In the late 1980s, as a journalism, film and creative writing student at Northwestern University, Ami Chen Mills was a leader in the student movement to remove the CIA from college campuses.
Today, more than 35 years later, Mills remains committed to social justice causes and is running to become the next mayor of Santa Cruz, California.
Some of Mills’s goals if elected mayor are to prevent the city from instituting new police surveillance technologies; to develop a more humane approach toward the homeless; to advocate for more affordable housing, protect tenants’ rights and hold developers accountable to their affordable housing commitments; to bring back salmon to local rivers; and to give a voice to locals who are outraged by the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and Iran and Lebanon wars.
Mills told me in an April 8 interview, that she became a political activist because she understood what it was like to feel marginalized in American society, as her mother was an immigrant from Taiwan and China. Mills also said that her father was a hippie in the 1960s who instilled in her a rebellious and inquisitive streak.
When Mills went to college, she was horrified by the CIA’s involvement in Central America and its ties to drug-running gangs such as the Nicaraguan Contras, or counter-revolutionaries. Previously, she had read about the 1975/76 Church Committee, which exposed the CIA’s involvement in nefarious mind-control experiments and political assassinations.
As Mills furthered her political education, she came to understand how the CIA operated in foreign countries with the intent of helping U.S. corporations to exploit their natural resources and labor force and to extract wealth.
After participating in protests over the CIA’s presence at Northwestern for which she was arrested, Mills wrote C.I.A. Off Campus: Building the Movement Against Agency Recruitment and Research, which was published by South End Press in 1991.
The book addressed the CIA’s long history on college campuses[1] and the student activist movement against the CIA, which grew out of the anti-apartheid student divestment campaigns and forced the CIA to terminate recruiting at dozens of schools and to cancel officer-in-residence programs.[2]
One of the major protests that Mills spotlighted occurred at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, after former President Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy was arrested along with famed 1960s activist Abbie Hoffman.
Boston University Professor Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, spoke at one of the rallies and called the CIA “an international mafia” sponsoring “monstrous crimes against international law.”
The foreword to CIA Off Campus was written by CovertAction Information Bulletin founder Philip Agee, whom Mills got to know when the two went on a book tour together sponsored by the Bill of Rights Foundation and the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.
Mills said that Agee “had the appearance of an old-world aristocrat in some way” and “was very genial.” At the time, he was promoting his book On the Run about being pursued by the CIA while living in various European countries.
Mills and Agee did radio programs together, including one hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel, and went to Hollywood, where they hobnobbed with Alan Alda and other members of the cast of the counter-cultural hit TV show M*A*S*H.
After graduating from college, Mills pursued a journalism career on the West Coast, working for alternative weeklies like Metro Santa Cruz and Metro San Jose, and later the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner.
Mills enjoyed the work immensely, serving as a music and dance editor for a period and publishing articles as a freelancer on a wide range of topics, including one on Big Pharma and the dangers of anti-depressant medications.
This latter article, along with another one on men whose insecurities led them to undertake risky penis enlargement surgery, led Mills to get involved with her father’s work in spiritual psychology.
Her main emphasis in this work was trying to get people to find happiness within themselves rather than through the superficial material rewards valued in colonized societies, including both neo-liberal capitalist societies and mixed capitalist systems like China’s.
Mills worked with people in juvenile halls, county jails, and drug and alcohol treatment centers to get them to move past negative ways of thinking and to make healthier and wiser lifestyle choices.
Her psychology work led her to found a non-profit that provided training and seminars designed to help people achieve spiritual growth and peace of mind in an atomized, materialistic culture. Currently, she has a private practice offering coaching and training and also has a radio show and podcast that airs twice a month and writes on substack.
Mills’s political activism over the last few decades has focused primarily on environmental and racial justice concerns that she sees as interconnected.
According to Mills, capitalists and the owning class who abuse human labor and the environment will often “degrade and dehumanize people” first, so they can then justify mistreating them.
When anti-Asian hate crimes saw a spike after Donald Trump called the coronavirus “Kung flu,” Mills began reading more about the history of Sinophobia and learned that the publisher of the Santa Cruz Sentinel at the turn of the 20th century was part of a Caucasian Society whose goal was to push Chinese people out of California.
Mills in turn helped to found Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders (PI), Santa Cruz County, which has worked to bring this suppressed history to the foreground.
In 2022, prior to serving as a member of the local Democratic Party Central Committee, Mills decided to run for Santa Cruz County supervisor against two elected officials but not make the run-off then.
Her decision to run for mayor stemmed in part from her concern that the Democratic Party in San Francisco has been taken over by corporate elements who are in league with Silicon Valley and Big Tech along with the real estate industry. She does not want to see that happen in Santa Cruz, where a tech oligarchy has also emerged to influence local politics.
Mills said that the front-runner in the Santa Cruz mayoral race, Ryan Coonerty, whom she described as a “centrist moderate Democrat” has worked as an adviser to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a former tech start-up company executive with a tough-on-crime and anti-labor record who is now running for governor of California.[3]
Opposed to a 5% billionaire’s tax being proposed for the California state ballot, Mahan has taken tons of money from Palantir, a CIA-front company and leading military AI contractor along with Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel who is Vice-President J.D. Vance’s sugar-daddy, and from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who has spent $20 million to try to stop the proposed wealth tax in California.
Mahan gained national publicity when he proposed arresting homeless people who did not accept offers of shelter, a policy adopted by conservative leaders in red states.
Mills said that, while not a terrible person, Coonerty follows Mahan in seeking to “sweep the homeless off the streets so they won’t be a nuisance to middle-class white people” who represent his political base.[4]
Coonerty founded a predictive policing company, PredPol (later Geolitica[5]), and, according to Mills, has voted in the past for the county sheriff to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has supported measures to enhance high-tech police surveillance.[6]
Mills, by contrast, said that she founded and co-led a campaign to cancel a Santa Cruz city contract with a Georgia-based tech company (Flock Safety) that provided license plate readers to the Santa Cruz Police Department that was intensifying the police surveillance state, including by funnelling data to ICE, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Mills has broadly opposed the city’s efforts to install more surveillance cameras, and advocates for more funding for mental health services so police can focus on apprehending violent criminals rather than having to deal with people with mental challenges roaming the street.
Mills said that, rather than driving the homeless off the streets with police sweeps, she would like to have city government provide them with better community services and listen to them more to see how they can best be helped and moved to a different location.
Additionally, Mills wants the city to provide more legal assistance to people facing eviction and supports tenant protection and education. As far as rent control, she said that when the city council tried to pass such measures in 2018, two progressive councilmen were recalled as a result of actions taken by the real estate lobby, which wields enormous political clout in Santa Cruz.
Mills wants to break up the real estate industry’s political machine, which has become ever more formidable, with Santa Cruz evolving into one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S.
On her website, Mills advances an array of additional progressive initiatives, like taxing wealth and not the working class, standing up for labor power, protecting bio-diversity and privacy, and empowering local businesses.
Mills says that, as mayor, she would raise awareness about the skyrocketing costs of higher education and use her bully pulpit to speak out against the difficulties faced by students while deans, administrators and chancellors at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches a class, make huge salaries.
Mills wants to further spread the message that protecting the environment is more important than protecting big corporations, and aims to establish micro-grids, independent power stations, and alternative and disaster-proof communication systems to help withstand disasters that may result from climate change.
Ironically, the congressional representative from Mills’s district, Jimmy Panetta, is the son of former CIA Director Leon Panetta. Mills said that she has met Panetta—who endorsed Ryan Cooterly even before the filing deadline in the Santa Cruz mayor’s race—and has engaged in several conversations with him, and that he is known in the community for being especially bad on Israel-Gaza.
While Mills no longer focuses her activist energies on the CIA, she remains anti-imperialist and opposed to regime-change operations and wars that have the same purpose as they did back in the 1980s.
Mills is especially worried about the slide toward fascism in the U.S., which she sees as a “natural outcome of the huge concentration of wealth among the elite in American society.”
The latter is something she is dedicated to continuously trying to fight against—whether in the Santa Cruz Mayor’s office, or wherever she might find herself in the coming years.
Mills highlighted in the book how Yale’s crew coach in the 1940s and 1950s, Allen “Skip” Walz, was known to have been a “spotter” for the CIA who received $10,000 to pass the names of athletic young men to CIA recruiters. Among the faculty that Mills cited as having deep CIA ties was Harvard Political Science Professor Samuel P. Huntington, who worked secretly as a CIA consultant, and Nadav Safran, the director of the Harvard Center of Middle Eastern Affairs, who received more than $100,000 from the CIA to write a book on Saudi Arabia and almost $50,000 to organize a university conference on Islam. Mills noted that, at the time she was writing, the CIA had been exposed as working at every level of the university system, from undergraduate recruiting and foreign student coercion to the establishment of entire institutes, research funding and faculty recruiting. ↑
Mills wrote that students trying to organize against the CIA faced an uphill battle because “the forces arrayed against them were plenty and powerful. Shoddy high school history courses with imperialist slants lack an economic analysis of our past and consequently lack a meaningful analysis of our past. The deliberately mindless mass media of 20-second news bites, owned by the very people whose interest the CIA is dedicated to and paid to protect, report State Department news as if it were the Sermon on the Mount.” ↑
The New York Times reported that Silicon Valley executives gravitated to Mahan, a Harvard classmate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “in part because of his distance from the state’s powerful labor unions and his moderate positions on issues like housing.” ↑
The homeless population in Santa Cruz is among the highest in California, resulting in part from extremely high rents. Keith McHenry, co-founder of the global movement Food Not Bombs, has pointed out that, in 2019, Coonerty proposed moving the homeless in and around Santa Cruz to Camp Roberts, a National Guard facility on the Santa Barbara and Monterey border. McHenry told the student-run weekly at UC Santa Cruz: “I get the sense from what I’m reading that he’s going to clean up the homeless and Santa Cruz again if elected.” ↑
Predictive policing technologies and facial software were banned by the Santa Cruz City Council in 2020, ironically, because of their links to overbearing and racially discriminatory policing. The ban was endorsed by the ACLU chapter of Northern California and the local NAACP branch. ↑
Among a wide-ranging roster, Coonerty is endorsed by Mahan, the Santa Cruz County sheriff and police officers association and local area Congressman Jimmy Panetta, the son of former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who has a predictably hawkish record on national security. A graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, Coonerty has been a lecturer at the Panetta School of Public Policy at California State University, Monterey Bay. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
In a May 2024 Instagram post Ami Chen Mills made the following statement:
,”I have condemned Hamas’s barbaric attack on Oct. 7. The perpetrators of those atrocities should be tracked down and held to account”.
In that same post, she also said, “I also condemn the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli government, using, in part, US tax dollars
It is good that she condemned October 7 as millions of people in the world celebrated October 7