The Ragged Edge A Common Bond Fiercely Independent, Patriots And Constitutionalists Are Linked By A Shared Resentment Of Government

Two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, police in Western Washington pulled over two North Idaho men they thought were domestic terrorists.

Inside the pair’s Chevrolet Suburban police found a guerrilla patriot’s war chest.

There were firearms and a silencer, night vision goggles and ingredients for Molotov cocktails; police scanners, stolen license plates and blank automobile ignition keys; communications gear, maps, a gas mask, a high-tech global positioning device.

And perhaps most intriguing, an electronic telephone directory - a Rolodex of patriots.

The dozens of names and telephone numbers stored in the tiny computer included constitutionalists in Coeur d’Alene, patriots in Sandpoint and Spokane, militia leaders in Montana.

It even contained Randy Weaver’s new address in Iowa.

The directory and a series of interviews suggest an informal network of patriot and militia leaders exists throughout the Northwest and the nation. Examine the list and talk to some of the people on it, and the connections emerge.

‘Up to something’

Charles Barbee, 43, and Robert Berry, 41, both of Sandpoint, were visiting Fort Lewis near Tacoma to buy surplus military gear shortly before their arrests May 2 in Kelso, Wash.

Police nabbed the pair after they had checked out of a motel, and a maid found a .357-caliber revolver left under a pillow.

Sgt. Vern Thompson says he and other officers initially thought they’d bagged a couple of would-be terrorists.

The equipment and small bags of marijuana found inside the Suburban also led Thompson to suspect the men were trading dope for military supplies.

“I’ve got to think they were up to something with all that gear,” Thompson says.

Not so, says Barbee, who along with Berry was convicted in state court of carrying concealed weapons without permits and possessing marijuana.

They each served less than a month in jail, and now are back in North Idaho.

FBI agents copied the names in Barbee’s telephone directory. He says agents also examined the computer memory in his global position system and went to those locations.

Federal authorities didn’t file charges against the pair.

Berry declined to be interviewed. Barbee agreed to talk, explaining “I’ve already been compromised” by the arrest.

Barbee says the pair are simply well-equipped patriots, prepared to defend against government tyranny. He views Randy Weaver as a victim of government tyranny, and that’s why he sent him a cash donation.

He says he is part of a small cell of North Idaho patriots who meet and train in small groups. “We have to be ready to conduct guerrilla warfare. That’s how it will be won.”

The purpose of this training?

“If there’s another Ruby Ridge or another Waco, we’re not going to tolerate it again,” he says.

“If the federal government sends in their armies to put women and children to death again, we will respond and put as many federal agents to death as possible.”

Barbee was transferred by his employer, AT&T, from Florida to North Idaho two years ago. He quit his $50,000-a-year supervisory job last year.

“It’s not a moral company,” he says. AT&T held gay and lesbian awareness sessions, which he refused to attend, and “coerced managers to join United Way,” he says.

“Half the people I worked with were women. They were working instead of being help-mates to their husbands, as God requires.”

Barbee, raised Roman Catholic by his grandparents, began reading Christian Identity books in Florida. Christian Identity is a white separatist religion that preaches northern Europeans are the true Israelites.

In Sandpoint, he attended David Barley’s America’s Promise Ministries, a Christian Identity church. That’s where he met Berry.

Now Barbee is self-employed, dealing in surplus military gear. He tends a large garden and hunts to feed his wife and his two children, who are home-schooled.

Barbee says the handgun found at the motel was Berry’s and the marijuana was for their personal use.

He believes the government can’t stop him - “a sovereign citizen” - from growing and using marijuana, and carrying a gun without a permit. He says he won’t pay his $650 court fine because he believes the laws are invalid.

And he says he has a network of fellow patriots who will support him.

His electronic telephone directory contains some of those names, including this entry: “Dave Baker, Spokane team leader.”

Asked about that name, Barbee says: “Oh, that’s the Spokane militia group.”

‘Just concerned citizens’

Dave Baker bristles at the suggestion his group is a militia.

“We are just concerned citizens,” the railroad worker explains from the basement of a Spokane County parks building where the group meets weekly.

Concerned Citizens of Washington pays the county $3 an hour for space in the Valley Senior Citizens Center.

It first met in October 1994 as part of the Northwest Liberty Network, an umbrella organization linking various patriot groups, tax protesters and constitutionalists.

Most members are white, middleaged to seniors, male. Their flannel shirt pockets bulge with notes, pens and copies of the Constitution. Some have belonged to the John Birch Society.

The meetings usually start with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer.

They watch Militia of Montana videos describing how U.N. and Soviet military equipment is being moved into the United States.

The group’s survival instructor, Bob Hayne, urges members to get into better shape to confront the troubled times ahead.

A military poncho is the most critical piece of survival gear, says Hayne, a Vietnam veteran whose name also is in Barbee’s directory. “It keeps you and your rifle dry.”

The members have gone on survival campouts together.

On one overnighter near Mount Spokane, a Native American woman who attends group meetings, shows her fellow patriots how to dry and preserve fish. Another woman brings along a heavy skillet for her favorite pancakes, but confesses it is impractical for survival training. “I need to be a better prepared patriot,” she says.

When the group meets, discussion veers from sovereignty to taxes to neighborhood crime.

Spokane County Commissioner Phil Harris spoke to Concerned Citizens last spring about crime and taxes. Later, he said he didn’t know much about the group.

Harris was invited by Ned Free, a political activist and one of several Vietnam veterans who attend the meetings. Free says the Concerned Citizens must be ready to help their neighbors battle crime and do what police can’t do.

“We’re not a militia unit,” he says, “but we could be in a day.”

Before the group breaks for coffee and cookies during one meeting, a red-haired woman in the back row speaks up.

Eva Vail says Militia of Montana leader John Trochmann and Montana tax protester Red Beckman will appear at a Northwest Liberty Network symposium in Post Falls.

“I’ll be there, and you patriots shouldn’t miss it either.”

Controlling forces

A great-grandmother and the first Idaho woman to join the John Birch Society, Eva Vail predicts a bloody revolution is about to erupt in the United States.

The fight will be between freedom lovers and “controllers pushing for a New World Order,” she says.

“It could be in two months or two years, but it’s going to happen,” Vail says from her home north of Coeur d’Alene. People “are tired of being controlled, and they want their freedoms back.”

The controlling forces, as she sees it, formed the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the United Nations.

Vail has heard about Barbee, and her organization is in his telephone directory.

While she’s proud of her four decades of political activism, the 68-year-old woman says it has cost her three marriages.

Now Vail is becoming a national figure in what she calls the constitutional patriot movement.

She’s on its lecture circuit, and has contacts nationwide.

She recently sponsored a series of lectures in the Northwest by a woman who claims she was a CIA-sex slave for George Bush and other political leaders.

Vail serves as national secretary for the “Ultimatum Resolution.” It seeks to have 38 states pass resolutions that would disband the federal government if the national debt exceeds $6 trillion.

She owns three nursing homes in Coeur d’Alene and Moscow, but pays an executive to run them.

Vail’s political activism has been full-tilt since 1992 when she says she spent 11 days at the base of Ruby Ridge during the Randy Weaver siege.

After the standoff, Vail helped form United Citizens for Justice. The group aimed to galvanize citizen anger at the federal government over the Weaver affair, but died amid internal turmoil after a few months.

Its first speaker at a meeting in Sandpoint was Louis Beam, a former Texas Ku Klux Klan leader and ambassador-at-large for the Aryan Nations.

More than 200 people gathered in October 1992 to hear Beam.

Listening amid the wooden pews and folding chairs at Sandpoint’s Gardenia Center sat a lanky heavy-equipment contractor, Bill Smyth of LaClede, Idaho.

What’s going on here?

Before the Ruby Ridge siege, Bill Smyth ran backhoes and bulldozers, not political meetings.

He worked hard to feed his wife and eight children. Raised in California, Smyth moved his family from Nevada to North Idaho in 1985.

While vacationing in California shortly after the Weaver siege, discussion turned to the standoff.

“I was asked whether Randy was some kind of criminal from outerspace,” he says. “The media really hyped these people into thinking Randy was a hardened criminal instead of a man defending his family. So after hearing this, I asked myself, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here? This is the United States of America!’ “

Smyth joined Eva Vail, David Barley of America’s Promise Ministries and Jim Postak to form United Citizens for Justice.

When that group folded, Smyth didn’t give up.

The 47-year-old contractor co-founded the Idaho Citizens Awareness Network, known as I-CAN.

The group’s phone number and Smyth’s name were in Barbee’s telephone directory. But Smyth, a Seventh-Day Adventist, distances himself from any extremist militia activity.

He also heads the Northwest Liberty Network, the patriot umbrella group.

I-CAN meets the first and third Fridays of the month. The group rents the Sandpoint Community Hall for $15 a meeting, and everyone is welcome. “We ask people to leave their prejudices and religious denominations at home.”

But that hasn’t been the case at every meeting, Smyth concedes.

Speakers talk about gun control, the Oklahoma City bombing, state sovereignty, the judicial system, taxes, military maneuvers by the United Nations, public education and the “homosexual agenda.” Local law enforcement monitors the meetings.

“Our intention never was to be a political group,” Smyth says, but to educate. “We stand on God’s word.”

I-CAN has no membership fees or newsletter. Smyth has a quicker way to get the word out: a $500 electronic telephone tree that delivers his messages automatically.

“I’ve got about 450 names and phone numbers on that thing and it does all the work, real quickly.”

One of those phones rings in an old Bonners Ferry service station owned by Frank Reichert.

Getting the message out

Dusty home-brew supplies line the shelves in Frank Reichert’s defunct gas station. Cigarette butts spill from an overflowing ash tray on the desk.

Here, the 46-year-old retired Navy veteran uses printer’s ink and a computer to push the patriot cause.

He runs a computer bulletin board called the Liberty Northwest Network and publishes a giveaway tabloid called “Trade and Save.” His foes call the newspaper a “militia rag.”

The paper and the bulletin board regularly promote I-CAN meetings.

The newspaper is distributed from Colville, Wash., to Libby, Mont. It circulates throughout North Idaho.

“We cover issues that are politically or socially incorrect to talk about,” says Reichert.

He’s not in Barbee’s directory, “but I’ve heard about him.”

Reichert started publishing in April with 2,500 copies. Now, he says, he prints 10,000. A group of private investors provides financial backing, he says, but he won’t name them.

Reichert is “more of a Libertarian than a Birch-type. I’m not pushing any type of supremacy or anti-Semitism, and won’t.”

Many articles he publishes are voluntarily submitted, including a regular column by Chuck Howarth.

While Reichert is familiar with Howarth’s columns, he says he doesn’t know much about his past.

Howarth is no “Joe Six-Pack,” as his column is called. Now living in Noxon, headquarters of the Militia of Montana, he was a Ku Klux Klan leader in Colorado in the 1980s.

He was convicted in 1983 of possessing and selling bombs and incendiary devices. Police said they were to be used to kill federal judges and blow up IRS offices.

“I feel that there are a lot of voices that aren’t being heard,” Reichert says. “A lot of people feel like they’re being backed into a corner right now. That’s why you have something like the bombing in Oklahoma City.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 Color Photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story:

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