Zen and the Art of Political Espionage
Nate Martin always thought there was something a little off about the new couple in town. Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca had shown up in Wyoming in 2019 with thin resumes and few references and quickly began immersing themselves in the state’s small but dedicated community of progressive activists. Maier, a burly Army veteran, expressed interest in a cannabis legalization effort supported by Better Wyoming, the advocacy group where Martin served as executive director. LaRocca, the new executive director of a group called Wyoming Progress, which sought to flip the nation’s reddest state, hoped to land a job with Martin’s then-fiancée, Karlee Provenza, who was running for a seat in the state legislature.
There was the way Maier and LaRocca seemed to mimic them—claiming to own a Belgian Malinois, just like them; getting engaged, just like them. And there were their wild ideas, schemes that seemed more at home in the world of black ops than grassroots organizing. In private, Martin and Provenza joked that their new acquaintances were moles. But they were friendly enough. And besides, who would want to spy on Wyoming Democrats?
“I just kind of thought they smoked a lot of weed,” Martin told me.
Then one afternoon in the spring of 2021, Provenza, now a state representative, was walking down Grand Avenue in downtown Laramie when she got a call from her husband.
“Do you remember Beau and Sofia?” Martin asked. It had been months since they had heard from the couple, who had disappeared from Wyoming’s Democratic scene just before the 2020 election.
“You mean the spies?” Provenza replied.
“Yeah,” Martin said. “They’re actually spies.”
Martin had called because he’d just heard that the New York Times wanted to get in touch about a big scoop. Yes, Maier and LaRocca really had gotten engaged (they have since gotten married). And they really were dog owners. But they weren’t trying to turn Wyoming blue. They were undercover conservative operatives, the paper discovered, who had been trained at a ranch belonging to Blackwater founder Erik Prince by a former MI6 officer with ties to the right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe. Maier’s mother worked for Prince. His uncle was Glenn Beck. Alongside other moles, Maier and LaRocca had been attempting to collect dirt on Wyoming’s Democrats—and certain Republicans—for a couple years.
While the news jolted Martin and other activists who’d once welcomed Maier and LaRocca into their homes, the identity of the woman who had allegedly financed much of the operation was less surprising.
Susan Walton Gore, an 83-year-old scion of the Gore-Tex waterproof-fabric fortune, was both a ubiquitous and reclusive presence in her adopted home state—a prolific donor whose network of political organizations picked big fights, but who shirked the spotlight herself. For more than a decade, Gore had embodied a familiar genus of American power: the big fish in a small pond who had learned just how far a dollar can go the farther you get from Washington. An effort to block Common Core science standards from being implemented in state schools? Gore, a onetime backer of the Libertarian Party, led the fight. Stopping tax increases, blocking Medicaid expansion, and reforming the state’s asset-forfeiture laws? Gore’s think tank, the Wyoming Liberty Group, led the way. The legislature’s rightward creep? Gore helped bankroll dozens of candidates.
The espionage operation, reportedly targeting liberals and the so-called “Republicans in Name Only” who certain conservatives believed were allied, marked a jarring departure—one that challenged values long espoused by both Democrats and Republicans in the state. But Gore’s transition from dark money to dark arts was, in part, the story of the Trump era: As the party grew increasingly unmoored from democratic processes and ethical norms, and ensconced in its own paranoia, it was not enough to rely on the familiar tools of political advocacy. The opposition had to be exposed and defeated by any means necessary. Donors—some wealthy, many not—poured tens of millions of dollars into shadowy and unorthodox projects, and such schemes took on increasing prominence in conservative circles.
No place was safe from these impulses—not even America’s least-populated and least-competitive state. For a long time, politicians in deep-red Wyoming had been happy to keep their distance from Washington’s daily dramas. But recently the state GOP has come to mirror the party’s national crack-up—a tense and volatile climate of censure, threats, and purges, where the dominant Trump faction is on the warpath against anyone perceived as stepping out of line. It’s become
