S16, Ep2 | The Real Outside Agitators of Iowa

Alleen Brown: 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.

Sikowis: 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.

Alleen Brown: 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.

Sikowis: 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 they 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.

[music]

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.

Robert Rice (archival): 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,

Alleen Brown: 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.

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

We hired an actor to read Robert’s chats.

Robert Rice: 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

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

Robert Rice:  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.

Joel McCollough: Awesome!

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

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

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

Joel McCollough: I would focus on the cook leaving,

Alleen Brown: 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 these 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.

They say, "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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Rice: we have several angles we are thinking about

Alleen Brown:   Joel seems to approve of THIS idea of targeting locals.

Joel McCollough: Local support is always a requirement for a successful camp.

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

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

Joel McCollough: 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

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

Robert Rice: 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)

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

Robert Rice: 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.

Alleen Brown: 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.

Robert Rice: 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.

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

Robert Rice: sorry, old habit

Joel McCollough: Yup

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

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

Robert Rice: haha, I know a lot of those types

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

Alleen Brown:  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.

Here's his real voice again.

Robert Rice (archival): Apparently, the charismatic Ed Fallon has taken over as the de facto leader of Little Creek Camp in Williamsburg, Iowa.

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

Robert Rice (archival): 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.

Alleen Brown:  With each new video, the rumors fly.

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

Robert Rice (archival): 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.

Alleen Brown: 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.

Robert Rice: 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

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

Alleen Brown: He says the locals have a lot of ideas.

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

Alleen Brown: 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

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.

Alleen Brown: 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.

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

But I don't recall specifics on that.

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

Alleen: Does that, do you remember anything like that?

Lance: 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,

Alleen Brown: 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.

Lance Schaefer: 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.

Alleen Brown: 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.

Lance Schaefer: 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.

Alleen: Hmm. So you're saying that those guys were kind of involved in Yeah.

Lance: Yeah. They, they, they wanted to see who was in the neighborhood and what was going on and, and.

A lot of people don't wanna speak up, you know, so these guys kind of say, Hey, we're, we're bold. We'll, we'll go talk to people. We'll tell 'em, get outta here. You know? Mm-hmm. That kind of thing.

Alleen: I guess what I think of militia, I think of like arms. Is that an important part of it?

Lance: Well, out here in the country, everybody's armed. I mean, you know, look at deer season. Pheasant season, everybody's armed,

Alleen Brown: Lance assured me that this militia was pretty unorganized — more bark than bite. But I was struck.

Before I left the hot parking lot, I explained to Lance who Robert Rice really was and what he and the infiltrator discussed in their chats. But Lance seemed unworried.

Lance Schaefer: I understand strategically it would make sense. You're gonna want the locals to. Uh, be adversarial in nature to them and try and drive them out and get 'em out. Uh, good or bad. I don't know.

Alleen Brown: But not every local target of TigerSwan's propaganda was so ambivalent.

Darrin Ehret lives in a community not far from Lance's, and he stumbled across Defend Iowa's very first video.

• phone ringing*

Darrin Ehret:  hello.

Alleen: Hi, Darrin.

Darrin Ehret: Yeah. How are you doing?

Alleen: I'm good. How are you?

Darrin Ehret:  Oh, not too bad.

The Facebook video Darrin saw features pipeline opponents standing on top of a truck yelling at police.

MUSIC AND SOUND FROM VIDEO https://web.descript.com/ac2d6d6b-d961-4cbd-a13a-40ad71ddd6d5/68e48]

There's  a hashtag in the corner that says "Iowa Beware."  It cuts to a Bismarck Police Lieutenant.

Cop: Don’t let it get too big too soon.

Alleen:  And a caption at the bottom, says "Look out Iowa County. You've got some potentially dangerous protesters like this making a new home nearby."

"Just ask the folks in North Dakota," says another caption.

In fact, a number of North Dakotans commented on and reacted to the video.

This footage was actually recycled. The cop interview and the police line footage were both part of the propaganda documentary that we talked about last episode. The one that used local North Dakotans' voices to say that the protests were bad.

Robert Rice was now using the local people in North Dakota to get local Iowans to rally against the Little Creek camp.

And Darrin from Iowa was watching all this and taking it to heart.

Darrin Ehret: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely the one I saw.

Alleen: Oh, I see.

Darrin Ehret: And I thought that they were gonna be moving in.

When Darrin realized that a group of water protectors would be marching from the Little Creek Camp and through his area, he was alarmed.

The march was led by an organization called Bold Iowa. Their plan was to walk across the state to try to start conversations with locals about climate change. They had a documentary filmmaker with them.

Archival: We are unstoppable. Another world is possible. We are unstoppable.

When they stopped to camp at the park next to Darrin's house, he drove his jeep to the property line, and left it there parked, flying both an American flag and a confederate flag.

Darrin: You gotta realize what time it was, 2016, 2017, whatever it was.

Alleen: Yep.

Darrin: That, oh, America's great, you know?

Alleen Brown: Darrin said the Trump election had influenced his decision to park the jeep there. As for the confederate flag…

Darrin Ehret: I mean, it wasn't a, uh, a racial thing by any means. It was simply, I don't know, kind of a states' rights, you know, not gonna be bullied, that kind of thing.

Alleen Brown: The filmmaker Ralph King captured what happened next in his documentary, called Crossing the Divide This is the voice of one of the campers.

Darrin: About 10 o'clock I was ready to go bed. I noticed cars going very slowly circling the camp about five miles an hour. And I hear these loud booms. I mean, it sounded like a cannon went off.

Alleen Brown: Someone was lighting off what sounds like firecrackers. Darrin was at home and he heard them too. He started to have a crisis of conscience. So the next morning, he drove over to the camp. Again from the documentary:

Archival: Good morning. Hey, I just wanna apologize for offending you guys. Yesterday we were told you guys were. Come over burn flags and that kind of stuff. No, and I don't tolerate that kind of thing. No, no, no. We don't do that. So, so no, absolutely not. It's, wow. Prayed about that last night and just really felt that I was wrong.

Alleen Brown: I asked Darrin how his impression of the people compared to what he'd seen on Facebook.

Darrin Ehret: Oh, it was night and day difference.

Alleen: Hmm.

Darrin: Super salt of the earth people.

I mean, just great, great people who had in their heart that they wanted to make the world a better place.

Alleen Brown: Robert Rice actually referenced this interaction in that WhatsApp chat.

Robert Rice: we helped cause some ruffled feathers with one of the neighbors but they made up

Robert Rice: Been thinking all day how to unravel that.

[music]

Darrin: It's infuriating, honestly.

Alleen: Hmm.

Darrin: Yep, because that's, that's not who I [00:27:00] am. I mean, I've never been that type of person, and that's what… Yeah, to, to be persuaded into doing something that's out of character was not, not pleasant.

Alleen: What did that make you think about Facebook and, and the stuff that you had consumed there?

Darrin: Well, I think that was probably the beginning of realizing that Facebook's nothing more than propaganda.

Alleen: Hmm. Wow.

Darrin: I mean, it really is.

Alleen Brown:

We know by now that the polarization that has infected this country didn’t just happen by accident. And talking to Darrin, it was so clear to me that all this online misinformation has disrupted more than big things like environmental movements or climate action. It’s kept us unwilling to build relationships with our neighbors – the kinds of relationships that at minimum just make life nicer – and at best can make our communities stronger.

Alleen Brown:  Back on the chat with Robert Rice, Joel McCollough throws out some ideas that push ethical boundaries even further. He's looking into these acts of pipeline sabotage I mentioned earlier, where someone used welding tools to poke holes in above ground pipeline valves.

Joel pastes in the email address of an activist who lives in the area.  He thinks this dude might have been in touch with the pipeline saboteurs.

Joel McCollough: Can you hack his email?

Robert Rice: My guys do not have tools to hack gmail. The company may have outside connections maybe?

Joel McCollough: Dunno. I can reach out to a guy.

Robert Rice: if we can’t hack his gmail, if we know where he is when he sends it, I would imagine we could trap his traffic or hack his system remotely

Robert Rice: that would require some people on the ground, but I think I know guys that could that

Joel McCollough: Cool, cool. Hell, yes.

Alleen Brown: I don't know if they ever actually hacked that guy's email account. But to me that exchange shows how far these guys are willing to go. And how blurry the line became between the pipeline's ground operation against the pipeline resistance and their online narrative war.

There's another thing going on with Joel throughout all this.

Remember, Joel has been going around acting like a friend of the water protectors. In the fall he was showing up at anti-pipeline encampments in Iowa. By winter, he was hanging out at the casino bar on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where water protectors went to get warm. And as spring came around, he infiltrated the group Food and Water Watch in  Chicago. All along the way, he was establishing relationships with people who genuinely believed he was their friend.

On the chat with the propagandist, he starts freaking out that he's about to get outed as an infiltrator.

Joel McCollough: Hey, man, a lot has changed in the last two days. I found out someone is burning me, and I think it is Heather Pearson in Bold Iowa.

Alleen Brown:  Bold Iowa is that same group that did the march across Iowa that Darrin Ehret met. Heather Pearson is a local activist. Joel thinks that Heather has leaked his name as an infiltrator, and that everyone is about to find out that he's been betraying them all this time.

Joel's response? Speed up the rumor mill.

Joel McCollough: Anything you can do to discredit Bold Alliance would be good.

Robert Rice: Yes sir. Would you like to have that to go, or will you be dining in?

Alleen Brown: Joel has a specific concern.

Joel McCollough: They called in The Intercept and gave them my real name to go after

Alleen Brown: I worked at The Intercept at that time. Did Heather actually tip me off? No comment.

Joel McCollough: If The Intercept goes after me I could get fucked. A friend of mine had activists empty his bank account and steal his identity, etc. all within 24 hours of his name getting out there

Robert Rice: damn

Joel McCollough: This shit is real

Robert Rice: yeah, I know

Robert Rice: ok, so what can turn things around?

Robert Rice: discredit heather?

Joel McCollough: Yes.

Robert Rice: ok tell me what you can about her

Alleen Brown: Eventually, Joel throws out an idea.

Joel McCollough: If her bank account was emptied it would distract her a lot…

Joel McCollough: Jus sayin

Robert Rice: I'm not THAT good

Robert Rice: lol

Joel McCollough: I might know a guy

Alleen Brown: To review, Joel just said he's worried about his bank account being emptied because a bunch of people who think he's their friend might soon find out he's been lying to them. And his solution is to empty the alleged leaker's bank account. This dude's moral compass is spinning round and round.

The duo throw around ideas about how they can protect Joel by discrediting Heather. Islamophobia maybe? Perhaps some Red Scare vibes?

Joel McCollough: You can ask why one of heather’s closest confidants is an Islamic Communist.

Robert Rice: ooh, that sounds juicy

Alleen Brown: How about an extramarital affair, Joel suggests.

Joel McCollough: He's always there while her husband is at home

Robert Rice: well that’s interesting

Robert Rice: when camp numbers go back up after everyone returns and some new people are there, this is something I can exploit

Joel McCollough: Good shit

Robert Rice: rumors of extra marital shenanigans from a source in camp disappointed by the drugs, sex, and alcohol. It’s not a good environment for Iowan kids and it is against the rules of the camp, you know?

Joel McCollough: Yup

Joel McCollough: Lol

Robert Rice: best part is that will make them all suspicious of each other

Alleen Brown: Again, I don't know that they actually did these things. But what Robert Rice did do was that he found a comment Heather had made on Facebook and used it against her.

Heather Pearson: I made a comment about being a goofy Iowa Farm wife because that's what I was describing myself because I personally am goofy and an Iowa farm wife.

Alleen Brown: Robert describes his plan on the chat. He says highlighting Heather's post might get the good ol boys riled up.

Robert Rice: how does this sound?

Robert Rice: Little Creek Camp activist dresses up like "Goofy Iowa Farm Wife" for Climate Justice march on Saturday. Isn't that precious?

This is how these hipster social justice warriors and eco-activists think about Iowans.

Heather Pearson: They posted it and twisted what I had to say.

And I actually got threatening messages from random people in Iowa who were, um, berating me for talking down about Iowa farm wives.

Alleen Brown: I told Heather about the extramarital affair rumor

Heather Pearson: um, no extramarital affairs, no nothing.

Alleen Brown: And about the bank account suggestion.

Alleen Brown (on tape): Did anything ever happen with your bank account?

Heather Pearson: Um, not that I was ever aware of. And oh my goodness, I didn't know that that was even a possibility. Um, wow,

Alleen Brown: Heather explained that she HAD gotten a tip on Facebook from an anonymous person saying that Joel was an infiltrator.

Heather Pearson: So, I mean, I guess he was right as in the, I was. Out to get him. I don't know if I would've used those words. It was more like I was exposing what he was doing.

Alleen Brown: After Robert suggests the Iowa farm wives post, Joel cheers right up and the two congratulate each other

Joel McCollough: Dude. You're brilliant. How are you not making millions as a campaign manager?

Robert Rice:  because I just discovered a knack for this business back in september

Joel McCollough: I like being able to feed you targets!

Alleen Brown: They continue chatting into the night.

Robert Rice: I just need a little something to work with and we can spin a tapestry

Alleen Brown: And Robert gives a hat tip to the private Facebook group from North Dakota, which he apparently is still using to spread anti-protest feelings.

Robert Rice: it helps that we have a large fanbase with the Defend Bisman crowd. They loooove us and are quick to jump in, comment, share, and fight the activist trolls.

Alleen Brown: Robert and Joel's chat fades out after a few weeks. But before it does, Joel throws out one more big idea: he wants to start bribing people.

Joel McCollough: So, I'm starting a new initiative. We're going to try to turn activists. Offer to pay for information. So, we're going to start looking for individuals who need money, maybe they’re disillusioned. Can you come up with a few names of vulnerable activists? All four states and beyond. I'm going to task the analysts in the states to do the same. If they turn down the offer we still win, because they'll start wondering who did take the money to inform.

Robert Rice: oh I like it

Robert Rice: Roger that on initiative. I think we can come up with some names

Joel McCollough: Awesome

Alleen Brown: The conversation stops a few days later. And honestly I wonder if I played a role in that. Because me and my colleagues at The Intercept started to put out a series of stories about internal TigerSwan documents that had been leaked to us.

But even though we published Robert Rice's name — he didn't actually quit.

And things started to get weird. Suddenly all these new propaganda pages appeared.

Cats for Truth Vid: Welcome to Cats for Truth. I'm Mr. Wiggles. Today we're gonna talk about anarchists, cults, and dangerous leftist agendas.

Alleen Brown: That's Cats for Truth, a Facebook page featuring a video where pretend newscasters wear giant cast masks and talk shit about water protectors.

There was also Black Badger Report. It looked like an investigative news site but featured headlines like "The Intercept is Connected to Communist Groups."

Joel fades from the record at this point. But it seems like propagandists actually did carry out his big idea to bribe people for information.

Because a story soon appeared on the Black badger report web site.  It featured a detailed account from a woman who was subjected to unwanted advances at Little Creek camp, by two people who had been drinking. The anonymous author claimed the story was leaked to them, and that they paid someone from the inside to provide it. They even included screenshots they said came from their chat with the leaker.

"I want your story, all of it, all the good stuff, all the bad stuff, all the dirt on camp life. Everything. A friend and I are working on a story about the water protector movement. For a little bit of time over email – we'll pay you $300 to your PayPal. I will send you a $50 gas card over night.”

When I asked around about who might have been the leaker, I got a tip that it might be a guy named Chris Truitt. So I tracked him down, in a rundown part of Davenport Iowa.

Chris: Miko, go lay down somewhere. Come on, Bob. Come on.

Alleen: How old is he?

Chris: Uh, 13.

Alleen: Oh my gosh. He's old.

Chris: Yeah, he's old. He's

Alleen: old for a big dog.

I start chatting with Chris about Little Creek.

Chris: I can't remember what month it was, but it was, it was still cold.

It, so me and me and my dog went up there and we set camping in a tent

people would wander in and it, it started building up. Um, I was the, uh, what, I guess you could say, the chef of the, the camp I took care of all the food and all that.

Alleen Brown: Chris remembers the Defend Iowa Facebook page well.

Chris Truitt: It was a propaganda page is what I, what I would call it, They just basically tried to, you know, get, get, uh, people to, you know, go against the, the movement. And I think it was successful for the most part because a lot of people did believe the crap that was, was being said.

Alleen Brown: Chris acknowledged that Little Creek struggled with internal conflicts. For example, it was supposed to be an alcohol free space, and sometimes people drank. And the Facebook stuff made the conflicts that existed worse.

Alleen: What impact do you think it had internally?

Chris: It created, it created friction and that's what it was devised to do. And it worked It, it created a lot of division.

Alleen Brown: Chris is pretty sure it was sometime after one of these arguments that he heard from someone unfamiliar.

Chris Truitt: I had somebody reach out to me to, to get the, the full story.

Alleen Brown: They said they'd pay him to tell them about little Creek.

Chris Truitt: They just wouldn't, they wouldn't leave me alone. They kept, you know, and trying to entice me to, to get this story. Um. And finally I gave in, I, I, I gave them a story, all right, but it wasn't the story that they wanted.

Alleen: who did he claim he was and like, why would he want, why did he say he wanted this information?

Chris Truitt: I can't remember who he said he was.

I show Chris the article from Black Badger Report while I gave Meko some pats.

Chris Truitt: Wow, this is crazy. I didn't know a lot of this stuff here. Hmm.

Alleen: I've heard allegations that it was you that leaked this thing.

Chris: I didn't leak it.

Alleen: Yeah.

Chris: I promise I didn't. Mm. Um, I, I did, I, like I said, I, I had somebody reach out to me and I gave them basic information, but I didn't give that type of information.

Alleen: Right, right.

Chris: Yeah. That would never come from me.

Alleen Brown: But whatever he said or didn't say, Chris did accept the offer of money for information.

Alleen: What made you, why did you take money from them and talk to them?

Chris: Because I needed money at the time that, I figured

they were playing a game, so I was trying to play a game back and get over on 'em easy. You know what I'm saying? Like. So I tried to get that easy money and just give him basic details, you know what I'm saying?

Alleen: Joel McCollough the infiltrator, had said in his WhatsApp message to Robert Rice that he figured even if a person said no to a bribe, it would still be worth it, because it would make the water protectors suspicious of each other. All of these things they'd been doing — from the Facebook posts, to the phone calls with locals, to the bribes. They attack that basic building block of any movement — or any relationship, really — trust. So what do you do once that's been attacked so relentlessly?

Sikowis: I'm just gonna show Aileen up. I'll just be gone for five minutes 'cause I'm just gonna show Aileen the, the land

Alleen Brown: It's been a long time since Little Creek closed down, and Sikowis Nobiss has spent the last decade building something new.

Sikowis: So this, these two houses here are ours as well. That'll be our healing justice house, that purple one. Mm-hmm.

Alleen Brown: Her organization Great Plains Action Society has bought up almost a whole  block in the college town of Iowa City. And she's got big plans. They’ve already converted an old scooter dealer into a sort of community center, and they've cleared a lot for a garden.

Sikowis: Um, and we'll be putting a big fence around it for, for deer.

Alleen Brown: One old building will house spaces for people to incubate small businesses. A little old house has been remodeled to put up guests, and another little house will soon be offices. They’re setting up an art gallery and a mutual aid cafe.

Sikowis: If you had been here two weeks ago, you would've, it would've been so different,

Alleen Brown: Sikowis sees what she's doing on this land as rematriation — part of that is restoring colonized landscapes, but it's also about bringing back the matriarchy.

Alleen: What is the work of bringing back the matriarchy?

Sikowis: It's really about making sure that everybody is taken care of. That's what it, uh, uh, that's what a, a mother does in her home. It's like everybody has a spot at the table. Everybody's gonna get fed, everybody's gonna have a place to sleep.

Alleen Brown: I'd planned to talk to Sikowis about Defend Iowa while I'm here, but she has to run, and we agreed to talk the next day. It ended up being over zoom.

Sikowis told me that the stuff Defend Iowa said about the camp was bullshit. But part of what made the divisive tactics hurtful was that the campers at Little Creek were already grappling with so much.

Sikowis: There was a lot of very damaged people with PTSD there working on their issues that we did not expect.

you could see none of these people were, well, like nobody was, well, like, like was coming back from Standing Rock.

Alleen Brown: But even if Little Creek was far from being a threat to the community like Defend Iowa claimed, the internal conflicts were tough.  Sikowis said they did their best to manage it. For example, in the case of the woman who was harassed by men at the camp — the incident Black Badger Report wrote about — she said they kicked out the main perpetrator and worked with the woman to try and repair what happened. These propagandists were poking at sensitive spots.

Sikowis: I think it's all harmful. Um,

Alleen: Yeah.

Sikowis: I don't care if it's goofy. I don't care if it's like, um, you know, like the thing with Ed Fallon, I mean, that that still affects people, Like, even having this conversation with you right now affects me because I'm thinking back on it and like now it makes me feel like they, they've tainted something.

You know, they took, they took regular situations where people were struggling, um, and where people were trying to do good things and do something they've never done before, and they tried to make them look, um, sinister.

Alleen Brown: She still feels the impact of what Robert Rice and TigerSwan did, a decade later.

Alleen: Tiger San was doing all these different things in North Dakota, the things that they did, they tried to do at Little Creek Camp, infiltration, aerial surveillance, like all kinds of weird meddling, like trying to divide communities like in the end, like what do you think the biggest impact of, of the things that they did actually was.

Sikowis: I think it's long-term mental health issues on people making some of us more paranoid. Um, causing division, uh, in, you know, maybe even if it's just between two people, uh, you know, that's two people that could have been friends for life, but they ruin that.

Alleen: are there lessons that you take from what happened at Little Creek

Sikowis: Oh my gosh.

Being careful about who you bring into your space. Vetting people much more, um, not putting up with, um, not putting up with, uh, problematic behavior. Just, you just can't, you just can't if you're building, you know, um, if you're trying to build a healthy community.

And that's why we have a healing justice house in our space, in our community.

Alleen Brown: Darrin Ehret, the guy who parked his jeep with the confederate flag at the water protectors camp site…he’s learned lessons too.

Darrin: I, I look at people a lot different now. whether you got an R or a D behind your name doesn't mean anything to me. It's how, it's the type of person you are. I, I mean, I could care less whether you're Republican or Democrat.

Alleen Brown: Robert Rice went back to his virtual reality work. Eventually, according to someone who worked for Robert, the digital metaverse he was trying to build ran out of money.

It's hard to tell what TigerSwan — with all that infiltration and propaganda — deserves credit for.

But what I do know is that after Standing Rock ended, Energy Transfer kept directing money and messaging at communities in Morton County. There were ads on TV and YouTube. And there was also the Mandan library renovation the company funded. The vocational school Energy Transfer co-founder Kelcy Warren helped build in the small city of Flasher. $3 million for the University of Mary’s new engineering building.

In 2025, the company's lawyers helped select jurors to decide one of the most important free speech cases in recent memory. The jury pool came from  Morton County, the same community Energy Transfer's messaging targeted. In court, Energy Transfer told the jury that it was Greenpeace that was responsible for the Standing Rock movement. And the jurors agreed. And now, as wildfire smoke fills the skies, one of the oldest environmental organizations in the U.S. is fighting to overturn a judgement that could end them.

Is propaganda to blame? I'm not sure. I'll never be able to fully disentangle the organic feelings of the community from the Facebook campaigns or the infiltration efforts or the skill of Energy Transfer's lawyers. What's certain is that the truth remains fractured, and it seems like that was the point all along.

A note to listeners: The original conversation between Robert Rice and Joel McCollough happened over WhatsApp. We edited for clarity and brevity. You can find original documents in the show notes