America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (40 page)

At present the evidence is silent on whether the Sanders family embraced radical Identity theology. But the evidence is clear that Stoner and Fields did embrace radical Identity beliefs and that they, like their fellow travelers in other organizations, demonstrated a record of terroristic opportunism, including creating a climate for racial polarization, piggybacking on racial violence to stoke even more chaos, and manipulating people like Carlton Sanders (and his family) into provocative acts of violence.

This pattern would continue, even as Stoner finally faced justice and prison time in 1982 for crimes he had committed during the 1960s. The Atlanta Child Murders may have represented the last dying breath of holy provocation for the likes of Stoner and the NSRP, but a growing number of smaller Identity-influenced groups and individuals continued to terrorize the United States in the name of a holy race war.

12

JEREMIAH'S WARRIORS

the
ORDER,
the
CSA,
and the
1984 MURDER
of
SHOCK JOCK ALAN BERG

T
he station promotion assistant at KAO Radio in Denver, Colorado, found something suspicious about the fifty-two-year-old University of Wyoming “writing student” who visited the station, supposedly on a research assignment for an upcoming class. Beyond her age, the “short, chubby” woman asked none of the questions that Patrick O'Connor normally fielded from students. She showed no interest in the “station's ratings, advertising rates or marketing.” Instead, the woman focused her inquiry almost entirely on the radio program's personalities—their airtimes, the substance of their shows. O'Connor became even more suspicious when he noticed the woman, later identified as Jean Craig, a Laramie, Wyoming, grandmother, taking photos of the facility, “including an employee-only parking lot behind the building.”
¹

The record shows that Craig was on a very different kind of assignment. Her mission at KOA became part of a wider effort by Craig to track the movements of Alan Berg, one of the station's most well-known and outspoken call-in radio personalities. A onetime writer for the brilliant, controversial, and unabashedly foul-mouthed comic Lenny Bruce, Berg had once earned accolades simultaneously as Denver's most-liked and least-liked radio host. By 1984 Berg had made his mark by berating on-air callers, be they liberals or conservatives, men or women. No one escaped Berg's hostile wit, especially not the white supremacists who frequently called in to the Jewish “shock jock.” Berg took great pleasure in ridiculing the bigots in his listening audience, specifically challenging members of the Christian Identity movement.

On February 13, 1984, Berg invited two Identity evangelists, Colonel Jack Mohr and Pastor Pete Peters, onto his program for a confrontation. The sixty-eight-year old Mohr belonged to the founding
generation of Identity clerics, and while his profile was less national than that of fellow Korean War veteran William Potter Gale, Mohr had self-published a large number of theological tracts while running an informal ministry for forty years. Peters, on the other hand, belonged to a new generation of Identity icons. Born in Nebraska, the “self-styled cowboy preacher” had founded the Laporte Church of Christ in Colorado in 1977. The church included its own outreach arm, Scripture for America.
²
The three-hour program ended in the spirit of outright hostility, but not before a caller phoned into the program, defending the two Identity preachers.

“You ought to have a Nazi on your show,”' the caller said.

“You're sick, perverted,” Berg replied. “You are a Nazi.”
³

Berg did not know that the caller, David Lane, belonged to a secret cell of religious terrorists known as the Order, or the Silent Brotherhood. Formed in 1983, the group had developed a six-phase plan to “recruit members, to build a ‘war chest' by robbing banks and counterfeiting, and eventually to liberate the Pacific Northwest as a homeland for whites.” In January 1984, the group “outlined ‘step 5' of the plan, the assassination of prominent Jews.”
⁴
Berg had no way of knowing it, but in antagonizing his white supremacist guests, he had made his way to the top of the Order's hit list. Five months later, Lane drove the getaway car involved in Berg's murder.

On June 18, 1984, with intelligence gathered by Craig's advanced scouting, members of the Order, including founder Robert Mathews, were waiting for Berg when he entered the driveway of his home at 1445 Adams Street in a suburb of Colorado. With thirty-nine-year-old New Yorker Richard Scutari serving as a lookout, Lane, a forty-seven-year-old former KKK member, pulled up behind Berg's VW Beetle in a four-door Plymouth, blocking the radio host's exit from his driveway. Mathews opened the door for another loyal member of the Order, thirty-year-old Christian Identity devotee Bruce Pierce, who opened fire, killing Berg with a .45-caliber MAC-10 submachine gun. As Lane peeled out to escape the scene of the crime, Pierce said to Mathews, “It was like we pulled the goddam rug out from under him the way he went down!”
⁵

For some, the killing of Berg marked a radical departure in the tactics of white supremacists. Mark Potok, an expert on extremism
from the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “In a sense, it was one of the opening shots of a truly revolutionary radical right perfectly willing to countenance the mass murder of American civilians for their cause.”
⁶
As has been noted throughout this book, the radical right had been willing to “countenance the mass murder of American civilians” since the late 1950s, especially if those civilians were either black or Jewish. During the 1960s, these plans were limited—first, because radical religious leaders hoped to leverage the large number of rank-and-file racists who were less amenable to wider violence, and second, because law enforcement had fractured the ranks of white supremacist organizations and curtailed their membership at the most opportune time for fomenting racial violence. This pattern persisted through the 1970s, despite the best efforts to unify the ever-shrinking numbers of militant bigots. But in 1979 the Greensboro massacre reignited the white supremacist movement. At the same time, many leading supremacists began to rethink and refine their tactics. In fact, the killing of Berg simply represented the next step in the evolution of domestic religious terrorism, a shift that had been ongoing since the Silent Brotherhood's founder, Robert Mathews, had been a teenager.

Mathews began his journey into radical white supremacy in 1971, as a nineteen-year-old in Arizona, where he and his family had moved from his birthplace in Texas. The Minutemen enjoyed a wide following in the Southwest, and their anti-communist and antigovernment message resonated with the teenager. But with Robert Bolivar DePugh in prison in 1971, the Minutemen were racked by internal rivalries. Failing to graduate from high school, Mathews widened his range of conservative activities to include membership in the Young Republicans, the John Birch Society, and eventually his own radical, paramilitary anti-tax group, the Sons of Liberty. By 1972 he had already drawn the attention of federal law enforcement, but at that point he was more or less living a transient lifestyle and was difficult to trace.

Mathews remained on the periphery of right-wing causes after the Sons of Liberty disbanded in 1975. But he soon joined William Luther Pierce's National Alliance, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and white separatist organization. By 1982 he had become active
with Richard Butler's Aryan Nations in Idaho and had explored Christian Identity theology via the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian.

Mathews's religious worldview is confusing to some. Some scholars still refer to him as a Mormon, based on his upbringing, but he clearly dabbled with both Christian Identity and Odinism. It is clear that when he formed the Order in 1983, Mathews recruited many members from Christian Identity offshoots, notably from Jim Ellison's Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. As late as 2007, a close associate claimed that much like Louis Beam, Mathews favored a form of Odinism that seemed to incorporate Christian Identity beliefs.

Beam's ideas appear to have influenced Mathews in more than just the religious sense. In 1983 Beam authored his essay, now famous in white supremacist circles, on “leaderless resistance.” In this landmark piece, Beam, perhaps with an eye toward groups like the Minutemen and the KKK, insisted that “so-called ‘secret army' organizations are sitting ducks for enemy infiltration, entrapment and destruction of the personnel involved,” because they relied on top-down, hierarchical, pyramid-style approaches to military organization. Beam argued that white supremacists needed to adopt the cell model of insurgency, whereby smaller militant groups operated “totally independently of the other cells,” with information on the government passed from group to group rather than dispersed from some centralized and unifying command.

Beam referred to the cell system used by the Soviets but ultimately rejected the Soviet model because the KGB retained its centralized leadership role in activating cells to achieve a broad objective. Beam instead harkened back to a strategy first articulated by lifelong intelligence agent Colonel Uluis L. Amoss and aptly named the phantom cell. Beam wrote:

The “phantom cell” mode of organization is based upon the cell organization, but does not have any central control or direction. In the Leaderless Resistance concept, all cells operate independently of each other, but they do not report to a central headquarters or top chief, as do the communist cells. . . .

The entire purpose of Leaderless Resistance organization is to defeat the enemy by whatever means possible, all members of
phantom cells will tend to react to an objective event in the same way, usually through the tactics of resistance and sabotage.
⁷

In many ways, Mathews's new group became the beta test for the phantom cell concept. Without any apparent central direction, the Order engaged in a months-long effort, from 1983 to 1984, to bomb Jewish targets, assassinate political leaders, and undermine the American economic system, all while funding itself through bank robberies and armored-car heists.

But if Beam's ideas informed the strategic framework for Mathews's revolutionary group, then William Luther Pierce provided the playbook for its activities. Writing under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, Pierce had authored the 1978 underground best seller
The Turner Diaries,
⁸
a how-to guide for would-be terrorist cells. Set in 1991, the futuristic novel assumes the form of a diary written by Earl Turner, a martyr in an insurgent resistance group known as the Organization. The passage of the fictional Cohen Act of 1989, calling for the mass confiscation of guns by the Jewish-controlled government (Turner calls it the System), radicalizes and coheres the Organization, once a ramshackle group of antigovernment conservatives, into a well-heeled militia. The Organization uses bombings, assassinations, and other tactics to fight a guerrilla campaign against the System while constantly facing structural problems, a lack of resources, and a lack of members due to government propaganda. After months of proving his worth “to the Cause,” Turner and his girlfriend are summoned for a loyalty test—a foolproof method of weeding out infiltrators. After that they are indoctrinated, through a secret ritual, into a covert subgroup within the Organization: the Order.

When Robert Mathews formed the Order in September 1983, he drew direct inspiration from
The Turner Diaries.
But the “proof” of government tyranny for members of the Silent Brotherhood was not any formal, national effort at gun confiscation. The group radicalized over the “martyrdom” of a handful of extremists who had died resisting the government.

This group included Gordon Kahl, a Christian Identity follower, shot dead in a February 1983 armed standoff with Arkansas law
enforcement. Weeks earlier, Kahl, a leader in William Gale's Posse Comitatus anti-tax organization, had killed two U.S. marshals who had sought to arrest the extremist for parole violations. (In 1976 Kahl had served time in federal prison for tax evasion.)
⁹

Other martyrs to the antigovernment cause included John Singer, an excommunicated Mormon fundamentalist who had refused to send his children to public schools because they promoted integration. In January 1979, when police attempted to enforce a court order giving custody of Singer's children to his ex-wife, Singer drew a weapon and was shot dead by Utah police officers.
¹⁰

Finally, there was Arthur Kirk, an in-debt Nebraska farmer who, on October 23 1984, wearing a gas mask and armed with an AR-15 submachine gun, exchanged fire with a state law enforcement SWAT team and died in a hail of bullets fleeing his home.
¹¹
Though there is no sign that Kirk was a religious radical, his death became a cause célèbre for Christian Identity zealots, who in their newsletters reported that “Kirk's wounds were not fatal, but the SWAT team then let him bleed to death in a dog pen before they took him to the hospital.”
¹²

In 1984, when the Order officially declared war on what it called the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), it cited all three men as “Aryan yeoman” who “awoke” to fight their government:

Our heroes and our culture have been insulted and degraded. The mongrel hordes clamor to sever us from our inheritance. Yet our people do not care. . . . Not by accident but by design these terrible things have come to pass. It is self-evident to all who have eyes to see that an evil shadow has fallen across our once fair land. Evidence abounds that a certain vile, alien people have taken control of our country.