Federal agents ran an undercover operation against protest organisers, climate groups and labour unions in Minnesota, infiltrating meetings in churches and libraries and pulling union financial records

A slide titled 'The Conspiracy'

Somewhere inside Homeland Security Investigations, someone made a presentation slide. It was headed “The Conspiracy”, and it charted 18 organisations. At one end was the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labour unions in the United States. At the other was a bicycle repair collective in Minneapolis.

That slide is now a court exhibit, and it is a strange thing for this archive to be looking at. Almost everything here is a diagram somebody drew in their bedroom: the string-and-pins board, the arrows between unrelated people, the certainty that a pattern means a plan. This one was drawn by a federal investigative agency, with a budget, and the people on it were mostly attending meetings in libraries.

The documents describing it were filed on 13 August 2026 and reported the same day by the Associated Press.

What the records describe

Two operations are named. Operation Puppet Master, which government documents describe as aimed at a network of conspirators helping violent opportunists and agitators, and a later effort called Project Whipple Shield, focused on identifying organised efforts to engage in violence and disrupt federal operations. Both ran during an immigration enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis and the protests against it.

According to the records, undercover officers attended meetings in churches, schools, libraries and parks. Agents monitored activist chat groups. Licence plate numbers were used to compile the names of people who had attended gatherings. And the government obtained years of certain financial records for organisations including the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, none of which was itself charged.

One request went to FedWire, the money transfer system operated by the Federal Reserve. It carried a line worth reading twice: “You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time.”

The sentence the agent wrote

On 31 January, in a Minneapolis library, an undercover officer identified in the paperwork only as UCA 9833sat in on a meeting of supporters of the Sunrise Movement, a climate group. The agenda, per the officer's own report, covered sit-ins, de-escalation tactics, and arranging for a police liaison and a safety marshal to be present at events.

Then the officer wrote this: during the meeting, it was made clear that the organisation focused on “peaceful” protests.

That is the single most important line in the disclosure, and it requires no interpretation from anyone outside the document. An operation predicated on violent conspirators sent an officer into a room, and the officer reported back that the people in the room were planning to bring a safety marshal and talk to the police. The surveillance recorded the lawfulness of its subject, in the government's own words, and did not stop.

The parts we are not entitled to assert

Three limits, and they matter more here than usual because the material is so damaging in one direction.

First, fifteen people are charged and none is convicted. They were charged in June with impeding the crackdown, through conduct the prosecution describes as ranging from throwing ice chunks to setting up blockades. Those are allegations, the presumption of innocence applies in full, and nothing in this file is a comment on any individual defendant.

Second, we do not say any of this was illegal. Attending public meetings and obtaining records through legal process can be entirely lawful. Whether these particular actions were properly predicated and proportionate is precisely what the disclosure motion is contesting, and it is a question for a court rather than for us.

Third, the documents arrived through advocacy.They were released in connection with a motion by a defence lawyer, Kevin Riach, who is arguing on a client's behalf and who characterises the operations as a broad and irrational investigation driven by politics rather than criminal conduct. That framing is his. The underlying records are the government's. The distinction is worth holding, and so is what sits on the other side of it: Homeland Security declined to comment on the existence or status of the investigations or on investigative methods, and the US attorney's office did not immediately respond to the Associated Press. There is no public government explanation to weigh yet.

Why nobody had to be persuaded

Most claims on this site have to overcome the reader's default scepticism. This one did not, and the reason is fifty years old. COINTELPRO ran from 1956 to 1971, infiltrated and disrupted civil rights and anti-war organisations, and was exposed and investigated rather than disproved. Every subsequent allegation of domestic political surveillance inherits credibility from it, and that inheritance is earned rather than paranoid.

What gives this one its particular force is the ordinariness of the target list. A conspiracy chart including a bicycle repair collective is very difficult to read as a narrow response to violence. And the non-disclosure request to a Federal Reserve system is the concrete version of a feeling people usually cannot evidence: that they would simply never have known. Here they would not have, and did not, until a defence lawyer asked for the file.

The chart that turned out to be real

Almost every file in this archive ends by explaining why a pattern somebody found was not a plan. Faces that looked alike, dates that lined up, a photograph that seemed to show what it did not. The recurring lesson is that human beings are very good at seeing conspiracies and very bad at checking them.

This entry ends the other way, and it should be allowed to. A federal agency drew a conspiracy chart, put a labour federation and a bike shop on it, sent an officer into a library, and asked the Federal Reserve not to mention it. Whether that was lawful is for a court. Whether it was wise is for the reader. But the documents are the government's own, and they are in the file.

The habit worth carrying is the same one this site applies to everything else, run in the other direction. Scepticism is a method, not a posture, and a method that only ever produces reassurance is not being applied honestly. Sometimes you check, and the thing is there.