Smetacek has, on different occasions, given her address as "London" and "New York". But the electoral rolls, telephone directories and credit card records in both London and the entire United States reveal no "Andura Smetacek". Her name appears only on AgBioWorld and a few other listservers, on which she has posted scores of messages falsely accusing groups such as Greenpeace of terrorism. My letters to her have elicited no response. But a clue to her possible identity is suggested by her constant promotion of "the Center For Food and Agricultural Research". The center appears not to exist, except as a website, which repeatedly accuses greens of plotting violence. Cffar.org is registered to someone called Manuel Theodorov. Manuel Theodorov is the "director of associations" at Bivings Woodell.

Even the website on which the campaign against the paper in Nature was launched has attracted suspicion. Its moderator, the biotech enthusiast Professor CS Prakash, claims to have no connection to the Bivings Group. But when Jonathan Matthews was searching the site's archives he received the following error message: "can't connect to MySQL server on 'apollo.bivings.com'". Apollo.bivings.com is the main server of the Bivings Group.

"Sometimes," Bivings boasts, "we win awards. Sometimes only the client knows the precise role we played." Sometimes, in other words, real people have no idea that they are being managed by fake ones.

By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 14th May 2002
Reprinted with permission of the author.