Militias Seeking Elite Soldiers Army Brass Believe Extremists Are Trying To Recruit Members From Special Forces

Senior Army commanders believe that members of the Special Operations Forces, the elite fighting unit that includes the Green Berets, have been targeted for recruitment by extremist militias, the Army said in a report released on Thursday.

Although the report said there was no evidence to “irrefutably confirm or deny this belief,” the commanders’ suspicion appears to be related to charges that soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., the headquarters of the Green Berets and the elite 82d Airborne Division, have been involved in a variety of extremist acts, including the racially inspired slaying of a black couple last December in Fayetteville, N.C., near Fort Bragg.

Those killings prompted the investigation that led to Thursday’s report on extremism in the Army. The report concluded that “there is minimal evidence of extremist activity,” although it cited figures suggesting that thousands of soldiers may have been the targets for recruitment by extremist groups, including militias, racist skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan.

According to the report, a confidential written survey of 17,080 soldiers found that 3.5 percent of them had been approached to join an extremist organization since joining the Army, while another 7.1 percent reported that they knew another soldier who was probably a member of an extremist group.

The Army said that it did not find those results surprising, or disconcerting. “Keeping extremists out of the Army is not a big problem - they’re not coming in.” the secretary of the Army, Togo D. West Jr., said at a news conference called to release the report. “You couldn’t have a better Army if you dreamed it up.”

The report said Army investigators “did identify instances of individuals or small, informal groups of individuals who held extremist views.” But it added that “suspicions of widespread, concerted recruitment of soldiers for extremist causes, and participation by soldiers in organized extremist activities were not substantiated.”

The report called for the Army to study whether it would be possible to screen recruits more closely to bar the enlistment of people with extremist views, and to clarify rules that now allow soldiers to have some involvement with groups considered racist or that advocate violence.

The investigators added no new details in the report to what is known about the Dec. 7 killings in Fayetteville and the subsequent arrest of three members of the 82d Airborne who were later described by the city police as racist skinheads.

Two of the suspects, Pfcs. James N. Burmeister II, 20, and Malcolm Wright Jr., 21, were charged with murder, while the third, Specialist Randy L. Meadows, was charged as an accessory to murder. Burmeister made no secret of his racist views, and a search of a room he rented turned up white supremacist literature, a bomb-making manual and pamphlets on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The Army report did suggest that commanders at Fort Bragg were not to blame for having failed to root out extremism on the base before the killings. “There were few strong indications that extremist organizations/activities were an issue at Fort Bragg,” the report said. “Subsequently, extremism received only passing attention.”

Still, the report noted “some senior commanders believe” that the Green Berets had been “targeted by the militia movement.”

Civil rights groups have raised fears that extremist groups were recruiting members among the Green Berets and other elite forces like the 82d Airborne - soldiers whose training in weaponry and guerrilla tactics might be turned to racially motivated terrorism. Their concern grew after two former soldiers were charged with the Oklahoma City bombing last year, although neither of them, Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, served in the Special Forces or airborne units.

There have long been suspicions of ties between soldiers at Fort Bragg and hate groups.

A group of soldiers at Fort Bragg, who call themselves the the Special Forces Underground, publish a clandestine newsletter called The Register, which has been described as racist and anti-Semitic by civil rights advocates. The newsletter calls for the federal government to be “defanged, muzzled, shackled and cast back into its constitutional prison.”