America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (37 page)

Allegations that the FBI went beyond surveillance and infiltration, graduating to provocation, began to surface in congressional investigations at this time. One of the most controversial charges involved an offshoot of the Minutemen known as the Secret Army
Organization (SAO). With DePugh in federal prison since 1968, the Minutemen splintered and dissolved. But in 1970, a handful of onetime Minutemen decided to reverse course, convinced that government infiltrators, rather than a lack of leadership and organization, lay at fault for the Minutemen's demise. They believed that, if purged of informants, the SAO could continue the fight against “the communists” controlling the American government and against New Left radicals outside of government. With a new and smaller organization, they hoped to avoid infiltration by federal law enforcement. As it turns out, one of SAO's founding members, Howard Godfrey, provided information on the group's activities to the FBI from the start.

Godfrey represented a rare type of informant, someone like the controversial Gary Rowe, who during the 1960s had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama at the FBI's behest. Described by the
Los Angeles Times
as an “unimposing ex-San Diego city fireman,” the thirty-two-year-old Godfrey told the press that he had assisted the SAO while it “conducted a reign of terror against the left in a series of attacks including bombings, burglaries and harassment.”
²⁸
He confessed that the group had plotted “the assassination of President Nixon and several controversial leftists,” stolen “membership files and lists from leftist organizations,” and shot “into the home of a Marxist college professor, wounding a woman guest.” For five years, using the false identity Captain Mike McGann, Godfrey reported on right-wing activities. He rose from a mere recruit in 1967 to head of the San Diego branch of the Minutemen to cofounder of the SAO.

As noted earlier, infiltrators like Godfrey and Rowe present conflicts of interest to their official handlers in law enforcement because they often must prove their worth to fellow radicals by engaging in criminal activity. Recall that Rowe even became an accessory to a murder in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 while on the federal payroll. The government, to this day, routinely offers waivers to informants who perpetrate crimes in the “call of duty.” But with Godfrey, federal law enforcement went way beyond looking the other way while ultra-right-wing militants engaged in violent criminal activity.

When the press uncovered Godfrey's activities, he revealed that he
had told his FBI handler about all SAO criminal operations, sometimes
in advance
of a crime. “We used to meet a couple of times a week, in parking lots throughout the city, behind stores, anywhere that happened to be handy. We would grab a few minutes and talk,” he told the
Los Angeles Times.
What's more, the FBI supplied Godfrey with a substantial amount of money for weapons—$20,000—to help cover 75 percent of the SAO's operating expenses.
²⁹
It appeared to some, especially in the New Left, that in supporting Godfrey, the FBI was more or less subsidizing the group's activities. The ACLU insisted to Congress that the SAO was set up “on instructions of FBI officials” to “serve as agents provocateurs, inciting disorders as a means of exposing ‘domestic radicals,' particularly campus leaders of the New Left protesting the war in Southeast Asia.”
³⁰

The FBI, for its part, maintained that it simply offered Godfrey passive approval—that it did not encourage any criminal activity. Yet there is no doubt that after Godfrey and a colleague fired shots into the home of Professor Peter Bohm, injuring Paula Tharp, Godfrey's FBI handler took the informant's weapon and hid it from the San Diego police for six months. The extent to which the FBI promoted the activity of the SAO remains a point of contention to the present day. For instance, in 2013 the Department of Homeland Security updated its database of historic terrorist activity to note that the SAO “was possibly funded by the FBI.”
³¹

By 1976 such FBI operations (as well as illegal wiretapping and “black bag jobs”) had been exposed by Congress, leading the FBI to end COINTELPRO. But as the Wilkinson story shows, the established FBI informant network inside KKK groups had become so vast that it may have been impossible to reel it back in. The kind of conflicts described in previous chapters, whereby the FBI was forced to balance the need to protect sources and methods with the need to prevent criminal activity, persisted. This dilemma applied not only to the FBI but also to local law enforcement agencies, which increasingly began to infiltrate white hate groups.

This situation became apparent after an investigation of one of the most shocking acts of KKK violence in the 1970s. On November 3, 1979, members of the Greensboro, North Carolina, Ku Klux Klan opened fire on an anti-Klan protest march staged by the
local Communist Workers Party (CWP). Five members of the CWP, which had been trying to organize black factory workers in the area, were killed. Tensions between the two groups had escalated in the previous weeks, with each side openly provoking the other and more than hinting at violence. The name of the CWP rally was Death to the Klan. But film footage of the shooting demonstrates that the KKK, with the help of the American Nazi Party, fired the first salvos on November 3. As many as forty of the sixty to eighty extremists who joined the counter-protest fired on the leftists, some of whom were also armed and returned fire. Police arrested fourteen Klansmen, many associated with Grand Wizard Virgil Lee Griffin's Confederation of Independent Orders of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for the murders. But in a decision reminiscent of injustices of the past, an all-white jury acquitted the men.
³²

Years later, new investigations into the crime—including a truth and reconciliation commission modeled on the body that investigated Apartheid-related atrocities in South Africa—uncovered disturbing information. The local police, whose investigative interests extended both to the communists and to the Klan, had employed an informant inside the KKK who, according to several witnesses, encouraged the KKK members to bring weapons to the event. The same man, who worked as a federal informant as well, appears to have warned both the FBI and the local police about the potential for violence, but nothing was done.
³³

One participant in the Greensboro massacre, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., symbolized many of the developing trends in the white supremacy movement. A Vietnam veteran, Miller was loosely associated with Virgil Lee Griffin's KKK group, which in turn was an offshoot of Bill Wilkinson's KKK group, which in turn was an offshoot of David Duke's KKK group. No one knows if Miller fired a shot on November 3, but he later split with Griffin to form his own KKK chapter, the Carolina Knights of the KKK, and then an antigovernment group, the White Patriots Party. At some point in the early 1980s, he became an Odinist, but he continued to associate with Christian Identity extremists who were swayed to terrorism by the writings of William Pierce. Miller later turned FBI informant and helped law enforcement develop charges against Louis Beam, among
others, in a 1987 federal sedition trial. The conviction never materialized, and despite his cooperation with federal authorities, Miller's hatred for Jews and blacks did not abide.
³⁴

In prison Beam elaborated on his theories on leaderless resistance, adding the idea of “lone wolves” who would “act when they feel the time is ripe, or [would] take their cues from others who precede[d] them.” On April 13, 2014, in an ironic and tragic manifestation of Beam's strategy, the seventy-four-year old Miller opened fire at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement home in Kansas. When arrested, Miller believed that he had killed three Jews and repeatedly said “Heil Hitler” to police officers. In reality, all three victims were Christians.
³⁵

Miller had first become attracted to white supremacy when he returned from Vietnam and read a copy of
The Thunderbolt.
He joined the National States Rights Party in 1973. He left the group, he claims, because it was “made up mostly of elderly people who were not that active.”
³⁶
For the most part, Miller's observation rings true. By the early 1970s, the NSRP included, according to one estimate, as few as seventy to eighty-five active members. Neuman Britton was literally the only member of the Arkansas NSRP, and despite the best efforts of people like Danny Joe Hawkins, the group could never even establish a chapter in the white supremacist stronghold of Mississippi. What public attention the NSRP could draw had come from J.B. Stoner's campaigns for public office in Georgia—all of which eventually failed, although he did garner seventy-three thousand votes in his 1974 campaign for lieutenant governor.

Increasingly, the NSRP became more open, in its literature, about its religious motivations. Stoner's campaign fliers included biblical citations that would have been very familiar to Identity believers, such as Revelations 2:9 (referring to the “synagogue of Satan”). In the past, one could find evidence of Identity theology in books advertised in
The Thunderbolt,
such as
Still 'Tis Our Ancient Foe
, a 1964 work by Identity minister and Minuteman Kenneth Goff that exposed the phony “Jewish religion.”
³⁷
But direct references to religion were rare (although still present) in the text of the periodical itself. In contrast the July 1974 edition of
The Thunderbolt
included an article entitled “The Basic Identity Message.” Written
by Thomas O'Brien, one-time Kilgrapp (secretary) for James Venable's National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and former editor of the NKKKK's periodical
The Nighthawk,
the article asserted that “the Jews are not the Hebrews of the Bible, they are not the tribes of Israel and Christ was not a Jew. They are the mongrelized descendants of Satan through Cain.”
³⁸
Editions of
The Thunderbolt
in 1974 also included a guest article by one of the founding Identity theologians, Bertrand Comparet, and an advertisement for James Warner's New Christian Crusade Church. But this did nothing to boost core membership.
³⁹

The NSRP did make strides in other directions. Stoner made visits to European countries as part of an outreach to the growing number of right-wing organizations in places like England and Germany. By 1980 Stoner enjoyed an impressive array of contacts with European white supremacist groups. In fact, on October 13, 1980, Stoner held a multinational conference for racists in Cobb County, Georgia. The following day, in nearby Atlanta, an explosion rocked the Gate-City Bowen Homes Day Care Center. Did J.B. Stoner have one more card to play in his effort to stoke a holy race war?

11

THE TENTH PLAGUE

the
ATLANTA CHILD MURDERS, 1979–1981

“I
t was so quick,” one teacher said, referring to the explosion that demolished the Gate-City Day Care Center in the Bowen Homes housing projects in Atlanta. “All I could think was, ‘Get to the door. Get out, children, get out.' I got all 12 of mine out—safe and accounted for.”
¹

“It was terrible, really terrible,” another teacher observed. “Some of the kids were badly hurt. I saw one little boy whose fingers were missing.”
²

The October 13, 1980, explosion that demolished the day care center killed five African Americans: one teacher and four toddlers. Authorities evacuated some 480 students from nearby schools, in fear of another bombing. The day care center and the schools serviced a local, predominantly African American housing project. Almost immediately, accusations against local hate groups, such as Stoner's NSRP, flowed from Atlanta's black community.

“It was the Ku Klux Klan,” one neighborhood resident shouted at Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first black mayor, when he visited the scene.

The Reverend Joseph Lowery, head of the SCLC, asserted, “There is an organized assault on black people across the country. We are tired of our children being killed.”
³

The Reverend Lowery's reference to an “organized assault” on children came with a context. For the previous two years, a series of killings had ravaged Atlanta's African American community, taking the lives of, among others, at least thirteen victims below the age of thirteen. The name known in history, the Atlanta Child Murders, is something of a misnomer. The victims also included several teenagers between the ages of thirteen and sixteen as well as six victims who were twenty years or older—two as old as twenty-eight.

After a year of killings with no suspects apprehended, Bowen Homes residents booed Mayor Jackson when he came to visit the site of the explosion. Many refused to accept the explanation for the tragedy provided by local authorities and endorsed by Jackson: that the explosion at the day care center had resulted from a faulty boiler. Lee Brown, Atlanta safety commissioner, who led the Atlanta Child Murders investigation, insisted that “absolutely no foul play was involved.”
⁴
The claim seemed too convenient, designed, in the minds of some, to pacify a city described, in several accounts, as on the edge of open racial violence. The explosion at the day care center appeared to be part of a general pattern, an ongoing organized assault on Atlanta's black children. That it came less than twenty-four hours after J.B. Stoner held a conference of international white supremacists in a neighboring county only amplified the suspicions and paranoia of Atlanta's residents. Stoner, after all, had built a reputation for bombing black targets as far back as the late 1950s.