U.S. Shifts Strategy for Probes Into Abortion Clinic Attacks

WASHINGTON — A year ago, antiabortion activists cheered when the Justice Department abandoned its high-profile search for a nationwide conspiracy behind violence against clinics where the procedure is performed.

A federal grand jury working with the Justice Department in hunting for a conspiracy quietly disbanded early in 1996, and a young activist who had been jailed for two months for refusing to testify was released. Antiabortion militants jubilantly claimed vindication, and they hoped the Justice Department’s scrutiny of their movement would come to an end.

But federal officials have instead launched an even more intense crackdown, using far more effective investigative tactics--by going back to law enforcement basics.

Abandoning their campaign to find a conspiracy, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are again tracking clinic attackers one at a time. And the agencies have taken the controversial step of using undercover informants inside the antiabortion movement.

Information on individuals that was presented to the Alexandria, Va., grand jury investigating the conspiracy allegations has since been parceled out to regional grand juries charged with looking into specific clinic attacks. That shift has led to indictments and convictions--and to complaints from some abortion-rights organizations that continue to believe a nationwide conspiracy exists.

Vicki Saporta, who, as executive director of the National Abortion Federation, meets frequently with Justice Department and FBI officials, said her organization is “convinced that a conspiracy exists, that these people aid and abet each other in committing these crimes.”

That view is not unanimous among abortion-rights groups. Officials at Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortion services, said they never believed the government would be able to prove there was a conspiracy, and saw the effort as a distraction.

“We were never comfortable with the conspiracy approach,” said Ann Glazier, director of clinic defense for Planned Parenthood. “We said from the beginning that there was not one meeting that all these people attended to come up with a master plan. Instead, they share a rhetoric and a commitment to violence.”

Federal officials refuse to talk about their change in tactics, but it is clear that in the absence of finding a broad conspiracy, the government has used a sweeping and controversial new federal law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, to aggressively prosecute activists who commit violent acts, as well as those simply conducting Operation Rescue-style sit-ins or clinic blockades.

The Justice Department said it has brought 27 civil and criminal cases against antiabortion activists under the clinic-access law.

Despite recent bombings in Atlanta and Tulsa, Okla., the federal effort is being credited with bringing about a sharp decline in antiabortion violence and blockades. A study by the National Abortion Federation found incidents of clinic harassment and violence dropped 21% in 1996. Clinic blockades have virtually disappeared.

Antiabortion leaders have charged that the law violates their 1st Amendment rights. Although the law has withstood constitutional challenges, activists are hoping to bring more cases to the Supreme Court to try to have the law overturned.

They also have complained that they are the targets of an unrelenting federal attack. At last week’s White Rose Banquet, an annual gathering outside Washington of militants who believe that using violence to end abortion is justified, a show of hands revealed that nearly half of the approximately 50 people in attendance had been forced to testify before at least one federal grand jury in 1996.

“I would have to say 1996 was a difficult year; I would call it the year of the grand juries,” said Paul DeParrie of Portland, Ore.

Among the honored guests at the White Rose Banquet were Cheryl Richardson, a Washington-area activist jailed for two months for refusing to testify before the Alexandria grand jury, and Jennifer Sperle, a 24-year-old mother of four who was one of the first activists to be indicted by a regional grand jury after the Alexandria panel was disbanded.

Sperle has become a cause celebre among antiabortion militants because she was among the first to fall victim to a controversial decision by both the FBI and the ATF to use undercover informants.

For years, federal law enforcement officials were reluctant to penetrate the movement. They remembered the bitter legacy of the 1960s, when the FBI’s credibility was nearly destroyed by its politically motivated investigations of antiwar and civil rights groups.

But as antiabortion extremists became more aggressive, escalating their violent acts from clinic arsons to the murder of abortion doctors, the FBI and ATF finally began recruiting spies. The decision has caused an outcry within the antiabortion movement as well as unease among civil libertarians, but it is paying off in the courts.

Federal officials refuse to comment, but sources on both sides of the abortion battle say that one ATF informant, Rick Thomas of Virginia, and an FBI informant, Phil Eck of Kansas City, Mo., both provided evidence that led to Sperle’s arrest in connection with two clinic arsons in the Norfolk, Va., area.

Sperle pleaded guilty in the case in November and faces sentencing in February. She accepted a plea bargain after another defendant, Clark Martin, pleaded guilty last May and agreed to testify against her.

Sperle was charged with sliding a lighted flare and lighter fluid through the mail slot of the Peninsula Medical Center in Newport News, Va., in December 1994, igniting a small fire that caused minor damage. Martin allegedly drove with her to the clinic and provided Sperle with the flare.

In March 1995, Martin and Sperle broke a window at the Tidewater Women’s Health Center in Norfolk and then ignited two gallons of kerosene inside. The fire caused modest damage.

Sperle and Martin went undetected, but Sperle couldn’t keep her mouth shut. One person she talked to was Thomas, the husband of a Norfolk-area antiabortion activist. Thomas was serving as a bodyguard and driver for David Crane, an antiabortion leader in Norfolk, where Sperle then lived.

Crane had come to the attention of federal law enforcement after he signed a 1993 petition endorsing antiabortion violence that was circulated by Paul Hill, a former minister from Florida who later killed an abortion doctor and his escort outside a clinic in Pensacola, Fla. Hill was convicted in the murders and is now on Florida’s death row.

While serving as Crane’s bodyguard, Thomas was also secretly acting as an informant for the ATF.

Sperle trusted Thomas enough to detail her involvement with the clinic vandalism in Virginia.

In the meantime, Sperle and her family had moved from Norfolk to Wichita, Kan., and befriended Eck, who they believed to be a fellow activist. Eck, who lived with Sperle and her husband in Wichita for two months, was actually an FBI informant who was telling FBI agents what Sperle said.

Sperle, in her first interview with the news media about the subject, said the antiabortion activist movement in Norfolk felt betrayed by Thomas.

“His wife was a rescuer, which is why we trusted him,” she said.

She also finds it hard to accept Eck’s actions, saying, “He lived in my home, I took him to the hospital when he was sick.”

The campaign to recruit informants has placed civil libertarians in an uncomfortable position. Liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have long sided with abortion clinics against Operation Rescue-style protests, but now find it difficult to support undercover operations.

“We do have some qualms about this,” said Lisa Landau, a staff attorney for the Reproductive Freedom Project of the ACLU. “Certainly the clinic bombings are distressing, and we support all efforts to investigate them. But there have to be stringent restrictions on the FBI’s ability to infiltrate these groups.”