America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (41 page)

All about us the land is dying. Our cities swarm with dusky hordes. The water is rancid and the air is rank. Our farms are being seized by usurious leeches and our people are being forced off the land. The Capitalists and the Communists pick gleefully at our bones while the vile hook-nosed masters of usury orchestrate our destruction. . . .

We now close this Declaration with an open letter to Congress and our signatures confirming our intent to do battle. Let friend
and foe alike be made aware. This is war!—We the following, being of sound mind and under no duress, do hereby sign this document of our own free will, stating forthrightly and without fear that we declare ourselves to be in full and unrelenting state of war with those forces seeking and consciously promoting the destruction of our faith and our race.

Therefore, for Blood, Soil, and Honor, and for the future of our children, and for our King, Jesus Christ we commit ourselves to Battle. Amen.
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If the CSA's Jim Ellison consecrated his leadership of malcontents by quoting 1 Samuel 22:2, then members of the Order held Jeremiah 51:20 (God's prophecy for Cyrus of Babylon as a future hero for the Israelites) in highest esteem: “You are My war-club, My weapon of war; And with you I shatter nations, And with you I destroy kingdoms.”

To take on the American “kingdom,” the Order took its cue from Pierce's fictional Organization and engaged in bombings (of Congregation Ahavath Israel Synagogue in Boise, Idaho) and a murder (of Alan Berg in Denver). Its list of potential assassination and bombing targets was longer and far bolder, but the group initially lacked the resources to pursue its goals. So, in another parallel with William Pierce's fictional universe, Matthew's cadre resorted to robberies to finance its operations, at one point scoring a series of armored-truck heists that netted millions of dollars.

Early on, Mathews assumed what the fictional Earl Turner realized only midway through his insurgency that a movement that hopes to undermine the system can attract adherents only by undermining support for the status quo. As Pierce/MacDonald asserts after Turner enters the Order:

What is really precious to the average American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn't fight.
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So, just like the Order in Pierce's fictional account, the Silent Brotherhood begins a major counterfeiting operation to undermine the status quo.

In the make-believe world of
The Turner Diaries,
the counterfeiting operation goes a long way toward bringing down the System. The combination of a militant insurgency and economic sabotage—including destruction of a major power plant in Evanston, New York—creates chaos and brings a growing number of new members to Earl Turner's group. In the novel, the Organization engages in widespread ethnic cleansing and mass murder, including the Day of the Rope, when Jews, “mongrels,” and race traitors are summarily executed by hanging in California. The Organization infiltrates and recruits from within the U.S. military and soon gains control over nuclear weapons, engaging in a war of nuclear attrition with the System and with the Soviet Union. Earl Turner, who early in the novel betrays his oath to the Order by failing to kill himself before being temporarily captured, redeems himself through a suicide mission, destroying the Pentagon in a kamikaze attack with a plane full of explosives. In the years that follow, the Organization gains the upper hand, overruns much of the Western world, lays waste to large parts of Asia, and of course exterminates Jews and minority groups by the millions, leaving a world where the fictional Order exercises “its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come.”
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In the real world, things did not go as well for Robert Mathews and the Order. The Order's counterfeiting operation produced a number of poorly made bills. The Secret Service traced the fake money to a member of the Silent Brotherhood in Philadelphia. Law enforcement then turned this member, Tom Martinez, into an undercover informant. In his reports, Martinez described to law enforcement the thought process of individuals like Mathews, who hated Jews as much as Stoner or Bowers ever did. Information provided by Martinez had helped bring down the most senior members of the Order by 1985 and ultimately led to a final denouement with Mathews at Whidbey Island in Washington State.
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With its rustic cabins, tidal basins, and old-growth forests, bucolic Whidbey Island is now a tourist attraction. But on December 7 and
8, 1984, it was the site of the last standoff between Robert Mathews and federal law enforcement. Weeks earlier, after a shootout in Portland, Oregon, in which an FBI agent was shot, a wounded Mathews escaped to the island. Cornered at a waterfront home on the ironically named Smuggler's Cove Road, Mathews refused to surrender or even negotiate with the “enemy,” despite being surrounded by “150 FBI agents from five states . . . plus Island County sheriff's deputies with Coast Guard and Navy support,” including “dozens of FBI sharpshooters, explosives specialists, negotiators and antiterrorist experts.”
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On the first day alone, the Odinist unleashed nearly one thousand rounds of ammunition on law enforcement. Knowing that Mathews had a virtual arsenal at the ready to continue his one-man standoff, law enforcement launched illumination flares at the cabin, setting the place ablaze with Mathews in it. “Mathews' blackened bones were found in a bathtub” not long after.
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Thus Mathews joined Kahl, Singer, and Kirk—and before them Kathy Ainsworth—as a modern martyr of the white supremacist cause. Perhaps twenty-five years too late, the hunt for the Order, according to Anti-Defamation League expert Marvin Stern, caused “governmental agencies to take a harder look at the (white supremacist) phenomenon. . . . It gave law enforcement the impetus to take a harder look at the threat this posed to them and to all of society.”
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In pursuing other fugitives connected with the Order, the government turned its attention to a group with close affiliations to Mathews: Jim Ellison's the Covenant, the Sword and Arm of the Lord. Since 1978, due to the influence of Identity pastors Dan Gayman and Robert Millar, the CSA had been moving more and more in a radical direction. In 1982 Ellison had declared himself King of the Ozarks and issued a “Declaration of Non-Surrender”:

We, the undersigned, knowing that we stand in the presence of God Almighty and His Son, Jesus Christ, do commit our signature and our willing approval to this document.

In the event of the collapse of this Great Republic or the consideration of surrender of our sovereignty by our duly elected government officials to an internal or external power, we the undersigned, acting in the spirit of our Forefathers and these great
documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of these United States—refuse any and all such treaty, pact or declaration of surrender.

We acknowledge that there can exist no compromise between the principle of Freedom under God and the establishment of a world order based on humanism, materialism, socialism, and communism. We accept the principle that it is better to stand, and if need be fall for the cause of Christ and Country than to submit to the coming attempt of satanic and socialistic world order.

Let it be affirmed in the name of Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our Forefathers.

The people of Zarepath-Horeb and C.S.A.
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According to ex-CSA member Kerry Noble, the group imagined an impending end-times scenario whereby the president of the United States surrenders American sovereignty to the “World Socialist Democratic Alliance” without so much as a shot being fired. Under the new system of government, all firearms would be confiscated and “all food, fuel and medical supplies will be impounded for the good of the people” and all “fundamental, independent, Bible-centered congregations will cease operation at once.”
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In this CSA nightmare scenario, publication and distribution of the Bible would be banned.

Returning from Richard Butler's Aryan World Congress in 1983, Ellison spoke about his future plans for the CSA organization, which included “dumping cyanide into the reservoirs of major cities, killing federal agents, blowing up an [Anti-Defamation League] building or overpasses in major cities; maybe even blowing up a federal building.” In the case of the latter, a CSA associate, Richard Wayne Snell, approached Ellison and asked “King James” if, “in his opinion . . . it [would] be practical to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, or possibly a federal building in Dallas or Fort Worth, Texas.”
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According to criminologist Mark Hamm, Snell joined Ellison and another CSA member, Steve Scott, and

traveled to Oklahoma City where, posing as maintenance workers in brown uniforms, they entered the Murrah Federal Building and
assessed what it would take to destroy it. Ellison carried a notepad on which he made sketches showing where the building was most vulnerable to collapse from the explosion of rocket launchers that were to be placed in a van. Ellison said “[The van] could be driven up to a given spot, parked there, and a timed detonating device could be triggered so that the driver could walk away and leave the vehicle in a position and he would have time to clear the area before the rockets launched.”
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Thankfully, Hamm observes, the CSA lacked the criminal skill and competence to pull off this grand scheme. Instead, it attempted a number of lower-level crimes as a means to that end: stealing police uniforms, CB radios, and various merchandise that could be pawned for cash. In one instance, Snell robbed a pawnshop under the mistaken impression that the owner was Jewish. Snell killed the man during the robbery. Later, while on the lam, he murdered an African American state trooper who had pulled him over for a traffic violation.

Neither of Snell's killings was part of any organized CSA terrorism. In terms of directly targeting its enemies, the best the CSA could muster was two arson attacks: one against the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church in Missouri and the other against Temple Beth Shalom in Indiana. In both cases, the resulting damage was minor.

Despite their frustrations, in 1984 Ellison and the CSA issued a declaration of war, which they called the Aryan Tactical Treaty for the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom (ATTACK). The document stated, “It is inevitable that war is coming to the United States of America. . . . It is predestined. . . . The time has come for the Spirit of Slumber to be lifted off our people! Arise, O Israel, and Shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of our Father is risen upon thee. We shall Attack and Advance into enemy territory within the next two years. Be Prepared!”
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By this time the U.S. government had compromised the CSA, developing seven informants inside Ellison's 224-acre compound in Arkansas. According to the Department of Justice, these informants established

that CSA was stockpiling military-type guns, fabricating silencers and grenades, converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic weapons, engaging in paramilitary training, and burying land mines around the compound perimeter. The agents also learned that CSA was involved in such activities as arson . . . attempting to blow-up a natural gas pipeline, and theft. These activities were intended to produce operating funds, to plunder the property of certain “unacceptable” groups, and to hasten the collapse of the government.
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With information provided by the moles, the government obtained a warrant to search Zarephath-Horeb in April 1984. Some three hundred federal agents surrounded the estate, fully expecting that the heavily armed CSA members would resist with violence. Despite some initial low-key resistance, no showdown ever materialized. Ellison negotiated a deal whereby he would surrender to law enforcement if federal prosecutors promised that he would be placed in a jail cell by himself. (He feared what would happen if he was placed in a cell with black prisoners.) The FBI convinced Ellison and his CSA compatriots to surrender without ever firing a shot.
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The FBI found and arrested two members of the Order, fugitives from the federal manhunt. Inside the compound investigators also found an alarming cache of weapons and military supplies. This included “ninety-four long guns, 30 handguns, approximately 35 machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, one heavy machine gun . . . and several thousand rounds of ammunition,” as well as several “improvised . . . land mines . . . and hand grenades.”
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Notably, agents also recovered a thirty-gallon drum of potassium cyanide that Ellison said would be used to poison water supplies in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Hamm, citing terrorism expert Jessica Stern, notes that “potassium cyanide is not a sophisticated weapon of mass destruction.”
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But, as Noble asserted, with additional research the CSA could have learned that the substance can be very lethal if combined with other chemical agents.
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A jury convicted Ellison for “racketeering activities . . . interstate travel to promote arson, and . . . firearms-related charges.” Sentenced to twenty years in prison, Ellison soon found an opportunity to save his own hide. Together with North Carolina bigot and Order
associate Frazier Glenn Miller, Ellison became part of the government's boldest effort yet to rein in the white supremacist movement: the Fort Smith, Arkansas, sedition trials. The two radicals became state witnesses. Claiming to have uncovered an organized plot to overthrow the U.S. government, federal prosecutors indicted fourteen of the country's leading white supremacists in 1987. They include Beam, Butler, Pastor Robert Miles of the Unity Now movement, and several members of the Order, including Richard Scutari, David Lane, and Bruce Pierce (all of whom had participated in the Alan Berg assassination). Almost half of the men were already serving prison time for previous crimes and convictions. The government argued that on the heels of the “martyrdom” of Gordon Kahl, the fourteen men had formally conspired to topple the government while meeting in Butler's Idaho home. A major inspiration for the plot, according to prosecutors, was
The Turner Diaries.
Prosecutors introduced over twelve hundred items of evidence, including testimony from Ellison and Miller. On the stand, Miller claimed that the late Robert Mathews had arranged to deliver substantial amounts of money, garnered from bank robberies and armored-car heists, to Butler, Beam, and others (including Miller himself). Ellison claimed direct knowledge of the antigovernment conspiracy.
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