America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (20 page)

Most of the group's following—between five thousand and ten thousand direct members and thirty thousand to forty thousand supporters, according to the best estimates—likely had no connection to Christian Identity. They were simply antigovernment activists who saw, in the growth of the militant American left and black nationalism, evidence that America was heading toward communist subversion and widespread disorder—and they prepared accordingly. But those same fears could be harnessed by those who wanted to polarize the races to foment the race war.

What stood in their way was an equally cunning and Machiavellian response by the national government, one that at times created problems as surely as it solved them. Law enforcement agencies and the military feared extremists on both ends of the political spectrum and targeted them accordingly.

In the late 1960s, the radical right and militant left shared a deep hatred for the American political establishment. The militant left saw the consensus between New Deal liberals and moderate Republicans on America's makeshift social safety net as a tonic that dulled the public from pursuing much more radical reforms of capitalism. The radical right saw that same consensus as evidence of a growing shift toward communism, especially with the advent of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. For the militant left, the broad foreign policy consensus behind cold war containment was an excuse to send working-class whites and urban blacks to die to expand the influence of capitalism around the world. For the radical
right, the failure to go above and beyond in that fight showed weakness in the face of the alarming spread of world communism. Of course, for the religious radicals who followed Wesley Swift, all of this was part of the “beast system”—the beast being the Antichrist (aka Jews) working on Satan's behalf in the time before God's final judgment.

The establishment all but ignored the religious dimensions of the violence and disorder that marked the 1960s. Yet, as the decade proceeded, more and more of those in power began to fear what the radical religious extremists coveted: another American civil war, even some kind of race war. Rightly or wrongly, the establishment realized something had to be done. Those in charge of America's domestic security—the FBI, the National Guard, local law enforcement—acted accordingly.

The central military planners at the Department of Defense adjusted America's entire national security posture. While keeping foreign policy focused on preventing the spread of communism, military leaders also concerned themselves with domestic security. They feared what one historian called a “made-in-America Tet Offensive”
³²
on domestic soil—a sudden, possibly coordinated series of urban uprisings that would spread like a wildfire and push America toward civil war. The growing violence associated with protests against the Vietnam War only reinforced this fear. In 1966, having found themselves forced into a supporting role during the Watts riots in 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created an ongoing, formal operation, first known as Operation Steep Hill and ultimately as Operation Garden Plot. The operation parlayed the recently created U.S. Army Intelligence Command, a collection of military intelligence groups with a focus on domestic security, into an intelligence-gathering operation aimed at watching America's political and urban hotspots and spying on antiwar and radical-left groups. The focus increasingly became geared toward preemption or rapid response in the event of civil disorder.
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The FBI, for its part, created the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The Bureau divided the program into two major components. COINTELPRO White focused on right-wing and white supremacist groups, and COINTELPRO Black focused on civil rights
and black nationalist groups. Like Garden Plot, COINTELRPO also included extensive surveillance operations. But it differed from other programs in its willingness to rely on provocation and dirty tricks. The FBI would play upon the natural tendency of many of these groups toward paranoia by pitting members against each other and instigating schisms and rivalries within the groups.

This work included spreading false rumors, sending inflammatory mailings, and sabotaging operations. In each case, the Bureau blamed members of the groups for actions taken by FBI agents or operatives. One humorous example, described to me by a former FBI official, referred to the not uncommon phenomenon of KKK members sleeping around with each other's spouses. At times, in places like Mississippi, the FBI actually observed these relationships as they developed. Late FBI special agent Jim Ingram, a senior member of the Jackson, Mississippi, field office, said that the FBI successfully took advantage of this phenomenon by placing notes in the mailboxes of KKK members, hinting that someone “knew where your wife was last evening,” eliciting predictable resentments and infighting after the pranks.
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At other times the dirty tricks were more serious. The FBI, to its historical shame, lumped nonviolent civil rights organizations such as the SCLC together with groups like the Black Panthers under COINTELPRO Black. A major target of the program was Martin Luther King Jr., whom J. Edgar Hoover suspected, incorrectly, of being a tool of the Communist Party, and whom Hoover resented for publicly criticizing the Bureau's handling of racial crimes. In what has to be one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the FBI, the Bureau sent a purported tape recording of Dr. King engaged in extramarital relations to the minister's family while sending a note to the civil rights leader himself, urging him to commit suicide. The FBI never relented in its effort to gather illicit information on King, through surveillance that included wiretaps and feeding scurrilous material in anonymous leaks to Hoover's many assets in the media.

With respect to the less sympathetic white supremacist groups, the “fun and games” involving pitting one white supremacist cad against another gave way to much more serious countermeasures—even what would amount to an FBI conspiracy to murder white
supremacists. Controversy also continues to persist over whether or not federal law enforcement looked the other way regarding, or perhaps even instigated, murders of Black Panther leaders.

As much as anything else, FBI operations against both white supremacist and black nationalist groups focused on developing informants and infiltrators within radical organizations and undermining the groups from within. In particular, by leveraging potential prison sentences against radicals arrested for various crimes, the FBI turned dedicated KKK members, including senior leaders, into ongoing sources of information and potential players in FBI dirty tricks campaigns. Supporting this thesis, internal reports on groups like the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi start with huge lists of redacted names—sometimes dozens for each report—of informants inside the group. At times the FBI would also use code names for human informants to disguise information obtained from wiretaps and mail intercepts. To this day, the FBI jealously protects the identities of these informants.

Some of that reticence may go beyond simply protecting these individuals against danger. As noted in the chapter on the Birmingham bombing, some suspects in that case were or became FBI informants. The problem for the FBI is that many of those informants were still dedicated racists; they did not change their stripes overnight simply because they began working for the FBI. And informants often found themselves at the scene of, or even participants in, major acts of domestic terrorism. The FBI must frequently decide whether or not to prosecute crimes committed by informants in the furtherance of, or in conjunction with, ongoing FBI investigations. For instance, thousands of secret waivers against prosecution were granted in 2013. But this process can come at a great price to the FBI if the nature of the forgiven crimes is publicized.

The effort to protect the Bureau against embarrassment becomes an important point to consider when one tries to assess what the FBI knew about the religious dimensions of white supremacist violence in the 1960s. Why has it taken so long for the theological foundations of white supremacist violence to be revealed to the American people? J.B. Stoner was clearly motivated by the theology of Christian Identity. But the connection of J.B. Stoner to the Birmingham bombing
may well be concealed by the FBI's ongoing decision to withhold surveillance data obtained from wiretaps in his law office. The same protectionist mind-set may also be in play in additional crimes described in this book that Stoner might have been involved in.

In any event, public statements and testimony from the 1960s show that the FBI greatly underestimated the potential danger of white supremacist groups in comparison to black nationalists. Perhaps owing to his obsession with fighting communism, or perhaps because of implicit racism (or both), J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers the number-one threat to American domestic order. In contrast, as William Turner noted, Hoover minimized the danger posed by the Minutemen, placing their total membership at only five hundred. He insisted that the FBI had thoroughly penetrated the group with informants (something that was at least partly true) and that he had them under control. The growing number of federal prosecutions against white supremacists by early 1967 provided some evidence that the FBI did have this problem under control. The FBI prosecuted Sam Bowers and his senior WKKKKOM members in connection with the Neshoba murders. Charges against Robert DePugh and Wally Peyson for bank robbery had forced both men underground by 1968. (They were caught in 1969.)

But Bowers and fellow travelers like J.B. Stoner would not be deterred. Those with the best access to white supremacists groups, such as investigative reporters Norden and Turner, described an interesting development from 1966 to 1968. Seemingly disparate white supremacist groups—organizations like the National States Rights Party, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (the second largest KKK group in the country, headquartered in Georgia but with a national reach), the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Minutemen—increasingly tightened their relationships with each other. FBI documents confirm such developments. This went beyond simple cross-affiliations by various members to actual cooperation. Turner and Norden also began to note the religious impulse inspiring several of these groups. Progressively, Swift's taped sermons and Bible studies gained a wider audience among the cadre of radicals who remained dedicated to the white supremacist cause despite their failures in 1964 and 1965.

Those listening to the Reverend Wesley Swift's words in February 1967 would hear some familiar themes. “Now, we have had the sign of the ‘son of man' in the heavens February 4, 1962,” he began. Swift was echoing a landmark sermon he had given several years before, in February 1962. In the earlier sermon, Swift referred to a recent solar eclipse in 1962, a sign of the beginning of the end-time, when God will “awaken” his followers and they will fulfill their destiny by “challeng[ing] the power and forces of darkness. And from this time forward, expanding and moving and working to this destiny, Christian civilizations and the white nations of the western world shall move forward, against the enemy.” Swift called this 1962 sermon “Zero Hour,” a reference to the beginning of the countdown to the End of Days.
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But in February of 1967, with riots and civil unrest seemingly having confirmed his prophecy, Swift combined the reference to zero hour with a reference to
Chapter 14
of the book of Revelations: “We have passed the time of the beginning of tare time. And we have come to the time of the abomination of the desolator who stands in the Holy place. This shows us that we are in the end time or in the last days.”
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For many evangelical fundamentalists,
Chapter 14
of the book of Revelations describes the Great Tribulation, when God imposes a series of plagues on mankind.

One of the signs of these end-times is the “reaping of tares.” Tares are weeds that are difficult to distinguish from wheat and that absorb needed nutrients from wheat. In the Great Tribulation, God directs his flock to harvest both the wheat and tares but to burn the tares. For Swift, the identity of the tares was obvious: “The Jews are the tares and the tares are the enemies of God's Kingdom.” “Tare time,” as Swift called it, had already begun by early 1967. In February he predicted that the rest of the year would be marked by

increasing catastrophes, Negro riots. And anything Communism has its hands on will increase as they try to destroy Christian America and Western Civilization . . . the White man will stand—shoulder to shoulder against the Negro and the anti-Christ.
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What remained to be begun was yet another prophecy in the book of Revelations, one also deeply rooted in symbolism: the winepress
of fermented grapes.
Chapter 14
of the book of Revelations prophecies that

Another angel, the one who has power over fire, came out from the altar; and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, saying, “Put in your sharp sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, because her grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God. And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press, up to the horses' bridles, for a distance of two hundred miles.

As one commentator describes the metaphor: “Satan and his angels will gather all the enemies of the God of heaven” and “Jesus alone will crush them and their blood will mingle with water that makes up their bodies and run like streams.”
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In February 1967, Swift did not mention what biblical scholars refer to as the grapes of wrath. But as will become clear, Swift's followers were determined to see his prophecy come to pass. And to do it, they likely perpetrated one of the most consequential acts of terrorism in American history.