Craig Rosebraugh, in a hip cowboy shirt, pearl buttons flashing in the sun, wipes flour off his hands after a long night baking vegan muffins. The 27-year-old Portland animal rights activist then talks about how fate in the form of a fax landed on his desk.

In May 1997, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a radical animal rights group, needed help publicizing their claim of responsibility for an overnight break-in at an Oregon mink farm that released the captive animals. Rosebraugh picked up the phone and his life took a turn that would bring him an interview on CBS, multiple calls to testify before federal grand juries, and a FBI raid on his home.

"I took it upon myself to release that information to the press and public," he says, "to

MARK BARNES

make them realize it was not a random act, but had a clear political and social motive." ALF realized they had a friend in Rosebraugh, and he became the exclusive spokesman for the group, destroying all faxes he receives, incinerating any letters and erasing all e-mails, before passing on the information to the press.

In October 1998, a similar group, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), contacted Rosebraugh, saying it had burned down a ski resort expansion in Vail, Colorado, which was encroaching on endangered lynx habitat. He didn't hesitate in calling the press. And he did the same last Christmas, when ELF took responsibility for torching timber company Boise Cascade's headquarters in Monmouth, Oregon.

ELF and ALF do not practice civil disobedience, they are purveyors of the most radical and controversial methodology in the environmental movement: the destruction of corporate property, or, as Rosebraugh puts it, "economic sabotage."

To the frustration of law enforcement agencies, not a single member of ELF or ALF has been caught. Not surprisingly, authorities have focused on Rosebraugh, as the public face of a faceless organization. In February, the FBI raided his home and grabbed his computer and filing cabinets. At an April appearance before a federal grand jury in Portland, he discovered that his phone had been bugged for the past three years.

Rosebraugh claims he does not know the identity of a single person doing these actions, and though he supports them, he has never taken part. The truth is probably less cut and dried. "You run a lot of personal risk for doing this," he says. " I hope and dream that these actions will increase, not only in the frequency but in their intensity. Because I believe that these type of actions are at the core of social change in this country."

He adds: "In school you are taught that there are times maybe where civil disobedience is appropriate. What we didn't learn about in school is the direct action movements that accompanied these other social movements, and their actions served to be so radical and out there as to push the mainstream paradigm of thought closer and closer to the social movements' way of thinking. After 10 years of working in various movements, I've come to the conclusion that what is going to work right now, in this day and age, is direct action in the form of economic sabotage."

Rosebraugh's main adversaries, however, are not the government, but the media and other environmental groups. He chastises the media for coining the term "ecoterrorist," even though no humans have been physically harmed in an attack by ELF or ALF, both of which he says adhere to a "code of nonviolence to humans and animals."

And he is disappointed in other environmental groups for condemning the sabotage--a condemnation that has been nearly universal. In the wake of the Vail destruction, the Environmental Defense Fund's Fred Krupp told the New York Times, "Undermining the rule of law cannot possibly advance the cause of environmentalism. Regardless of what one's view of the lynx is, or the expansion, the arson at Vail is an outrage."

Rosebraugh responds: "It would have been easy for them to come out and say, 'We don't agree with the tactics, but as of right now we can see that people are going to do whatever they can to further the issue.' "

And for ELF, according to Rosebraugh, that issue is protecting the earth "for not only our future generations but for other animal nations."