Peg Millett has been an Earth First! activist since the mid-1980's. In the late eighties she and four others were framed in an FBI sting operation. The Arizona Five, as they have become known as, were arrested for conspiring to cut down a power line in 1989. After spending two and a half years in jail, Peg continues to be a powerful voice for the Earth First! movement, through her singing and continued activism. This is the first installation of a two-part interview.
I started interviewing Peg at the 1995 Earth First! Activist Conference in Austin, and after losing a good chunk of the juicy tidbits to the mini-cassette god, I finished at my Grandparents house in June of 1996. Although I officially met her in 1993, I knew of her since 1988 and thought I knew what information I wanted from the interview. Peg's a gabber and I took advantage of that╤there were only a few questions she attempted to answer carefully╤the rest of the time she was as open and unpretentious as I expected. However, as one question led to another I discovered so much more about Peg's history and who she is╤it turns out she deserves a book, not just an interview. She's a fascinating woman who I am very proud to call my friend.
Kimberley Dawn: Let's talk about Peg Millett, the early years.
Peg Millett: I was born in Flagstaff, Arizona and raised in the suburbs of Scottsdale. I had a lot of turmoil in my home when I was young and so I escaped into the desert and started relating to animals and plants. I liked to observe and study the natural world and went to the wild for solace, solitude and safety.
Before I went to college the second time I traveled around for about six years doing different jobs. I trained horses, worked in bars, as a fisherman, an apple picker. On my travels I always asked people, "What kind of tree is this and how much rainfall do you get here?" Nobody could tell me and it frustrated me. So I went to Prescott College to learn about natural history. I wanted to become an educator of children so that kids would know how much rainfall there is and what kind of trees are around them and what kinds of animals live with those trees, etc. I was dumbfounded at how little respect we have for the natural world. Watching all this destruction was killing me. So I moved out to the woods with a fellow I hooked up with.
KD: When and how did you first get involved with Earth First!?
PM: I read an interview with Dave Foreman in Mother Earth News in 1984. I thought, "Holy shit! This guy is talking my language. How come I don't know about any of these people?" There was an address at the bottom that said you can find out more if you read the Earth First! Journal. So I wrote to the Journal and said please send me a copy. I immediately subscribed and read the whole thing from cover to cover. In that copy they announced the Round River Rendezvous in Colorado in 1985. I thought, "I have to meet these people, I have to find out if this is real." From what I read these people had a red-neck mentality, they had this really caustic sense of humor. And I loved it, I totally related to it. I'm a red-neck, and I have a wild, caustic sense of humor. Plus they were passionately committed to changing the way the world is going. So I felt an affinity. I felt really jacked up about that.
It just so happened that in 1979 I had gone to a Rainbow gathering. I had a good time, I met a lot of people. But I did not connect with anyone because we didn't have a common goal; everybody just went their own way╤ they were all doing love and peace and I could walk around naked. It was wonderful to be able to do that.
I went to the Rendezvous with the idea that it might be like the Rainbow gathering in that I'd have a good time but I'd never really connect and I'd never want to be involved again. When I got there I camped way at the edge of camp. I didn't know anybody but there was a bunch of people and they were all hob-nobbing and pallin' around. It was wonderful! Then I started to get acquainted with people and went to the workshops. I went to Howie Wolke's workshop on the Forest Service ╤ I had been working as a Forest Service firefighter. I didn't agree with fire suppression but I didn't know about the politics ╤ I was very nèive, in other words. I sat there in the workshop and asked, "What is with this BLM land swap?" Howie said, "It's a smokescreen and here's why," and he educated me. After that a man came up to me and said "I wanted to meet you because you're from Prescott and I'm originally from Arizona but now I live in Montana"╤that was Gary Steele. He stuck his hand out and I thought, "Wow, somebody wants to meet me." He took me under his wing and introduced me to lots of people. That is how I got introduced to Earth First!
KD: Did you stay involved after your first RRR?
PM: Yeah, partly because I really loved the action after the Rendezvous. When I discovered guerrilla theater I discovered my calling. I volunteered to make signs for some stuff that we were doing in Arizona about uranium mining. It was just the beginning of the campaign for Mt. Graham.
I lived out in the woods without a phone but I listed myself in the Journal as a contact. I wasn't well versed in researching or paper monkeywrenching or anything like that. I just got out there in front of the media, acting like a silly goose having a good time and doing banners and all that sort of thing.
KD: In 1987 you were on the RRR committee.
PM: Wow, that was a great Rendezvous. At the 1986 Rendezvous I got really pissed off 'cause they had a gasoline generator. When it was decided that Arizona would be the next RRR site I signed up to be on the committee. It was on the north rim of the Grand Canyon and we could see forest fires across from us. I spent most of the Rendezvous as a cop╤walking up and down in the area where people were starting fires for cooking. We put together a really kick-butt Rendezvous.
KD: How did you first meet the players involved in the power lines action╤ Mike Fain, Ilse Asplund, Ron Fraser, Mark Davis and Mark Baker?
I had met Mark Davis through the town grapevine. Ron Fraser, a paid FBI informant, moved in to the trailer court that my friend Ilse was managing with her husband. I believe that was the spring of 1987. He began to become friends with her.
Fraser wanted me to drive with him to the Rendezvous in 1988 but I didn't want to because I wasn't comfortable around him at that time. I did end up taking a ride back from the Rendezvous with Mike Fain [an FBI agent] and Ron Fraser. In the meantime Mark Davis broached the subject of the ski lift action to me in 1987 after the RRR. I had never really focused like Mark wanted me to with him. I decided to do it because I wanted to see if it worked. I was experimenting.
KD: Could you go into the plans of the ski lift actions?
PM: Yeah, it's over now. There's a ski lift on these peaks in northern Arizona that are seen as sacred land according to Hopi, Navajo and several other tribes around there. The people had been protesting, quietly and politely, to all the powers that be about this ski lift for the past 50 years. Mark wanted to target it at the time because Congress was going to pay for a new paved road. It was a really nasty and stupid situation and he wanted to bring attention to it.
We planned to cut the bolts on the pylons to the ski lift with a portable acetylene torch. The ski lift was under repair because it was between seasons╤we had deliberately chosen that time of the year. We wrote hundreds of letters under the name of E.M.E.T.I.C. , and sent them to media outlets the night of the action and afterwards. Then we went on top of the mountain and started cutting bolts. I don't know if the Feds knew about it or not. They claimed they didn't. They allowed us to do several acts of vandalism in order to snag Dave Foreman cause they were really after him. They didn't give a dang about us. They wanted to associate him with us.
KD: Tell us about how the FBI infiltrated your little group.
PM: Mark Davis was mainly involved with anti-nuke stuff. I was involved with that and Earth First! which is why I think they decided to use me as a point of entry╤which worked. They did psychological profiles on many of us and sent me my very own FBI agent, Mike Fain. I met him at the Rendezvous in 1988 after I heard about him from Ron Fraser. After the Rendezvous my husband went off for a month fire fighting. I was alone at my house in the woods and Fain drives up and wants to know if I know anything about oil pumps or something ridiculous like that╤then we went dancing. He was very clever. He did a very good job at getting my trust.
KD: After you all got busted there were a lot of rumors going around. One was that Fain had a romantic relationship with a friend of yours. What's the story behind that?
PM: Fain and I were great on the dance floor and he was very willing to go dancing with me. I was also developing a major crush on this guy but I didn't want that to go anywhere. I wanted my marriage to work; I wanted to be with my husband╤I really loved him. But I still wanted to be around Mike Fain so I introduced him to my friend Jane. The four of us, my husband, myself, Fain and Jane, went to country-western swing lessons every Thursday night at a local bar. That was pretty much as far as it went. My friend Jane also developed a crush on Mike Fain because he's very handsome. He led Jane to believe that, well...He took an AIDS test and all that shit. It was just a ploy to keep us strung along and both of us were extremely gullible about it. It was just a bummer. She never went to bed with him or anything like that. As for Mike, it was just a job for him. It would have been counter-productive for him to do anything more than allude to things. As long as we were both attracted he wouldn't go any further. And then he just stopped.
KD: Did Fain or Fraser ever do anything to raise your suspicion?
PM: When Fain first showed up at my house after the Rendezvous, my husband was gone. We were having a nice visit and by-golly for some reason we started talking about dancing. The country-western place is about 16 miles away but it takes an hour to drive because it's on a really gnarly road. We were going to drive in his truck and I noticed it wasn't for the kind of terrain that we were living in. I thought it was very funny that this macho cowboy guy doesn't have a macho truck.
Later, after it's dark, we're walking back and I'm wearing my little dancing shoes and my dancing dress. I always have a flashlight on me but I didn't use it and at first he was a little disoriented. We're walking along and all of a sudden I jumped ╤and I grabbed my flashlight and looked down to see what it was that had stung me. I noticed it was this big, long centipede and I thought, "Wow, cool." I'm bending over to look at it when I noticed Fain was about to smash it. I pushed him over before he had a chance to do it. Then I looked at him and I thought it was so weird.. I didn't understand why he would smash a centipede. That was a very major discrepancy in the way he portrayed himself to me and the way he was really acting. That was a reaction on his part. My reaction was to keep him off the centipede. It was very interesting but I didn't pay attention to it. Those two things, the truck being very unsuitable and the centipede incident, were signs for me. They were red flags╤red flags I ignored because I didn't want to deal with it. I wanted to believe what he wanted me to believe.
KD: How did Mike Fain get involved with planning the downing of the powerlines?
PM: It was getting to the point where we were about to do something and Mike Fain was involved. It took a long time for people to develop a trust in him╤but they did through me because I trusted him. That what was very difficult for me to come to terms with because I had made a mistake by trusting him and people trusted me, an intense thing to realize.
We chose the power lines going to a pump station, which were not nuclear power lines, but just a pump station on the CAP project. Fain was working real hard to get us to do something to the nuclear power plant. Mark didn't want to mess with that in the direction they were pushing it.
KD: What is CAP?
CAP is the Central Arizona Project. It's a water boondoggle, a pork-barrel project. They divert water from the Colorado river and pump it, channel it and bring it to Tucson. The pump stations pump the water uphill from the Colorado.
KD: Why did you choose those power lines?
PM: We chose the power lines going to the CAP project because we knew that they would not be connected to any city. And that the power lines were connected to the pump station and it would stop water from going uphill╤and that would be all. We didn't like the CAP project╤it's a dastardly defiance of nature. It was also in a remote area. We also just wanted a practice run to see if we could get away with it.
KD: I understand that later you weren't as motivated to cut down the power lines.
PM: I began to lose interest because I was more interested in preserving sacred lands. I was still going along on the momentum that we had started and excitement of it all. I didn't try to direct anything. I did talk about sacred lands╤that is what I was most interested in. Mark was going in another direction and we were being influenced as well by people who were working for the Feds.
KD: Set up for us the whys, whos, etc. of the power line action. Was there any significance in the day you picked for the action╤May 31, 1989?
PM: We picked it because of the moon which was waning╤it was new and dark.
KD: I understand the motives of Fain, Davis and yourself╤which were all quite different. What motivated Ilse and Mark Baker, to the best of your knowledge?
PM: Ilse was involved with this because she felt the same way as the rest of us and she was living with Mark Davis. Mark Baker, he was sort of like the mad scientist. He really wanted to be accepted╤he was frustrated. I can't really speak for him but that was my impression. Mark Davis was talking to him a lot about coming out and doing stuff at night. I've done stuff with Baker at night and he's really fun.
KD: How did Fain's pressuring affect how far you all went and how fast things came together?
PM: Fain and Fraser definitely influenced us and pressured us. I sure was influenced by Fain╤I can't speak for Mark Davis. I definitely went much further than I would have had it not been for both Mark and Mike.
KD: I've heard you tell the story about the ride out to the power lines. Fain was secretly recording your conversation and later you all heard the tape with your lawyers. Exactly what happened?
PM: To start out with, I didn't really want to go out. I was so scared, really stressed out and crying. Mark told me right before we went, "Look, you don't have to do this╤at all." He gave me the escape. But of course I wasn't going to back out at that point. I felt responsible for Mike Fain being there for one thing.
I wanted to ride in the back of the car 'cause I was so freaked out. And Fain said "Oh no, no╤there's plenty of room in the front." Of course Fain wanted me up front so he could have my voice on tape as part of the trio.
As we were driving everybody was jacked up. We were getting ready to do something pretty scary. Meanwhile this is the last night for Fain and he's preparing to lead us right into the mouth of the Feds. We were being very punchy and really silly. We were talking about things like shooting cows on public land with arrows dipped in cyanide extracted from the seeds of apples╤we were just talking shit. We were just howling╤I was laughing so hard I could hardly see straight╤it was ridiculous. When I listened to this on tape in the lawyer's office I laughed again. I thought if they put this on in the courtroom they're going to throw us out for being a bunch of idiots. It was too funny.
KD: I take it they never played it in court?
PM: Of course not! So we were driving out there and it felt very surreal and I began to feel resigned. It was like I was on the top of this wave and there was nothing to do now to change things. I was in the truck and we were going out to cut down a power line. I felt powerless in a way.
KD: Aside from having a FBI agent along for the ride, what kind of security measures did you all take?
PM: [Laughs] Well, I got this really strange, eerie feeling when we were driving down the road. I saw lights way, way ahead of us╤this was at dusk╤and I saw the lights turn off the road when we turned off the road. And way, way behind us I could see other lights and they turned off the road the same time we did as well. It was very strange╤I didn't understand it. We parked in a wash and we all decided to disguise our footprints. I wrapped my feet with duct tape. Mike Fain did the same thing with his shoes. Mark Davis put socks over his shoes. Mark Baker put plywood planks under his shoes and we called him Daffy Duck. There were two towers standing side by side and he climbed up one of them to get a look around.
I thought it was a very stupid place to cut down a power line because it was in a little basin. There was no way to see beyond the wash. Of course it was where Fain lead us to and there were Feds hiding in bushes all around us. It was also a place where Mark wanted to cut this power line because he figured that the wire would pull the tower over a certain way.
KD: Did Mark Davis and Fain choose the place together?
PM: I'm pretty sure it was Davis and Fain.
KD: Okay, so there you were with funny shoes unknowingly surrounded by the FBI╤ what happened next?
PM: I was out there with this wand of brush and I was wiping out our tracks which was futile. I thought what am I doing this for╤it's ridiculous╤but I did it anyway. So there I was wiping out our tracks and Mark Baker was up on this tower looking around. I was thinking this is a really weird place and why am I here. Fain was using a blanket to shield the light of the acetylene torch from the road╤
KD: And Mark Davis was using the acetylene torch?
PM: Right. Then I ran around beating out little fires that started from the sparks of the acetylene torch. Mark got in a couple of inches on an I-beam then all of a sudden a flare went up. I heard this phsoooooooo╤I looked up and everything's lit up. It was like the movies╤slow motion and everything was shining, I could see all around╤really weird. Some part of me knew╤ it had been waiting for this moment so it could say to the rest of me, "I told you so, I told you so."
Mark Davis was working╤paying no attention to the flare. Mark Baker was looking at the flare with the same dumbfounded look that I had and Fain was just waiting for them to get us. I heard some rustling and some metallic sounds and I just thought "Oh shit, this is a setup. We're sitting ducks." So I ran past Mark Davis and Mike Fain and tapped them both on the shoulder and said, "I'm outta here." And I ran. I heard metallic clicks of guns behind me and someone yelling, "Halt, this is the FBI." I was sure they were going to shoot me in the back because they weren't going to shoot me in the front and I wasn't going to halt and I wasn't going to turn around. They didn't shoot me in the back, though. I ran off at top speed.
For the exciting conclusion to this incredible tale, tune in next issue, where Peg talks about shapeshifting, arrest, trial, dealing with Dave Foreman, etc.