There's something about Mary ...

According to an article in Mother Jones, several anti-gun groups were allegedly infiltrated over the years by a "mole" named Mary McFate, a/k/a Mary Lou Sapone.

But these two Marys share a lot in common—a Mother Jones investigation has found that McFate and Sapone are, in fact, the same person. And this discovery has caused the leaders of gun violence prevention organizations to conclude that for years they have been penetrated—at the highest levels—by the NRA or other pro-gun parties. "It raises the question," says Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "of what did she find out and what did they want her to find out."

Using her maiden name, McFate, Sapone began posing as a gun control activist in the mid-1990s. Bryan Miller, the executive director of Ceasefire New Jersey, a grassroots gun control group, recalls first meeting her in the summer of 1998. The NRA was holding its annual convention in downtown Philadelphia, and the event drew the usual bevy of protesters. Among them was a middle-aged woman then living in Pennsylvania who made a point of introducing herself to Miller. In the following years, Miller would remember this encounter well, as he watched McFate rise from a street protester to a figure known nationally within his movement. She became a leader of Pennsylvanians Against Handgun Violence and later a board member of Ceasefire Pennsylvania. According to staffers at several gun violence prevention groups, she worked on the Million Mom March in 2000, when hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in Washington, DC, to demand stricter gun laws. She joined the board of Freedom States Alliance, a network of nine state-based gun control organizations. At States United to Prevent Gun Violence, a nationwide coalition of anti-gun groups, she was the director of federal legislation, an unpaid position that placed her in charge of the outfit's lobbying efforts in Washington. In that role, she collaborated with national organizations including the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center.
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McFate's (now former) colleagues note that she was well-positioned for many years to provide the NRA—or any other gun rights groups—the plans, secrets, and inside gossip of practically the entire gun violence prevention movement. "She had access to all the legislative strategy for every major issue for years," says [Violence Policy Center legislative director] Rand. Another gun control advocate who worked with McFate and asked not to be identified recalls, "She was one of those rare people. As a volunteer, she wanted to know more and more about what people were working on." With intelligence gathered by McFate, Ceasefire New Jersey's Miller says, the gun lobby could "learn a lot: what the grassroots of the gun violence prevention movement intended; where our priorities are shifting; which legislation we would be promoting or fighting against and what sort of effort we would be putting into that; who our targeted legislators would be; what states and districts we deemed important enough to put an effort into; our messaging, what our messaging would be before we put it out there."

Article here. Interesting reading.