What Standing Rock’s Propaganda War Means Today		

 In early 2017, some of the water protectors from Standing Rock joined a new camp where they could gather and organize. It was called Little Creek, and it was not far from the Dakota Access Pipeline’s route in Iowa.

 I thought it was gonna be more of an action based place, but it's, it, what it turned out to be was more of a healing place.

 Sikowis Nobiss is a Plains Cree and Saulteaux citizen of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada. She lives in Iowa.

A landowner had offered up an old Christmas tree farm gone feral. The land is rolling, the grass is long.

 We had sweat there so people would sweat. We had pipe ceremony come through quite a few times. it was just quiet.

The people who came from Standing Rock to Little Creek had been through a LOT. Some had made it through months of police and private security pressure, before police evicted the camps in North Dakota at the end of February 2017.

The campers end up participating in some demonstrations. But they spend more time attempting to heal from what just happened.  They sit around the fire, grow vegetables, get a  few goats and chickens. They argue with each other a lot.

You might expect that from the perspective of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s parent company, Energy Transfer, that 

 have won. They got their pipeline built, they got the protestors kicked out, things are good. But Energy Transfer and its contract private security firm TigerSwan are not done with these people.

I'm Alleen Brown for Drilled and this is The Propagandist,  the inside story of a narrative war between a pipeline company and an  environmental movement.

A couple months after the water protectors set up camp at Little Creek in early 2017, they start to notice a new Facebook page making the rounds among their neighbors. It's called Defend Iowa.

That name should sound familiar. It seems to be a spin on Defend Bisman, that private anti-protest Facebook group you heard about last episode, the one that TigerSwan targeted in North Dakota, where local people vented their frustrations with the protests. But this version was NOT created by locals.

It’s the newest project of the propaganda team working for Energy Transfer’s private security company.

In North Dakota, Robert Rice and TigerSwan attempted to encourage opposition to Standing Rock using Facebook. Here in Iowa, the security operatives are aiming to stifle the movement going forward.

A lot of the Defend Iowa Facebook videos feature none other than Robert Rice himself, Tiger Swan’s contractor who we met in North Dakota.

He's a mild-looking white guy, with gray hair and a beard and glasses, usually wearing a polo shirt. And he poses like a news anchor.

 As you've probably heard, a group of protesters from Standing Rock have formed a camp near Williamsburg in Iowa County. Their stated goal is to build the camp from twenty people to at least one hundred people by midsummer. They say they want to develop new ways to fight pipelines. Now, let us be clear. We are not against peaceful protesting. However, many of the members of this cell have been part of the destruction in Standing Rock last year,

 We reached out to Robert several times and he never responded.

Little Creek camp is in the middle of Iowa farm country -- it's miles on miles of corn and soybean fields. Like in rural North Dakota, that insider/outsider dynamic is strong.

Unlike in North Dakota, we have a clear sense of what Robert Rice's ultimate goal was in Iowa -- because he spelled it out in a WhatsApp chat. I got it through a public records request..

Around the same time the Defend Iowa page launches, one of TigerSwan’s managers connects Robert Rice and another TigerSwan contractor, Joel McCollough.

Joel is a burly ex Marine with a big beard. And the fall before all this, he started showing up in anti-pipeline spaces in Iowa and North Dakota with his sweet spotted white dog. He presented himself as an ally for the movement  -- sometimes he even said he was a journalist. He bought things for people -- supplies for the camps, a hotel room where people talked about their protest plans, even alcohol and weed. And he made friends. All that deception was to gather information for the pipeline company. And now TigerSwan wants this infiltrator and their propagandist to put their heads together.

These guys are essentially private spies for a pipeline company. But the records from their WhatsApp chat mean we get to eavesdrop on THEIR conversations.

: I think we have a good chance of completely shutting down Little Creek.

We hired an actor to read Robert’s chats.

What would help me to know is how they are connected to the other camps, and what strings to start pulling on, or what factions to exploit against each other

He told Joel what he'd been up to with the Defend Iowa Facebook page.  

 our stuff has resulted in some cold shoulders and pushy behavior from locals and loss of support. I think we ruined the first day of their climate march and cost them two venues.

We also hired an actor to read for Joel. And Robert is eager to get his help.After all Joel’s infiltrated camps before..

 I’ve been looking for some other information on the internal factions infighting at little creek

Again, Joel’s been pretending to be the water protectors’ friend for months.

Joel starts feeding Robert rumors. We reached out to Joel, but he declined to answer our questions.

Little Creek camp might seem like small potatoes now that the Standing Rock camp has been evicted, but if you think about it, if TigerSwan wants to keep their contract with Energy Transfer, then playing up 

 water protectors as dangerous makes the company’s security work seem more essential. In one of their reports, TigerSwan tells Energy Transfer that the water protector movement is akin to a jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan.

"What the anti-DAPL [DAP-ull] protesters have called an 'indigenous decolonization movement' was, essentially, an externally supported, ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component."

TigerSwan points to the aftermath of anti-Soviet jihadist uprisings in Afghanistan in the 1990s. After the insurgents were defeated, TigerSwan writes, they dispersed and regrouped... and this so-called bleedout, eventually led to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. TigerSwan doesn't say it explicitly, but what came after that was 9/11. TigerSwan suggests to Energy Transfer that something similar is now happening in the upper Midwest. Their daily report says,

"We have already seen this 'bleedout' happen with the ideologically driven pipeline fighters from Standing Rock, as several of them are in the process of moving to Iowa"

They're suggesting Little Creek could be a place where water protectors radicalize further -- just like happened with Al Qaeda.

But this is NOT an armed conflict, and Little Creek is not on a path to doing a 9/11. The most significant acts of Dakota Access Pipeline sabotage involved two women setting fire to construction equipment and using a welding tool to pierce holes in above-ground pipeline valves along the route in Iowa. But that sabotage is also justifying Joel and Robert's continued activities.

Neither TigerSwan nor Energy Transfer responded to our requests for comment.

So Robert is trying to exacerbate division within the movement, to make the arguments that are already happening at the camp even worse. And he also targets Little Creek's neighbors. He apparently wants to start a countermovement – one with the same name as that new Facebook page.

 I’m also working on getting a defend iowa group to set up a camp or follow the Little Creekers around

: Encouraging people to follow campers could be tricky. If there's an altercation it would look bad

Joel doesn’t seem totally convinced at first of Robert's schemes.

: Little Creek is heavily dependent on locals. I get the feeling that if they lose local support they might go away.

: or if there is stronger pushback, the landowner Max might get cold nerves and shut them down

 In fact,  Robert has already posted the email address of the owner of the Little Creek camp’s land, and encouraged locals to complain.

: we have several angles we are thinking about

   Joel seems to approve of THIS idea of targeting locals.

 Local support is always a requirement for a successful camp.

 They're insurgents. I go after them with that mindset

 He says it directly: Joel views water protectors as insurgents.

 Gotta make a call, hit me up later or anytime if you have a question. I spent a lot of time in Iowa last year

yeah, same here. I'm a night owl and I live online.

 I’m at your service if you need anything at all and I can exploit anything interesting you come across (and will really really appreciate any info or insight)

They continue chatting the next day. Robert seems like he’s trying to prove himself to Joel.

 life circumstances kept me from serving, although I grew up in the military and come from a line of military guys. My father was in the Army 23 years — enlisted. My Grandfather commanded a guerilla unit in the korean war...no joke, it was called Rice's Raiders. So anyway, I have a deep amount of respect for vets.

 As their chats go on, Joel rattles off tips for Robert. He tells Robert who at the camp is well-liked and who is disliked. He provides ideas for a social media segment Robert wants to do.

 oh, hey you might have some input on this  one...have you seen those "what people say" videos? Like, Shit Hipsters Say or Shit Girls Say? We are thinking about doing one for Shit Water Protesters Say in the same  sort of fashion and humor.... but we need some good camp insight, otherwise we are just making shit up.

 Hahaha!!! First, it has to be Water Protectors, never "protesters"

Me too. They yell at you when you say protester in camp! Huge no no

White people claiming to be 1/16th Cherokee is always funny to natives

 best I can claim to (thank you DNA test) is 2.5% native something.

 Meanwhile, Robert starts putting out more videos on the Defend Iowa Facebook page.

Up until this point, I’d been thinking of Robert as the propagandist and Joel as the infiltrator. But in these videos, Robert is putting on an act, too.

Apparently, the charismatic Ed Fallon has taken over as the de facto leader of Little Creek Camp in Williamsburg, Iowa.

 In each video he acts as a sort of newscastor, aiming content at local people.

 Camp members have stated they're going to begin flying drones soon. If you live nearby, expect to see drones in the sky above your homes and fields.

And Robert seems to be soliciting some of the information from the people in the community.

In the past few days, local residents have sent us several emails that we think you should know about. Number one, according to some sources on social media, the Little Creek group has been dumping raw waste from their camps into nearby creeks.

 To be clear, Little Creek camp had a compostable toilet and Sikowis Nobiss told me they had porta potties that were cleaned every week. They didn't dump waste into the creeks, she said.

Robert isn't just posting things online, though. He tells Joel he's stepping out from behind the role of Facebook propagandist to manipulate people more directly.

 I spent about an hour on the phone with a local guy that is going to step into a leadership role to organize a lot of uh, red necks, ex military, iowa militia types that are fuming about this camp and want to raise hell

 we have them calming down and they are going to be productive instead of stupid

 these guys want to fly drones over little creek, some of the ex military ones want to cut off electricity or other shenanigans

The line between propaganda and infiltration is getting thin.

Robert mentions that he got one specific local quoted in a right-wing media outlet . He's "one of my sources," Robert says. It turns out to be a guy named Lance Schaefer

 I did find out that there were some pretty, pretty diehard protesters and they, they had records, you know, they had criminal activity and we just wanted to make sure the neighborhood was safe.

That's Lance.  We're sitting in the bed of his pickup truck, chatting, outside a Casey’s gas station in the small town of Victor, Iowa.   He's got close-cropped hair and a goatee that’s streaked with white, and he looks like he's been spending time in the sun.

Lance got to be really active on the Defend Iowa Facebook page. After Defend Iowa posted the Little Creek landowner's email address, Lance took it further and posted the guy's phone number and home address, too. " toss some garbage on his front lawn and see how he and his neighbors like it," Lance wrote.Another time, Lance posted " time for the Iowa County militia," adding, "when there are rats in the corn crib, you might have to burn the whole corn crib so they move on." He wrote that he was looking for a drone with video capability.

He doesn't remember the name Robert Rice. He does remember a phone call, though.

 gave him insight as far as what they were doing when they were out and about, walking around on the road, et cetera.

 I tell Lance about how Robert said he thought he could convince locals to set up a camp and follow Little Creekers around.

 Does that, do you remember anything like that?

 I, I do kind of recall that, uh, he, he wanted to get some people that would, I think it would probably be a photo op that if they were out protesting that there would be counter protesting against them and hanging signs and banners, et cetera.

we, we weren't interested in following 'em around.So,

 Lance tells me that despite his Facebook posts, he didn't get a drone, and he didn't throw garbage on the landowner's land. But even if he didn’t exactly follow the pipeline opponents around, he did monitor their activity.

 I had been on a couple of, uh, patrols at night to just go by and see what they were doing and what they were up to. And as I said, there was an implement store down the road that got broken into, so we kind of wanted to make sure that they weren't going out and causing trouble in the area.

 I haven't seen any proof that anybody from Little Creek robbed that store. But Lance was convinced that the campers were up to no good. And although he doesn't give much credit to the Defend Iowa Facebook page for influencing his thinking on that, his comments show that he was consuming its content.

There was one other thing I was really wondering about. Robert Rice had said he was talking to militia types. And it turns out, Lance HAD been a part of a militia movement.

 The freedom and sovereign man movement and the militia and those things, they, they kind of all go hand in hand.

Anyway, this militia crew was indeed part of the group pushing back on the camp.

Transcription

The pipeline has been built, the protest camps disbanded, but the fight isn't over. As pipeline opponents set up a new camp in Iowa, the Tiger Swan propagandists follow them, this time with the help of an undercover infiltrator. A WhatsApp chat reveals the private spies' machinations. This mini-series was reported in partnership with 

The Propagandist Documents

SLAPP’d

Welcome to "The Spill," Our New Weekly Newscast

S16, Ep2 | The Real Outside Agitators of Iowa

Drilled A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts .

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Drilled

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S16, Ep2 | The Real Outside Agitators of Iowa

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What Standing Rock’s Propaganda War Means Today