Sean Dungan

Burning rage: Clausen is widening his scope, chasing after everything from anti-Frankenfood crop crushers to leads in the Leonard Peltier case.

Sometimes law enforcement officials are forced to listen to him. They do not, as a rule, enjoy it. When ELF claimed responsibility for the $12 million Vail fire in 1998, two agents from the FBI's San Francisco bureau interviewed Clausen. They got an earful. "You go back and tell your leadership that I can show them how to predict one of these crimes in advance," Clausen says he told them. "It's as simple as reading."

This sort of attitude goes down poorly with federal agents. (The two in question politely declined to comment.) When asked about Clausen, Doug Auckland, a domestic terrorism specialist in the FBI's Seattle office, answers, "Well, I know who he is, but..." He pauses and ponders the subject with an amused sigh. "I'm not going to comment. And I think the Bureau's position is going to be not to comment." I got this a lot: A moment of recognition ("Oh-ho! Barry, my man!" crowed one FBI agent) followed by a denial of any working relationship. "I am aware of him," says Tom Lyons, head of law enforcement for the U.S. Forest Service's 25 million acres in the Pacific Northwest. "When he has raised issues in the past, or felt that he had information, our investigative teams have contacted him. As they do with anybody who comes to us with information."

Two years ago, Clausen tells me, he was subpoenaed by an assistant U.S. attorney in Portland to testify about ELF and ALF before a federal grand jury investigating the Vail fire, as well as arson incidents at a Bureau of Land Management wild horse corral in Burns, Oregon, and a meat processing plant in Redmond, Oregon. Can you prove it? I ask. He faxes me the subpoena. "When I first started doing this," he says, "law enforcement wouldn't talk to me. But as things progressed, there were officers that realized, 'Wait a minute, Clausen has something.'"

Sometimes, though, they don't need what he's got. Take the Unabomber frenzy of 1996. Shortly after the mail-bomb murder of California Forestry Association president Gil Murray in April 1995, a CFA official discovered an article headlined "Eco-Fucker Hit List" in a 1990 issue of a Northwest eco-zine called Live Wild or Die. At the top of the list was the Timber Association of California—the former name of the CFA and the organization to which the bomb had been addressed. Third on the list was Exxon, whose purported employment of ad executive Thomas Mosser was the motive behind his mail-bomb murder the previous December. Clausen obtained a copy of the list and waited until August 2, 1995—the day The New York Times and The Washington Post published excerpts from the Unabomber's manifesto—to leak it to reporters. After it came out, an FBI spokesman told the Sacramento Bee, "we have met with [Clausen] and we are very interested in what he has to say." You could almost hear their teeth grinding. The Bureau already knew about the list; all Clausen did was make it public.

Shortly after Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in the spring of 1996, Clausen overplayed his hand once more in attempting to connect Earth First! to the Unabomber. He claimed that Kaczynski had attended a 1994 Native Forest Network conference in Missoula, Montana—where members of Earth First! were also present—using the alias "T. Casinski." ABC News, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other media outlets repeated Clausen's claim. Few mentioned that the Oregon Natural Resources Council and the U.S. Forest Service were also at the conference, and none questioned the logic of his claim, i.e. why Kaczynski would assume a name so similar to his own.

When he produced no hard evidence to back up his claim (Clausen says he got the information from an FBI agent), Earth First! fired back and shifted the story to his credibility. "He is a wanna-be informant who has been rejected by every law enforcement agency he has tried to work with," read one Earth First! release, which went on to quote Horace Mewborn, an FBI domestic terrorism specialist. In 1995, Mewborn testified in federal court as part of Earth First! leader Judi Bari's suit against the FBI and the Oakland Police Department for allegedly mishandling the case of a 1990 car bombing that shattered her pelvis and injured fellow EF! activist Darryl Cherney. (Bari and EF! claimed it was an act of antienvironmental terrorism; the police and FBI suspected the two were transporting the bomb themselves. The case was never solved, and Bari died of cancer in 1997, but her suit lives on. It's slated to be heard in federal court in October 2001.) "We did some other agency checks about Clausen," Mewborn said. "His name came up in other places...and they said he was not reliable."

Still, if Clausen's evidence was shaky, his instincts were sound. When FBI agents searched Kaczynski's Montana cabin, they found a copy of the June 21, 1993, "Litha" edition of Earth First! Journal, which asserted (erroneously) that Burson-Marsteller, the public relations firm Thomas Mosser worked for, helped Exxon clean up its image after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. By itself, this proves nothing—Kaczynski's cabin was overflowing with ephemera. But agents also found a letter written to Earth First!, titled "Suggestions for Earth First!ers from FC." ("FC" was the alias the Unabomber used in correspondence.) The letter stated in part, "As for the Mosser bombing, our attention was called to Burson-Marsteller by an article that appeared in the Earth First! Litha." This comes not from Clausen but from the prosecutors at Kaczynski's January 22, 1998, federal court hearing—evidence that Kaczynski confirmed.