“The War Within” The War Within Working Independently But With A Common Goal, Rebels Throughout The Nation Are Attempting To Disrupt And Overthrow The Government
Anti-government rebels are committing crimes across the United States in a violent pattern that’s going largely unnoticed.
They are robbing and bombing banks, forging checks and plotting to blow up buildings. They are selling marijuana and methamphetamine, and threatening public officials.
These rebels are adopting a strategy called leaderless resistance, forming secret groups known as cells.
The cells usually have about six members and are designed to keep law enforcement from infiltrating beyond any one group.
Each acts independently but shares a common goal: to disrupt or overthrow the government.
When one group gets caught, dozens more are still out there.
The most deadly example of leaderless resistance may be the April 19, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
The violence hit Spokane twice this year when a group of camouflaged commandos bombed a Spokesman-Review office and a Planned Parenthood clinic, and robbed a U.S. Bank branch.
“When you start seeing yourself as a target, you start evaluating every situation that in the past you took for granted,” says Spokane County Sheriff John Goldman.
“Without resorting to demagoguery or sounding like an alarmist, this is an issue that we have to prepare for,” he says. “Unfortunately, this is going to become the routine.”
Evidence of domestic terrorism and anti-government crimes can be found in at least 25 states.
In one case, a group called the Aryan Republican Army robbed 19 banks in eight states as part of a plan to establish an Aryan republic in North America.
Militia groups in Georgia, Arizona, Western Washington and West Virginia are charged with or already convicted of building bombs and plotting attacks on government buildings and officials.
Authorities blame sabotage for last year’s Amtrak train derailment in the Southwest that killed one railroad worker and injured 100 passengers. A note left at the scene claims the crime was committed by “Sons of the Gestapo” and made references to the Branch Davidian and Randy Weaver sieges.
Other anti-government groups are taking a less violent approach. They swamp public officials with common-law legal documents and property liens in a tactic called paper terrorism.
Eric Schlansky of California’s Department of Justice believes there are more anti-government cells now than before the Oklahoma City bombing.
“There is a growing amount of criminal activity and open defiance of the law by these groups,” says Schlansky, who supervises investigations of terrorism and extremist groups in California.
The revolutionaries call themselves Phineas priests, Aryan warriors, Christian patriots, freemen, sovereign citizens or militia soldiers.
Some are motivated by white supremacy, Christian Identity beliefs that northern European descendants are the true children of Israel. Others hate the government for what they see as its overreaching authority.
Willie Ray Lampley of Muskogee, Okla., turned his views into action when he and three other men assembled a huge fertilizer bomb and plotted to blow up civil rights offices.
“See, it doesn’t matter if the FBI or anyone else finds out about the members of one cell, like mine, because they still won’t find out about the other ones,” says Lampley, who was convicted in April and is serving federal prison time.
“There’s not a whole lot the FBI can do about it.”
No one knows how many crimes have been committed by these revolutionaries.
Local, state and federal authorities prosecute individual cases as they come up, but no single agency keeps track of the entire anti-government movement.
The FBI leads the fight against domestic terrorism, but can’t legally investigate radical groups until criminal activity is suspected. Even then, the agency has a narrow definition of domestic terrorism and rarely classifies these cases as such.
Only now is federal law enforcement reorganizing to respond.
A new counter-terrorism center opened this month at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Assistant FBI Director Robert Bryant says the agency is refocusing on the threat posed by small antigovernment groups.
“It’s a very high priority, one of the highest priorities,” says Bryant, who is in charge of national security issues for the FBI.
Few people think the rebels will win this lopsided war against the government. But their indiscriminate, unpredictable acts are sending a chill through many communities.
In the Spokane Valley, the Planned Parenthood clinic remains closed - five months after it was bombed.
“I feel a sadness that America has reached a point where domestic terrorism reigns like this,” says Sandra Meicher, Planned Parenthood’s executive director at the time of the bombing. “It’s an ugly specter. It’s anarchism.
“These folks are anarchists, and they’re criminals. To the extent that we accept this standard of violent behavior, we’re endorsing it.”
Network of extremism
U.S. Attorney William Wilmoth played down conspiracy talk after seven members of a militia group were arrested in October for plotting to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center in West Virginia.
“I don’t want it to appear to be some nationwide conspiracy or anything more grave than the charging documents show,” Wilmoth said. “As far as we could tell, it was localized.”
There may be no conspiracy, but anti-government groups are linked by more than their shared distaste for the feds.
They exchange ideas at various crossroads such as Christian Identity religious conferences, gun shows and rallies hosted by anti-government groups.
Just look at two of Willie Ray Lampley’s contacts.
Lampley says he met West Virginia militia chief Ray Looker at a militia meeting in Texas last year. Who is Looker? He played a key role in the plot to bomb the FBI fingerprint center, authorities say.
Also at the Texas meeting, Lampley says, was Montana freemen leader LeRoy Schweitzer. He’s now in jail in Billings, Mont., charged with promoting a multimillion dollar national check fraud scheme.
Members of the Aryan Republican Army traveled from the Midwest to North Idaho to visit the Aryan Nations; they also visited a Christian Identity community in Oklahoma called Elohim City.
Telephone records obtained by the FBI show that Timothy McVeigh made at least one call to Elohim City before the Oklahoma City bombing.
Several sources say bombing suspect McVeigh also attended the nation’s largest machine-gun shoot, held twice a year in Kentucky, which has become a popular militia recruiting and meeting ground.
During last October’s gathering, militia leaders from throughout the country held a secret meeting in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall not far from the shooting range.
Anti-government activists are linked in other ways, too. They read the same books, newsletters and pamphlets, listen to telephone hotlines, and promote their ideas on the Internet.
“The technology that’s out there now makes these kinds of cells a force to be reckoned with,” says Brian Levin, of the Richard Stockton College’s Center on Hate and Extremism in Pomona, N.J.
Detailed instructions about making bombs, outfitting a paramilitary gang and choosing the best targets are widely available.
One book is frequently recommended as a blueprint for organizing against the government. “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel written by National Alliance leader William Pierce, details how small rebel groups fight a race war in the United States.
The book’s influence first surfaced in the mid-1980s when authorities learned members of an Aryan Nations splinter group called The Order used it to guide their crimes.
Now the racist novel is sold by mail order, through the Internet and at gun shows - including those in Spokane.
In a video the Aryan Republican Army made to promote its cause, one member recommends the book “for you budding young revolutionaries… It gives you a good idea of what might be expected as the struggle heats up.”
The book also turned up among McVeigh’s possessions after his arrest for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Recorded telephone messages help get the word out, too.
Just this month, a racist group called the National Socialist Alliance recorded a telephone message containing a “call to action” that warned bombs could go off in 15 U.S. cities as part of a holy war.
There were no explosions, but bomb-making components were found by FBI agents who searched the Tulsa, Okla., home of a man who had the recording.
It said white people should “realize that the current system of government is beyond repair.
“Our revolution is not about changing this system but to absolutely destroy it by any means necessary,” the recording said.
Resistance in the Northwest
The roots of leaderless resistance run deep in the Northwest.
It first emerged among hard-core racists after several Aryan Nations associates were convicted of violent crimes in the 1980s. But the strategy found a new partner with the birth of the militia movement in the early 1990s.
The Militia of Montana describes the concept of cell groups in its publications; and leaderless resistance is promoted and discussed on the Internet.
Gary Lee Yarbrough, a member of The Order, encourages leaderless resistance and the cell concept in the newest Aryan Nations newsletter.
“It’s time to get serious,” writes Yarbrough, who is serving an 85-year prison sentence for racketeering. “Our entire movement must be restructured and decentralized.”
Yarbrough argues that “resistance forces should be comprised of select individuals that constitute small nuclear units of teams no larger than five or six members.
“These units will conduct their resistance efforts in whatever capacity they feel capable of carrying out.”
One of the best explanations of leaderless resistance comes from Louis Beam, a longtime associate of Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler.
Beam, Butler and 10 other extremists were acquitted in 1988 in Arkansas of charges that they conspired to overthrow the U.S. government by being the godfathers behind The Order.
After the jury reached its verdict, Beam stood outside the courthouse and proclaimed the battle would continue, but with smaller groups secretly pressing the fight.
“To hell with the federal government!” he shouted.
Beam details the concept in an essay published in his newsletter, The Seditionist, in February 1992. He now has his own home page on the Internet that includes this essay and other samples of his writings.
Beam credits a man named Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, whom he calls a fierce opponent of communism, with proposing the idea of leaderless resistance in 1962. But Beam traces its roots to the Committees of Correspondence, groups that were organized to support the 13 colonies before the nation’s independence.
Most organizations, Beam writes in the Seditionist article, are structured like a pyramid, with orders flowing from the top down. This organization is “not only useless, but extremely dangerous for the participants when it is utilized in a resistance movement against state tyranny,” he says.
A single government infiltrator can destroy the entire organization. “An alternative to the pyramid type of organization is the cell system,” he writes.
But how can a movement thrive by essentially abandoning any organization?
“The answer to this question is that participants…must know exactly what they are doing, and how to do it,” Beam writes. “It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information as to what is to be done… No one need issue an order to anyone.”
Beam remains an influential voice in anti-government and white supremacy groups. He was the featured speaker in Sandpoint when more than 200 people met in late 1992 to protest the government’s action at Ruby Ridge.
A dozen years ago, he was one of the first racists to use computers and the Aryan Nations pulpit to direct animosity at the federal government.
“Beam promotes it and he’s been a trendsetter before,” says Levin, of the Center on Hate and Extremism. “He’s got credibility in the movement, and people are following his concept for cells.”
Terrorism statistics deceiving
FBI statistics suggest domestic terrorism isn’t much of a threat.
The agency reports 28 terrorist incidents in the United States from 1990-94, the most recent statistics available. In 1995, the FBI says there was only one - the Oklahoma City bombing.
These numbers are deceiving.
The FBI has a narrow statistical definition of domestic terrorism that doesn’t include many hate crimes or religiously motivated acts of violence.
The FBI also doesn’t count groups convicted of building a bomb but not setting it off, or rebels filing liens and threatening public officials.
When well-armed robbers shocked the Spokane Valley with bombings and bank holdups on April 1 and July 12, leaving behind notes referring to Yahweh and containing the symbol of the Phineas priesthood, the FBI wouldn’t call it domestic terrorism.
“We’re investigating this…simply as a bank robbery,” FBI regional chief Burdena Pasenelli said at a press conference.
Eight months later, Justice Department attorneys prosecuting three men arrested for these crimes finally acknowledged it was domestic terrorism.
The question of what is terrorism or anti-government crime isn’t just an academic issue.
By law, the FBI is responsible for investigating domestic terrorism. Other federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, also have authority to investigate crimes involving anti-government suspects.
So, for example, a militia bomb-building case handled by ATF agents may never involve the FBI.
That makes determining the scope of anti-government crime nearly impossible.
“My concern remains that we’ve yet to have any full-scale attention drawn to this by Congress or anyone in Washington, D.C.,” says Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee.
Stern says that if the Oklahoma City bombing suspects had been African Americans, Congress “would have left skidmarks” in its rush to hold hearings into the extent of home-grown terrorism.
“Because these militia cells are basically white people, the number of cells proliferating out there is being ignored.”
Declarations of war
Walter Thody watches this war unfold from a federal prison in Atlanta. The self-described Phineas priest is serving a life term in Atlanta for a series of bank robberies in 1992 that he claims netted his racist, anti-government group $2 million.
“We’re willing to do virtually anything that has to be done because we are in a state of war, and those who are still active out there know that,” Thody says.
“War rules are in effect, which means you can kill, you can take the enemy’s property and do whatever is necessary to stop the activities of the enemy.”
That may sound like an empty threat.
But listen to what Charles Barbee of Sandpoint said during an interview last year.
“We have to be ready to conduct guerrilla warfare. That’s how it will be won,” said Barbee, who blamed the government for the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
“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.”
Now Barbee sits in jail, one of three men indicted for the Spokane Valley robberies and bombings.
Investigators and civil rights watchdogs worry about what anti-government groups might do next.
“I think we’ll see increasing frustration and acts of desperation from these groups,” says civil rights leader Bill Wassmuth in Seattle.
Some predict terrorists will graduate from robberies and bombings to weapons of mass destruction - poisonous or biological chemicals.
It may already have happened.
Two Minnesota men who belonged to a tax protest group were convicted in May 1995 for possessing the poison ricin, which can be used as a chemical weapon.
The prosecution was the first under the Biological Weapons Antiterrorism Act of 1989.
Members of the Aryan Republican Army also claimed to have access to radioactive isotopes and biological weapons, although agents didn’t find any when they arrested the group.
“The threat of a biological or chemical attack on a segment of society is likely,” predicts Michael Reynolds, a militia expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “It’s not a matter of if but a matter of when.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 7 Photos (6 color) Graphic: How leaderless resistance works
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IN THIS SERIES Today More and more anti-government groups are committing crimes using a strategy called leaderless resistance. Monday The FBI is gearing up for a stronger, more organized attack against domestic terrorism. Tuesday Terrorism’s impact spreads far beyond the initial damage and fear.