The Secret Agent

Starring: David Suchet, Cheryl Campbell, Peter Capaldi

The 1920 Wall Street Bombing

The Wall Street Bombing occurred at 12:01 pm on Thursday, September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. The blast killed 30 people immediately, and another eight died later of wounds sustained in the blast. There were 143 seriously injured, and the total number of injured was in the hundreds.

The bombing was never solved, although investigators and historians believe the Wall Street bombing was carried out by Galleanists (Italian anarchists), a group responsible for a series of bombings the previous year. The attack was related to postwar social unrest, labor struggles and anti-capitalist agitation in the United States.

At noon, a horse-drawn wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District's busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments, but the driver was believed to have left the vehicle and escaped.

The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young people who worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. Many of the wounded suffered severe injuries.The bomb caused more than $2 million in property damage ($23,500,000 with inflation) and destroyed most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building.

One Cell Is All You Need

Image via: Carthage.edu

As described in a Dec. 21 paper in Science, a team of researchers, led by Xiaoliang Sunney Xie, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and made up of postdoctoral fellow Chenghang Zong, graduate student Alec Chapman, and former graduate student Sijia Lu, developed a method — dubbed MALBAC, short for Multiple Annealing and Looping-based Amplification Cycles — that requires just one cell to reproduce an entire DNA molecule.

More than three years in the making, the breakthrough technique offers the potential for early cancer treatment by allowing doctors to obtain a genetic “fingerprint” of a person’s cancer from circulating tumor cells. It also could lead to safer prenatal testing for a host of genetic diseases.

“If you give us a single human cell, we report to you 93 percent of the genome that contains three billion base pairs, and if there is a single base mutation, we can identify it with 70 percent detectability, with no false positives detected,” Xie said. “This is a major development.”

In a second paper, published simultaneously, researchers from Xie’s lab worked with scientists at Peking University in China to demonstrate MALBAC by sequencing 99 sperm cells from one individual and examining the paternal and maternal contribution to each cell’s genome.

As its name suggests, Xie said, MALBAC is a type of DNA amplification that allows researchers to duplicate the single DNA molecule present in a cell many times so it can be analyzed in the lab.

“While other methods of DNA amplification exist, most — like polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or multiple displacement amplification (MDA) — suffer from a specific problem,” Xie said. “Because they amplify exponentially, both have bias. They dramatically amplify some parts of the genome, but amplify others very little.”

By comparison, he said, MALBAC relies on linear amplification, meaning it is able to minimize the sequence-dependent bias.

Just as it does with other methods, the amplification process begins by splitting the DNA double helix into two single strands. Xie’s team then adds a random “primer” — tiny fragments of DNA — that binds in dozens of locations along each strand.

To extend those primers, Xie’s team used a DNA polymerase, the same cellular “machine” that synthesizes DNA as cells divide. Using that machine, researchers are able to extend the primers from as few as seven bases to as many as 2,000. Upon heating, they break the elongated primers apart from the original DNA, yielding half products.

When those half products are then amplified using the same primers, the two ends of the DNA combine, forming a loop that prevents it from being amplified again. The leftover half products and the original DNA are subject to another cycle of amplification. After five cycles of such linear pre-amplification, the full product is amplified by PCR to produce enough material for sequencing.

Despite the high coverage, DNA polymerases do occasionally make errors, Xie explained. To ensure that the genome produced by MALBAC is accurate, researchers turned to a different technique.

“Many diseases are associated with a single base mutation,” Xie said. “The challenge, however, is that finding one mutation in more than 3 billion base pairs is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Earlier techniques, like PCR or MDA, start with many cells, making the challenge even greater; a single mutation simply gets lost in the process. MALBAC, however, starts with a single cell, so it is easier to identify those mutations when they happen.”

To ensure MALBAC’s accuracy, Xie’s team simply let the original cell divide.

While the polymerase that researchers use to build the DNA sequence is highly accurate, only making one mistake per 10,000 bases, letting the cell divide gives researchers a chance to double check its work.

“The chances of the same mistake being made at the same base position are about one in 100 million,” Xie said. “If we let the cells divide again, and sequence three cells, the chances go up to one in 10 billion, less than the number of bases in the entire DNA molecule, so we can remove all the false positives.

“Getting that level of accuracy is very important, because if a doctor tells a patient that he detects a mutation, he doesn’t want to be wrong,” he continued. “When we use MALBAC, if a mutation appears in two or three related cells, we know it must be a real mutation.”

As a demonstration of MALBAC’s power, Xie and his team monitored the mutations that arose in a single cancer cell as it divided over 20 generations, and uncovered as many as 50 newly acquired mutations.

“This is the first time the mutation rate of a human cell has been measured directly,” Xie said. “Because we can now see the unique, newly acquired bases, we can study the dynamics of the genome in a way that was not possible before.”

Via: "The Harvard Gazette"

English 'Til I Die

Al Jazeera Investigates The rise Of The English Defence League.

Al Jazeera World
Last Modified: 26 Oct 2011 15:43
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"




In English 'Til I Die filmmaker Awad Joumaa examines the rise of the English Defence League. Here he explains why the growth of the far right in Europe can no longer be ignored.

For several years I have been intrigued by the rise of the far right across Europe.

In England, I have watched the emergence of a group called the English Defence League - or EDL. I have tracked their demonstrations and seen their numbers grow.

In 2010, I made a film about this far right group for Al Jazeera's Arabic channel. The EDL declined to be interviewed for it.

At that point the group had been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

But all that changed after July 22, 2011 - when Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right wing extremist, killed more than 70 people in a bombing and shooting spree. Breivik boasted about his links to the EDL in a manifesto he posted online.

Suddenly the EDL was in the spotlight and questions were being asked. From where had this group - with a seemingly hate-filled rhetoric - emerged? How had an atmosphere of fear and anxiety taken root in a country known for its colonial past and yet today troubled by a gloomy economic future?

"Some people say we've got to find a British identity. Where? Which one is it? ... I mean the British identity is like the British weather. You look up [at] the sky and you know it's the weather, you know today it was raining and now it's sunny and it could snow by the evening. Right, you know it's British weather. But you can't really define it. That's what I think Britain is like. You know when you're British because you live here, you see the whole melting pot, but to put your finger on it and define it so easily is impossible." Benjamin Zephaniah, poet

During my travels around England, I met young people and old, critics and supporters of the EDL. All agreed that the EDL and the far right can no longer be ignored.

The group has organised more than 20 large protests in English cities, including London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Its leaders claim it is a peaceful organisation, but as the EDL gains support, Muslim communities have found themselves feeling increasingly targeted.

Mosques have been vandalised and in some places, images of swastikas and the words EDL have been sprayed on walls.

"The EDL have the potential to become a serious threat but if British people allow them to become one. They are dangerous because they're innovative about how they draw attention away from their true beliefs." A researcher for anti-fascist group UK Fightback

The group plays on nationalist and religious sentiments, drawing on symbols from the time of the Crusades, when Christian Europe united to fight Islam in the Holy Land.

And its 'us versus them' rhetoric has proved compelling both in England and further afield where the group has forged links with influential far right groups in Europe and the US.

Rail Bombs Raise Fear Of Left-Wing Terror Attacks

13 Oct 2011 13:10
Courtesy Of "Reuters Alert-Net"



BERLIN, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Germany stepped up security on its railways on Thursday, dispatching police reinforcements to halt a campaign of arson attacks after officials found a firebomb on tracks near Berlin.

It was the 16th explosive device detected in four days.

None has been hurt but hundreds of trains have been delayed and the spate of attacks has triggered fears of a surge in left-wing violence.

Federal police and prosecutors are now in charge of the investigation. Dozens of experts, some in protective clothing, are scouring railway tracks for clues. Police helicopters are hovering over railway lines to spot possible suspects.

"We are looking at a new dimension of left-wing violence which is extremely worrying," Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said.

"It is an attempt to comprehensively and systematically put at risk the working of a city which is of great importance," he told Focus magazine.

Over the summer, mystery attackers set on fire over 100 cars in mostly affluent districts of Berlin. Police have not discovered who was responsible but many politicians blamed left-wing radicals targeting the rich.

The latest attacks have reawakened memories of the deadly Red Army Faction attacks in the 1970s and 1980s which killed dozens of people, including some top establishment figures.

The series of arson attacks started on Monday. Most of the devices, which consist of bottles with flammable liquid, have not exploded although on Wednesday one caught fire.

Most bombs have been planted on tracks in the Berlin area -- one was on the high-speed link between Berlin and Hamburg.

Railway operator Deutsche Bahn has offered a reward of 100,000 euros for clues and federal prosecutors, who usually get involved only in cases of national security, say they suspect "anti-constitutional sabotage".

A group called the "Hekla Reception Committee -- Initiative for more Social Eruptions" claimed responsibility on Monday, saying it aimed to cause widespread disruption and it opposed Germany's part in the Afghanistan war.

Asked about fears of a new wave of RAF-type terrorism, Friedrich said historical comparisons were difficult.

"But we must be extremely vigilant and make sure that the readiness to commit violence seen in these attacks does not develop into a new form of left-wing terrorism."

Germany's intelligence service has for months warned about the danger of growing left-wing militancy.

On Saturday, left-wing protests are due to take place across Europe, including in Berlin. (Reporting By Madeline Chambers)

From Civil To Savage: Buy A Gun

Our Nation Is Getting Desperate. When Will Chaos Rise In Our Streets?

By Joseph McBrennan
Source: "Taipan Daily"
August 19, 2011
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"


Buy a weapon to prepare for what may be the most devastating economic downturn our nation has ever faced. As one trained in economics, I never thought I'd write those words.


However, I'll repeat them. Buy a gun.


The coming storm will not only impose financial hardships for those unprepared, but also entail a physical threat to you, your family and your property.


The threat will come from inside the halls of government with the constant attack on savings and investments through inflation, monetary gimmickry and, eventually, the destruction of our currency.


These events will be led by welfare programs gone awry. A recent nearby incident, and events in London, forced me to confront a reality too few wish to believe. Here's what FT.com's Gautam Malkani had to say:

The speed of the disintegration said everything. It took less than 48 hours for London to descend from self-styled capital of the world into a circuit of burning dystopian hells. The speed of BlackBerry messaging; the speed of kids on BMXs; the speed of Molotovs and petrol. Never mind the police, even the media couldn't keep up.

The world around us is deteriorating every day: socially and economically. It's not limited to London.
England seems pretty distant, but when the chaos rears up in your backyard, literally, you begin to prioritize and prepare. I suggest you do the same.


Let me explain.


Last Saturday night, in a very upscale neighborhood a few blocks from where I live, a horde of what can only be described as feral youth descended upon a very upscale outdoor shopping area called the Country Club Plaza.


They arrived around 11 p.m. after their cellphones alerted them that this upper-middle-class shopping district, two miles from the third-richest residential area in the country, was the target for that evening.


Within an hour, shots were fired by one group of kids at another and three children were hospitalized.


It's not the first flash mob to hit Kansas City and likely won't be the last. If our city's mayor had not coincidentally been on the scene, our local media would have swept it under the rug.


As you could expect, they've attributed the "disturbance" to kids not having enough activities "like night basketball." In other words, the middle class needs to entertain these hooligans or they'll entertain themselves by robbing and terrorizing the productive class.


Philadelphia's mayor has been dealing with these thugs for 24 months. Here's the recent reaction from Mayor Michael Nutter:

"You've damaged yourself, you've damaged another person, you've damaged your peers and, quite honestly, you've damaged your own race."

Mayor Nutter didn't stop there. He blasted the youth and their parents of Philadelphia with:

Take those God darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. Nobody.

If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy!

The Immaculate Conception of our Lord Jesus Christ took place a long time ago, and it didn't happen here in Philadelphia. So every one of these kids has two parents who were around and participating at the time. They need to be around now.

Parents who neglect their children, who don't know where they are, who don't know what they're doing, who don't know who they're hanging out with, you're going to find yourself spending some quality time with your kids in jail.

To fathers: "If you're not providing the guidance, and you're not sending any money, you're just a sperm donor."


That's powerful stuff, but I dare say many wish it were said sooner. I would also suggest that too many should have said it, but feared being labeled a racist if they utter such cutting, yet accurate, remarks.
If London, Kansas City or Philadelphia were isolated events, I'd not bother mentioning it. It's occurring everywhere. The signs of our crumbling civilization are all around us. The same stories are being reported from Chicago to Miami and from coast to coast.


It's even occurring in what is considered one of the most civilized countries in the world. The Associated Press reported Aug. 17 that Swedish police say unrest erupted overnight in Goteborg, the country's second-largest city, as several officers were attacked by youths hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails.


I've heard all the theories of why this group or that group should be excused for animal-like behavior.


And, like Mayor Nutter, I'm calling those excuses what they are. B.S.


The root cause is the destruction of family by the federal government and its welfare policies. Fathers are no longer needed, or even economically beneficial, when Big Brother steps in and pays unwed mothers more, monthly, for each fatherless child they drop from their wombs.


If you look at the numbers, it's a lucrative cottage industry in some parts of the United States.


Combine these destructive policies of the federal government with the costliest "free" education on the planet that teaches nothing except that you're a victim, sprinkle a little left-wing media propaganda, and you have the perfect formula for a civil unrest.


Economically speaking, we had far more poor during the Great Depression than we do today, so please don't tell me it's because our poor are so underprivileged. We also had far less crime in the '30s.


The real facts tell a very different story.


The United States has no significant amount of real poor. By this I mean destitute, suffering from malnutrition or without material goods. By most standards, our poor are very well off.


The so-called poor of our country are angry, though their rage is baseless. They have received without contribution, and take without merit.


The ones who should be outraged in our country are the middle classes. They should be rioting.


Our retirements are stolen. They'll either nationalize it on the next major market drop, or it'll be eaten up by Big Ben's inflation. Either way, it's locked into worthless dollar-denominated investments through the government regulations that assume we are too irresponsible to take care of our own lives.


Of course we know the Social Security we've paid into for a lifetime has been stolen right out from under our noses. There's nothing there but Treasury IOUs, now rated AA+.


And all the while we face these delights, we're browbeaten by Obama into believing we are not paying our "fair share."


Everything we hold sacred, family, honesty, hard work, religion, savings and the Constitution, is snickered at by the elite of Washington and the puppet masters on Wall Street.


Their game is nearly over. Their world of social engineering and financial gimmickry is ending. The fabric of all nations is disintegrating before our eyes.


In February I wrote:

Our World Is Unraveling...[my theme has been one of] safety, capital preservation and self-reliance. We even recommended purchasing raw agriculture land as an alternative, or supplement, to precious metals.

Everything we've discussed from land to offshore banking was to prepare you without scaring you. It appears my time frame may have been overly optimistic. We have less time than I thought.

Now, six months later, our message is more urgent than ever.

In troubled times like these, the prepared will prosper, and so I'll return to my constant message: secure rock-solid investments, have a reserve of cash on hand, maintain a reliable alternative to the dollar, consider a retreat outside major metropolitan area, and...


Buy a gun.


P.S. I am sure I've disturbed some of the social-justice crowd with the above. I welcome your emotionally based responses atjoseph@taipandaily.com.


Publisher's Note: Joseph is not the only one at Taipan raising a red flag. Another of our insiders -- a U.S. dollar expert -- believes the U.S. will see riots like those we saw in London.


Anything could be the trigger that sets off these riots.


But all our research leads us to the same conclusion: The event with the single highest probability for triggering an all-out collapse of civility in the next 180 days is explained in this groundbreaking video report that you can access right here.


Joseph McBrennan is Editor, Taipan Publishing Group

Anarchists Claim Responsibility For Rome Bombs

By Roberto Landucci and Daniele Mari
ROME | Thu Dec 23, 2010 5:41pm EST
Courtesy Of "Reuters News"

(Reuters) - An Italian anarchist group claimed responsibility for parcel bombs on Thursday that wounded two people at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome, a reminder of Europe's home-grown threats at a time of political instability.

A Swiss man was seriously wounded and rushed to hospital. An employee at the Chilean embassy was less seriously hurt. A note was found stuck to his clothing, claiming responsibility for the attack on behalf of the FAI, or Informal Anarchist Federation.

"We have decided to make our voice heard with words and with facts, we will destroy the system of dominance, long live the FAI, long-live Anarchy," said the note, written in Italian, which was released in the evening by the police.

The incidents bore similarities to an episode in Greece last month in which far-left militants sent parcel bombs to foreign governments abroad and to embassies in Athens.

The note was signed by the "Lambros Fountas revolutionary cell" of the FAI, named for a Greek anarchist killed in a clash with Athens police in March. It also made reference to anarchist movements in Chile, Mexico, Spain and Argentina.

"Greece, Italy and Spain have seen the presence of anarcho-insurrectionalist groups that are tightly linked," Italy's Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said before the note was found. "They are very violent."

The FAI is well known to Italian authorities. Intelligence services said in a report to parliament last year that it was "the main national terrorist threat of an anarchist-insurrectionalist type."

In December 2009 the group claimed responsibility for a bomb that partially exploded in a tunnel under Milan's Bocconi University at 3 am, causing no casualties.

No note was found at the Swiss embassy, but police said the packages that exploded were almost identical.

The explosions came at a time of tension in Italy. Last week saw an anti-government student protest that descended into some of the worst street violence in Rome for many years.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini condemned the incidents, which he said were a serious threat to diplomatic missions in Rome. He urged caution and warned against alarmist reactions.

The attacks, like those in Greece, focused attention on Europe's domestic security threats at a time when authorities had otherwise been warning of the risk of attacks by al Qaeda.

"It doesn't look like a typical jihadist thing. It looks more like the act of a leftist, fringe group," said Stephan Bierling, professor of International Politics at Regensburg University in Germany.

Spending cuts caused by the financial crisis have led to demonstrations and strikes around Europe, and experts expect a rise in political violence by far-left groups.

"Given the similarities with the recent parcel bombs in Greece following anti-austerity protests, this could be a copycat incident by domestic activists," said Samantha Wolreich, European risk analyst at advisory firm AKE.

A Greek police official said they had so far not received a request for help from Italian police. He said Greek authorities had stepped up checks of parcels at airports across the country following the attacks in Italy.

HEIGHTENED SECURITY FEARS

Bomb disposal experts searched the Swiss embassy offices but staff remained in the building following the incident, which occurred at around midday (1100 GMT).

Firefighters conducted checks of the Chilean embassy, in the same prosperous neighborhood, after the explosion of the package the size of a document. Other inspections were carried out at foreign missions across the Italian capital.

A source in the Rome prosecutors' office said the package in the Chilean embassy had been sent from Italy, while the package in the Swiss embassy had been completely destroyed.

"We are reviewing our security posture in Rome in light of incidents today," U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington.

Chilean ambassador Oscar Godoy said there had been no indication that an attack was likely.

"This is an absolutely irrational and brutal act of terrorism," he told reporters.

The explosions follow the discovery of a rudimentary device in an empty underground train in Rome on Tuesday. However, police said that it lacked a detonator and tests showed it contained no explosive.

(Additional reporting by Antonella Cinelli, Massimiliano Di Giorgio and Catherine Hornby in Rome,Sven Egenter in Zurich, Olzhas Auyezov in Kiev, William Maclean and Peter Apps in London, Ingrid Melander in Athens; Writing by James Mackenzie and Gavin Jones; Editing by Peter Graff)

What The Fight Against Anarchism Tells Us About The Fight Against Radical Islam

By Brian Doherty
From the January 2011 issue
Courtesy Of "Reason Online"

The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents, by Alex Butterworth, Pantheon Books, 482 pages, $30

In the late 19th century, as today, a terrorist cabal detonated bombs in the heart of the Western world. Judged by the number of successful attacks on politicians and royalty, that force was more directly threatening to the inner circles of power than today’s radical Islam.

This episodic violence, loosely associated with the extremist wing of the anarchist movement, lasted roughly from 1880 to 1910. It claimed the lives of only about 150 private citizens but also killed a president, a police chief, a prime minister, a czar, a king, and an empress. Yet the wave of terror eventually receded. No one has lived in mortal fear of bomb-throwing, dagger-clutching anarchists for nearly a century. Will citizens in 2110 view radical Islamic terrorism as a similar historical curiosity, useful mostly for colorful storytelling?

I don’t know, and neither does Alex Butterworth, author of The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents. The book is a detailed chronicle both of the anarchists—intellectuals and peaceful activists as well as terrorists—and of the cops and spies who set out to nab and crush them. It is irresistible, while contemplating this history in 2011, to look for analogies that might illuminate the current war on terror.

Butterworth, an English historian, brings up that comparison casually in the introduction. It feels like a last-minute addition to give a long tale of days gone by a ripped-from-the-headlines promotional hook. The author himself never returns to the idea. But perhaps the rest of us should.

The anarchists were considerably more precise in their attacks on political leaders, implying, perhaps, that they were more efficient, clever, or at least focused than today’s more civilian-oriented terrorists. Although their plots never approached the scale of 9/11, they did outdo the Islamists when it came to the number of successful fatal attacks within Western cities.

Might smarter, more effective intelligence and policing in the 21st century explain the difference? Butterworth provides stories and data relevant to that question but no decisive answers. He does not, after all, have access to a century’s worth of delayed revelations about our current twilight struggle. Still, the first war on terror does offer tantalizing hints about what we face when confronting organized nonstate international killers.

Butterworth’s walk through the  oft-told tale of 19th-century anarchism includes plenty of familiar material. Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, the Communards and the narodniki, the First and Second Internationals—all get plenty of attention. (So do many tangential stories, some interesting and some not, about the historical milieu in which they lived.) The freshest and most relevant parts of the book are Butterworth’s tales of cops and spies at war with anarchist radicals. The most valuable player in this battle against the international anarchist terror conspiracy—which didn’t actually exist, in the sense of one organization centrally planning attacks across national lines—was the Russians’ man in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky.

Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in St. Petersburg’s radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a prosecutor for the czar’s government. He ended up running the show for the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated.

From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping anarchists under surveillance and on the run—and also, in many cases, financed and supplied with ideas. Butterworth notes that “prominent among his early initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived.” Rachkovsky’s aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar. This guaranteed him a solid berth in Paris that was lucrative both in salary and prestige—and, Butterworth’s research leads him to strongly suspect, in opportunities for corrupt under-the-radar dealings with a French government doing heavy business with Russia.

Rachkovsky wasn’t the first cop to use agents provocateurs among the French radicals. Louis Andrieux, the French prefect of police during the early 1880s, had been frustrated that all his spying on the anarchists failed to uncover a crime worthy of his time and attention, so he decided that “it was necessary that the act was accomplished for repression to be possible.”

Rachkovsky’s bosses in Russia and his hosts in Paris both feared the radicals, allowing the Russian agent to tighten the ties between the two nations. He succeeded so well that Butterworth argues he was partly to blame for the Russo-French alliance that helped make World War I such a bloody mess.

The British government, by contrast, initially resisted czarist efforts to capture Russia’s radical émigrés. In 1890 Vladimir Burtsev, wanted by the czarist police, boarded a British boat bound from Constantinople to London. When the ship found itself surrounded by Turkish police vessels with Russians on board, the captain refused their demand to hand over the fugitive, announcing: “This is English territory. And I am a gentleman!” But soon even Britain’s Special Branch ended up playing the spy and provocateur game.

Although Butterworth warns today’s governments and spymasters that future historians will “have access to the material necessary to hold those leaders to account for any deceptions they may have practiced,” his own research into the century-old fight indicates that that won’t necessarily be so. The current keepers of the Special Branch’s archives, which could shed light on the history of police behavior toward the radicals of the time, keep access to the relevant records “tenaciously guarded” even now.

It would be comforting to assume that one of the reasons the radical anarchists were able to gin up more consistent bombing action in the West than radical Islam does today was because their ideals—storming the bastions of illegitimate power, winning a better deal for the working man, crafting a future without any coercive authority—were more inherently inspiring than Shariah or a new Caliphate. These anarcho-radical movements were huge in the late 19th century. Star anarchist figures such as Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta could get tens of thousands, sometimes more than 100,000, fans to show up whenever they arrived in town. The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist movement’s many publications was in the tens of thousands in France alone. But the active participants in anarchist congresses numbered less than 1,000, and while many of those activists and intellectuals excused the violence, others opposed it. The number of people actively involved in planning and executing terror plots seems to be no more than a few dozen.

Terror then and terror now both hoped to inspire popular insurrection; both failed. Although anarchists referred to their violent actions as “propaganda by deed,” acts such as blowing up cafés or opera houses were really far more successful propaganda against anarchism than for it. Similarly, there is scant evidence that even the spectacularly destructive strike of 9/11 did much to help Al Qaeda recruit smart, useful, self-destructive folk willing to wage constant war on the decadent West. Suicide attacks in the name of jihad are only about 30 years old; they arose from modern circumstances and could disappear as those circumstances change.

To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.” Collaborations of national secret police agencies created an ad hoc global force to fight the nonexistent global anarchist conspiracy, and the very advocacy of anarchist ideas was outlawed in most of the West. 

As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.

The legacy of the secret police war against anarchists is ongoing and ugly. Both the CIA and the KGB learned from the techniques of the Okhrana, and the authorities today still cling to the notion that policing terror sometimes means encouraging it. Many of the alleged terrorists captured over the past several years were influenced, and in some cases provided materials by, police informants, including the Miami Seven, the accused Rockford, Illinois, shopping mall bomber Derrick Shareef, and Sami Samir Hassoun, who was charged with conspiring to bomb a nightclub near a Dave Matthews concert in Chicago. 

Likewise, Butterworth concludes from his scattered documentary record that provocateurs were close to the planning and/or financing of many headline-making anarchist bomb plots, and that the staff of the British radical magazine Commonweal may have consisted entirely of informants, unbeknownst to each other. (Even today, with unprecedented access to police files, Butterworth is often unsure who was reporting back to the cops.) The French grande dame of anarchy, Louise Michel, once joked, “We love to have [agents provocateurs] in the party, because they always propose the most revolutionary motions.” In his fanciful 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday, inspired by the milieu of anarcho-skullduggery that Butterworth chronicles, G.K. Chesterton describes a convocation of anarchist conspirators in which all of the plotters turn out to be cops sent to infiltrate the group.

Anarchists may have been relatively effective at decapitating power, but they were not a mortal threat to Western civilization, and neither are the Islamists. They do not warrant the suppression of civil liberties or the huge cost, in lives and money, of the wars waged by Bush and Barack Obama.

Cracking down on supposed terror threats, whether through mass arrests in the late 19th century or drone air attacks in the 21st, can create martyrs and encourage counterattacks. Many acts of anarchist terror were explicitly conceived to avenge comrades caught and killed or brutalized by Western governments. Sometimes the blowback is more long term, harder to predict, and more terrifying. The 1887 hanging of Alexander Ulyanov, a member of the Russian terror group People’s Will, inspired his younger brother to become the revolutionary known as Lenin.

Butterworth’s most important lesson for our current war on terror is buried in the middle of the book. Discussing the British police reaction to a bombing campaign—this one not by anarchists but by Irish nationalists—he comments that “the threat may have been smaller than those responsible for its policing liked to maintain.” That haunting thought should help guide American voters and politicians as they consider the future of the Second War on International Terror. 

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism(PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).