“Allah Didn’t Put You Here to Work at Walmart”: A Comparative Examination of the Use of Informers by the FBI in the Cold War and the War on Terror

Since the Cold War, critics have focused on the use of technology by the state to conduct surveillance. After 9-11, a persistent critique against domestic and foreign security and intelligence agencies has been an overreliance on technology at the expense of human intelligence (HUMINT). As a result, police forces and intelligence agencies in countries, including the U.S., have increasingly used informers as a prime part of their counterterrorism operations. In turn, the tactic has generated controversy because of its lack of transparency, the potential of the state to deploy agents provocateurs, and the impact on targeted communities. 

Of course, the use of informers for domestic security is not new. Several Eastern European nations during the Cold War, following the Soviet police-state model, made extensive use of informers to spy on their citizens. Although the scale of informing was much greater in the latter, the practice was used by domestic security agencies in the west as part of counter-subversion operations and to help ensure social order. The FBI, for instance, made extensive use of informers against the Communist Party of the United States of America, the Klan, and African-American communities.

This paper will compare the use of informers in current domestic counter-terrorism operations in the United States with their use in the later Cold War. It will examine why informers have been and remain a crucial tool for security agencies in democratic states?  Specifically, the paper will argue that the use of informers in security investigations in both eras reflects, at least in part, the failure of domestic security agencies  to resemble in terms of ethnicity or ideology or religion or gender, “suspect communities” targeted for surveillance. As a result, security bodies turn to members of the targeted communities themselves to assist in state surveillance.