2000

That might be what the office looks like, but it's impossible to say, because Barry Clausen, 58-year-old rogue private investigator, self-styled ecoterrorism expert, and moving force behind North American Research, a one-man information clearinghouse targeting radical environmentalism, refused to reveal the location of his workplace for this article. He also would not give out his home address, was leery of divulging his e-mail alias, declined to disclose his wife's last name—and now that you mention it, he'd prefer that you forget her first name, too. Clausen resides in a world insulated by double-secret precaution. "I have no doubt that somebody would like to find me," he says ominously.

Clausen's got reason to be more than a little paranoid. Over the last decade he has succeeded in turning himself into the radical environmental movement's chief persecutor. Why haven't you heard of him? In part, because that's the way Barry likes it. But for good or ill, his reputation in green political circles is sharply defined.

"Barry Clausen is a fraud who aims to discredit the environmental movement by any means necessary," proclaims Tarso Ramos, research director of the Western States Center, a left-wing research organization with headquarters in Portland, Oregon. One Earth First! activist describes him as a "professional snitch"; another calls him "nothing but a pain in the ass." Some say Clausen is a distortion artist out to smear legitimate conservationists as "ecoterrorists" and whip up public fear about nonviolent environmental groups. Others just find him hard to take seriously. "Truthfully," says Portland, Oregon–based Craig Rosebraugh, spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, "I think he's a fool."

"Barry," says Asante Riverwind, a director of Oregon's Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project who has sparred with Clausen off and on for ten years, "is going to need a lot of healing at some point in his life."

What has this man done to attract such vitriol and mockery? A lot, actually. In the shadowy world of private intelligence-gathering, Clausen's specialty is the eco-activist database. An insatiable reader and avowed pack rat of radical publications like Earth First! Journal, the British eco-zine Green Anarchist, the Animal Liberation Front newsletter The Underground, and Black Clad Messenger, a sort of New Republic for Eugene, Oregon–based anarchists, he keys every byline, subject, date, and suggested industry target into his computer. (The subscriptions aren't in his name, of course; a friend with a post office box forwards them.) When he hears about an Earth First! rally or an animal rights protest, he often shows up to record names, car makes and models, and plate numbers. When he hears about an act of ecotage—a firebombing or fur protest, for instance—he'll call up the victimized company or local police agency and let them know he has information that might prove useful. It's an operation built on the backdoor quid pro quo. "Barry knows a lot of players," says one FBI agent (who, along with many other officials in law enforcement and the timber industry, declined to go on the record about Clausen).

This avocational snooping might pass unremarked if it weren't in service of a larger goal, which is to unmask Earth First! as the most criminal bunch of American radicals since the Weather Underground. Since 1990, when he briefly infiltrated Earth First! chapters in Montana and Washington, Clausen has tracked the group and its members with a doggedness that borders on obsession. But obsession has its weird ego perks. ABC News, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, and countless radio talk shows have all turned to him for quotes on environmental extremism. While some observers might argue that Earth First! was already on the wane as a force to be reckoned with by the time Clausen made the group his bête noire, he continues to portray it as a Sinn Fein–like front for such violent groups as ALF and ELF, which use "direct action" (read: arson, destruction of property) to get their point across.

"The original concept of Earth First! was to make other environmental organizations look more mainstream," Clausen contends. "But the group's radicalism has escalated, and now there's basically no control. Even [cofounder] Dave Foreman left Earth First!. It's one thing to protest or spray graffiti. What they advocate has gone beyond that. It's gone into terrorism."

Environmentalists write him off as a kook, and even some of his allies treat him with suspicion. And yet Clausen's campaign, conducted from the hinterlands of the West, has influenced the environmental debate far out of proportion to his fans (few), his fame (negligible), and his funding (nonexistent). Which is to say, when Clausen talks, some powerful people listen. Two years ago, members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime listened as he gravely warned that Earth First! "advocates anarchy, revolution, and terrorism to the youth of our country." FBI agents, assistant U.S. attorneys, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have debriefed him on some of the most well-known eco-crimes of the last decade, including the Unabomber case and the 1998 firebombing of Two Elk Lodge in Vail, Colorado. And as incidents of crop-crushing by anti–genetic engineering groups increase (more than two dozen have already been reported this year in the U.S. and Canada), leaders in agricultural research are turning to Clausen for information on activists in the so-called Frankenfood battle.

For a man caught up in such a high-pitched sociopolitical battle, Clausen maintains a complex relationship with the facts. "Barry's not so stupid that he'll just make things up," explains one acquaintance. "There are just enough kernels of truth to what he says to make the whole thing sound credible." Perhaps the strangest fact of all is that underneath his outrageous conspiracy theories and cloak-and-dagger theatrics lies an uncomfortable truth about radical environmental activism in the year 2000: It ain't just monkeywrenching anymore.