Accused eco-saboteur Joseph Dibee is set to change his plea and accept a negotiated deal next week to settle charges in a string of attacks that destroyed or damaged environmental targets across the West two decades ago.
Sentencing terms of the final deal aren’t public, but Dibee’s attorney wrote to the court earlier this month that the settlement may mean no further time behind bars.
On Tuesday, defense attorney Matthew Schindler and prosecutor Quinn Harrington confirmed to U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken that Dibee was ready to accept a plea offer. A hearing is set next Monday for the plea.
Dibee was arrested in 2018 in Havana, Cuba after being on the run for 12 years.
Federal investigators have said Dibee was part of “The Family,’’ describing it as a terrorist cell of about 20 people who committed crimes in the name of two groups, the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.
Dibee was indicted in Oregon in 2006 on federal charges of arson, conspiracy to commit arson and destruction of an energy facility. He’s accused of helping destroy the Cavel West Inc. meatpacking plant in Redmond in 1997 and destroying a Bonneville Power Administration tower near Bend in 1999. One of Dibee’s prior lawyers said Dibee didn’t play a role in the tower vandalism.
In Washington, Dibee faces federal charges of conspiracy to commit arson and possession of a destructive device stemming from a 1998 fire at a U.S. Department of Agriculture building in Olympia, Washington.
In California, he faces federal charges and conspiracy to commit arson, arson of a government building and possession of a destructive device, accused of helping to destroy the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse corrals near Litchfield in 2001.
Under the settlement, the case from Washington is expected to be dismissed and the California case will be handled with the global plea in Oregon, Schindler and Harrington told the judge.
Schindler said amid a “challenging set of circumstances,” retired U.S. Magistrate Thomas M. Coffin and federal prosecutor Scott Bradford were instrumental in helping all sides reach a resolution in the case.
Aiken said she was “incredibly grateful’' for Coffin’s mediation work in the case.
Federal prosecutors have said Dibee fled the United States days after he and a prior lawyer met with prosecutors and an FBI agent in Seattle on Dec. 7, 2005, and learned of the evidence against him.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office wanted to see if Dibee would accept responsibility and cooperate with authorities, Assistant U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Barrow has said in court.
Instead, Dibee returned home, destroyed evidence in the case by setting it on fire in his fireplace and then had a friend drive him to Mexico City, Barrow said. From there, he flew to Beirut, Lebanon, and set up residence in Syria. He moved to Russia in 2010, where he later married and adopted a son, according to Barrow.
Dibee never surrendered though he knew he had been indicted in Oregon.
He was stopped in Cuba in 2018, traveling with a Syrian passport in the name “Yousef Deba,” which a prior defense lawyer described in court as the Arab Syrian version of his name. Dibee has said in court previously that he was flying from El Salvador back to Russia through Havana using a Syrian passport when he was detained and turned over to the FBI.
Dibee has been on home detention since January 2021 when he was released to his sister’s home in Seattle to quarantine after contracting COVID-19 while in custody at Inverness Jail . After quarantine, he was allowed to live with his father, who is suffering from a terminal illness in Seattle. He has been under GPS monitoring and home detention.
Schindler earlier this month had hoped to get permission for Dibee to fly to Alaska and remove his ankle monitor to help on an environmental project. Dibee wanted to go cold-water scuba diving there to assist with a kelp farming research project, according to Schindler.
The nonprofit Native Conservancy Project has been working with Dibee to develop “smart buoys” to help track kelp production yields in Indigenous ocean communities in Alaska, the project’s executive director wrote to the court.
Schindler argued in court papers that Dibee would have no incentive to flee because he wouldn’t abandon his dying father and his wife in Russia has divorced him.
Aiken was set to consider the request Tuesday but Schindler said the project has been delayed a year until next spring.
In 2019, Dibee’s then defense lawyer Paul Hood told the court that Dibee has been seeking to affect change through the research and development of better environmental practices that would financially benefit companies and their bottom line.
Dibee told Aiken then that direct action and protests don’t really work. “The best way to make change is to make good environmental and financial practices,’’ he said
Dibee, an engineer by training, explained then some of the projects he worked on while in Syria and Russia over the last decade: a solar power project he developed in Syria before fleeing the war, a separation machine he developed for gold mining in Ecuador to avoid the use of mercury and his research to create a biological process for industrial mining to avoid the use of cyanide.
Dibee said then: “The charges are literally from three lifetimes ago….As times go by, people develop … people change over time. We learn from our mistakes.’’
