“The War Within” Militia’s Imprisoned Prophet Says System Is Doomed
CELLS: The prophet
Willie Ray Lampley believes he’s a brigadier general in the U.S. militia and a prophet of God.
His group was following God’s orders when its members assembled a huge fertilizer bomb last year in Oklahoma.
Now, the 66-year-old self-described minister is in federal prison, serving a 12-year sentence.
The FBI says Lampley, his wife, Cecilia, 49, and three other men planned to blow up an office of the Anti-Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Lampley disputes that.
“We were just going to see if the bomb works,” he says from prison in Illinois. “The whole system is going to fail, and we were just getting ready.
“I was working as a prophet of God.”
One of Lampley’s conspirators, it turned out, was on the FBI payroll and wore a hidden transmitter. Lampley and the other conspirators were arrested in November 1995, convicted and sent to prison this year.
Richard Schrum was the FBI’s informant.
“We were taught by other people involved with the militia that cells are small groups of people who can act independently,” Schrum says. “The smaller amount of people that know about what you’re doing, the better off you are.”
He says he’s heard of as many as 15 other cells operating in Oklahoma, but doesn’t know who’s involved.
“I know of one cell right now that’s training attack dogs,” Schrum says. “I know of another cell involving a doctor, a surgeon, who’s supporting guys like Lampley.”
For his part, Lampley is well-connected in the anti-government and white supremacy movements, and has been for years.
He knew and wrote a book about Gordon Kahl, a fugitive North Dakota farmer and Posse Comitatus member who shot and killed two deputy U.S. marshals in 1983.
He knows Richard Millar, founder of Elohim City, a white separatist church commune in eastern Oklahoma. Lampley says he also “knows and respects” Louis Beam, an influential proponent of leaderless resistance.
He recalls meeting Montana Freeman leader LeRoy Schweitzer at a militia meeting in Texas last year. Leaders of other groups were there, too, including Ray Looker of West Virginia.
Looker and six other militia associates were arrested in October and accused of plotting to blow up the FBI national records office in Clarksburg, W.Va.
Lampley says he wasn’t aware of what Looker was up to.
“See, we don’t want to know what the other cells are doing, and that’s why this concept is successful. I do know that it’s going on in every state in the United States.”
Lampley boasts the FBI doesn’t understand the scope of the movement. “If they did, they’d back off.”
He’s also convinced cells are proliferating.
“Let me give you a little tip about them,” he says, grinning. “Just find out how many steel Army helmets were sold in the state of Kansas alone in the last three years.
“They’re not buying them to ride motorcycles.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo Map: Muskogee, Oklahoma