America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (42 page)

Sedition trials are incredibly rare and difficult to prosecute in the United States for a reason. There is a fine line between the right to free speech guaranteed by the Constitution and discussing a conspiracy with credible, subversive intent. To prove the latter, the government had to rely on witnesses whose radical beliefs compromised their credibility and who were promised reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony. Defense attorneys established, among other things, that Ellison “had two wives, thought he received messages from God and had himself crowned King James of the Ozarks.”
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Those same defense attorneys managed to remove all minorities from the jury during the voir dire process, and two of the remaining white female jurors fell in love with some of the defendants. One of the jurors even married one of the defendants when the trial was over. But even Harvard ethnographer Raphael Ezekiel, who has studied the racist mind-set and who witnessed the trial, was not convinced by the government's case. On April 8, 1988, the jury acquitted all fourteen
defendants, with Louis Beam gloating, “I think ZOG has suffered a terrible defeat here today. . . . I think everyone saw through the charade and saw that I was simply being punished for being a vociferous and outspoken opponent of ZOG.”
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Others agreed with Beam, and in what must have made the mastermind behind the concept of leaderless resistance gloat even more, the trial itself became an impetus for the growth of the modern American militia movement. In the decade that followed, thousands of Americans banded together in local groups to practice paramilitary combat, in preparation for a government takeover. But Beam began to reconsider the feasibility of leaderless resistance. In the utopian world of
The Turner Diaries,
experts had foolproof methods for detecting infiltrators. But the actual events of the mid- to late 1980s demonstrated that the “pimps” that J.B. Stoner and Sam Bowers had railed against in the 1960s could penetrate even a small and disciplined group like the Order, which one FBI agent described as “the most organized group of terrorist-type people ever to have operated in the United States.” In 1992 Beam made a significant revision to his earlier essay on tactics, introducing the concept of the lone-wolf terrorist alongside the idea of the phantom cell:

All members of phantom cells or individuals will tend to react to objective events in the same way through usual tactics of resistance. Organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations.
No one need issue an order to anyone. Those idealists truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe,
or will take their cue from others who precede them. While it is true that much could be said against this type of structure as a method of resistance, it must be kept in mind that Leaderless Resistance is a child of necessity.
³³

In some ways, events had already illustrated the power of the lone-wolf terrorist. Gordon Kahl, a 1983 martyr for antigovernment extremists, had taken two U.S. marshals and one county sheriff with him before he died in the name of resistance.

At the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trials, one defendant became a living testament to individualized terrorism. Richard Wayne Snell saw the value of acting autonomously as early as 1983, when he and a fellow CSA member plotted to bomb a natural gas pipeline in Arkansas. When acquitted for sedition, Snell had already been sentenced to death for his role in killing the pawnshop owner and the Arkansas state trooper in 1983. Steven Snyder, a federal prosecutor from Fort Smith, says that Snell's eventual arrest and conviction for those crimes likely prevented a much bolder plan: to bomb an IRS building in Oklahoma City in protest for a recent raid on his property.

After years of legal wrangling, the public learned the official date for Snell's execution: April 19, 1995. Logs show that on the day of his execution, Snell requested to watch television and spent the time “smiling and chuckling” at the day's events.
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The rest of America was stunned.

13

TIM MCVEIGH'S BIBLE

the
1995 OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

A
t 9:02
AM
on April 19, 1995, Robert Dennis, a federal court clerk, waited for an elevator in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He recalls, “I'd just gotten to the elevators when everything went black. There was a crashing, rumbling noise, a terrible sound. My first thought was that a boiler or transformer blew. The dust and smoke were so thick, I couldn't see, I couldn't breathe. I thought I was going to suffocate.”
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Awaiting execution in Indiana, Richard Wayne Snell “smiled and chuckled” at the most profound act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States until 2001. The same building that Snell had planned to destroy in 1983 (according to fellow CSA members) now lay in ruins. Inside the ruins were the dead bodies of 168 people, including nineteen children in the building's day care center.

An hour later and eighty miles away, Oklahoma state trooper Charles Hanger, patrolling interstate highway 35, “came upon a vehicle which was a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis, four-door. It had a primer spot on the left rear quarter panel. And I started around that vehicle in the left lane, it was in the right lane traveling north, I observed that it was not displaying a tag on the rear bumper.”
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Hanger pulled the vehicle over. Receiving unsatisfactory explanations from the driver, twenty-three-year-old army veteran Timothy McVeigh, for the lack of license plates, Hanger took McVeigh into custody. When police searched McVeigh's vehicle, they “found an envelope containing about a dozen documents, among them a copy of the Declaration of Independence and a quotation from John Locke copied in McVeigh's handwriting.”
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“Glued onto one of the pages in the envelope”
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was a photocopied excerpt from what federal prosecutors would later call Tim McVeigh's Bible, the blueprint and inspiration for his attack on a federal building:
The Turner Diaries.

Another would-be Earl Turner, McVeigh had highlighted a passage: “The real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties.”
⁵
The line referred to a series of coordinated Organization attacks in
Chapter 9
of Pierce's novel: a mortar attack on Capitol Hill, a massacre of members of the Los Angeles City Council, and the shooting down of a New York-to-Israel passenger plane with a bazooka. But on April 19, McVeigh modeled his bombing of the Murrah Building on an event in
Chapter 6
of
The Turner Diaries,
where Turner and his fellow revolutionaries mix ammonium nitrate and fuel oil into what experts call an ANFO bomb. The fictional team places the explosives in a stolen truck, drives it into the garage of another federal building (the FBI building in Washington, D.C.), and detonates the explosives from several blocks away. “A glittering and deadly rain of glass shards continued to fall into the street from the upper stories of nearby buildings for a few seconds, as a jet-black column of smoke shot straight up into the sky ahead of us,” Earl Turner wrote in his “diary.” “The whole Pennsylvania Avenue wing of the [FBI headquarters] building, as we could then see, had collapsed. . . . Overturned trucks and automobiles, smashed office furniture, and building rubble were strewn wildly about—and so were the bodies of a shockingly large number of victims.”
⁶

Switch the fictional FBI building with the real Murrah Building on April 19, and McVeigh parroted Earl Turner step for destructive step, including the use of a fertilizer bomb and a truck to deliver and store the explosives. McVeigh and his coconspirator, Kansas farmer and antigovernment radical Terry Nichols, tightly packed several barrels of ammonium nitrate and racing fuel into a yellow Ryder truck, which McVeigh drove from Kansas to Oklahoma City. McVeigh parked the Ryder truck immediately in front of the Murrah Building and walked to his getaway vehicle. On detonation, the explosives destroyed 25 percent of the Murrah Building's structure, obliterating most of the four lower floors, causing damage to buildings nearly a block away.

Tim McVeigh had become enraptured by
The Turner Diaries
in 1988, shortly before joining the army. In some ways, the book reinforced his pre-established views on social decadence. After graduating
high school in 1988 and just before entering the military, McVeigh had worked as a driver for an armored-car service that delivered money to banking establishments near welfare agencies.
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His lawyers' notes, based on discussions with the terrorist, say that when McVeigh

would drive up, he would see a 3-block line of black welfare recipients waiting for their welfare checks. Tim would have to push his way through the line with his gun drawn to deliver the money. During the rest of the months he would drive by their houses and he would see them always sitting on their porch waiting for their check, hence the name of porch monkey.
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Pierce's novel, which described blacks in primal terms as violent hordes leeching off the public dole, resonated with McVeigh. As he read
The Turner Diaries,
McVeigh later recalled, “his views of the world expanded.”
⁹

McVeigh entered basic training in the spring of 1988. There, at Fort Bravo, Georgia, he met and befriended his future coconspirators, his platoon commander Terry Nichols and fellow enlistee Michael Fortier. The men shared a love of guns and a growing antipathy toward the U.S. government. McVeigh encouraged Fortier's nascent antigovernment feelings, providing the native Arizonan with, among other things, a copy of
The Turner Diaries.
Nichols had grown up in rural Michigan, where banks increasingly foreclosed on family-owned farms, dispossessing their owners. The same process had helped fuel the Posse Comitatus movement across the United States.

Nichols and McVeigh requested and received honorable discharges following their service during Operation Desert Storm, America's first military conflict with Saddam Hussein, in the early 1990s. In the years that followed, their hatred for the federal government only intensified. At one point, Nichols attempted (but failed) to renounce his U.S. citizenship. McVeigh began a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, becoming part of the increasingly popular gun-show circuit, which expanded after federal laws loosened regulations on the private sale of guns. But new laws were already being considered. These same gun shows became an echo chamber for antigovernment paranoia, as the U.S. Congress moved closer and closer to passing
the first major pieces of gun-control legislation in more than two decades—the Brady Handgun and Violence Prevention Bill and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Gun-rights groups, such as the National Rifle Association, saw the Brady Bill as an entrée to national firearms registration, a Trojan backdoor to the mass confiscation of firearms by a tyrannical government. At gun shows, McVeigh began to sell photocopied versions of
The Turner Diaries,
which begins, recall, with the passage of the fictional Cohen Act of 1989 to strip all Americans of their weapons.

At first McVeigh's concerns about the direction of the social order manifested in a move toward survivalism—a more passive form of antigovernment resistance, whereby one waits and prepares for the collapse of society. But hints that McVeigh was considering bolder action can be seen in letters he wrote to friends and to newspapers. “America is in serious decline,” he asserted in an editorial to the
Lockport (New York) Union-Sun
in 1992. “Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that, but it might.”
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McVeigh also joined an Arkansas-based contingent of the Ku Klux Klan, insisting later that he believed that the KKK was simply pro-gun and antigovernment. According to McVeigh, only later did two events push him toward a position of proactive violence.

The first event was in August of 1992, when federal law enforcement raided the remote mountain home of Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) believed Weaver, a Christian Identity believer, to be the kind of violent, antigovernment firebrand one would find in another part of Idaho—at Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound. In fact, the government attempted to use a minor firearms charge against Weaver to leverage him into becoming an informant against Butler; Weaver refused. As with the majority of Identity followers, religious ideas about racial purity and the impending end-times manifested in Weaver's desire to separate from society and adopt principles of survivalism, as opposed to engaging in radical terrorism. When, in 1992, BATF agents descended on Weaver's isolated home in the woods of Idaho, under the false assumption that Weaver was stockpiling illegal weapons, they created the conditions for a firefight that never had
to happen. A shooting exchange between Weaver's fourteen-year-old son, Sammy; a family friend named Kevin Harris; and federal marshals who had snuck onto the Weaver property quickly resulted in the deaths of a marshal and Sammy. Events escalated from there. By the time the conflict ended, the list of the dead included Weaver's wife, who was shot while carrying her baby. Even though Weaver eventually won a wrongful-death civil suit against the government, his family members' murder infuriated militia groups, Christian Identity believers, survivalists, and antigovernment organizations.
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Not surprisingly, the raid also incensed McVeigh.