Blood and Politics (72 page)

To non-Freemen, this “township” consisted of a 960-acre wheat farm and cattle ranch blessed with a natural spring, two fishponds, ranch-style houses, log cabins, and outbuildings.
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Long burdened by a debt incurred
during the buy now, pay later land inflation boom of the 1970s, the farm had gone bankrupt in the agricultural crisis of the early 1980s. At that time the principal debtors joined the ranks of other farmers looking to Posse-style hucksters plying no-win medicine oils in the countryside. Predictably, the bad debt got only worse. After years of default, the bank sold the farm on November 16, 1994, with the proviso that the debtors had the right to redeem the property for a year after the sale.
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By that time, however, the debtors had joined the Freemen and refused to vacate the land.
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Instead, they turned the bankrupt acreage into a compoundlike setting as activists from other territories joined in.

A shifting assortment of two to three dozen men, women, and children hunkered down at Justus Township. In addition to the tools of their trade—computers, diskettes, and laser printers used for creating phony financial instruments—they stockpiled weapons. Whether cached away or worn on their hips, fifty-nine rifles, twenty-four handguns, eight shotguns, ammunition clips, and speed loaders made them a formidable armed force, even if most of the weapons were small caliber or bolt action.
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They built “survival” bunkers and stockpiled food, and they sealed off a county road that passed through the property. In the main house, one large space was converted into a classroom, with old lawbooks and an encyclopedia set stashed in a cabinet near weapons and ammunition. A trailer set on the farmstead’s perimeter served as the Freemen’s guard-post, and they stood duty under an American flag.

They adopted an elaborate code of rules to live by that included compassion toward the “poor and needy,” as well as proscriptions against “unclean animals unfit to eat.” Included on that list were hogs, rabbits, catfish, shellfish, and camels. Among the “General Health Laws” was a rule that “garments worn by one who has a contagious disease are to be burned.” Smoking cigarettes, however, was not outlawed, and the adults smoked constantly. These rules reflected how Christian Identity theology pervaded life decisions at Justus Township in Montana, just as it had motivated the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord camp in Arkansas twelve years earlier. There were other similarities. The township, like the camp, had become a nodal point for like-minded activists, fugitives from the law and refugees from the routine of marginal middle-class lifestyles. Both compounds enjoyed immunity from law enforcement long after they had become centers of criminal activity. And the arrest and conviction of the ringleaders at the CSA effectively ended one period of clandestine resistance, just as the end of the Freemen saga signaled the effective conclusion of open defiance by militias and common law courts in the 1990s.

While the township was physically on a larger tract of land and more
sparsely populated than the CSA camp had been (something like the difference between Montana itself and Arkansas), more than time and space distinguished the two compounds. The Covenant camp’s leadership had been vertically structured, with James Ellison in a gurulike role at the top. By contrast, peer pressure, rather than a common obedience to a single leader, glued the Freemen characters one to the other. Perhaps for this reason, the FBI’s capture of the principal leadership did not immediately result in the collapse of the group’s will.

During the previous period, when the Freemen were building the larger common law court network, a federal agent succeeded in infiltrating the group. That agent attended one of the many classes, professed agreement, and began demonstrating his supposed support with contributions. At different times the agent bequeathed computers, a copy machine, and radio equipment to the township. The gifts bought him a measure of trust inside the group, and they also set up the FBI’s coup de grâce. He brought a radio relay antenna to the farmstead and then persuaded two of the most senior leaders to leave the ranch house and help him erect a radio tower. When this trio was safely out of the sight line of those remaining behind, an FBI team moved in and quickly snared the two. They were whisked off to jail on March 27, 1996. The incident precipitated a siege lasting more than two months.
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During this standoff, the FBI’s tactics were as flexible as the Freemen’s were obstreperous. Instead of setting up barricades in plain view of the farmstead, agents remained virtually invisible to the fugitives, relying on numerous roadway checkpoints to control traffic and seal the area. No sharpshooters in black uniforms roamed the perimeter, as at Weaver’s Ruby Ridge. No loud raucous music blasted at the compound, as had been done at Waco. The agency declined to electronically jam cellular telephone, television, or radio signals, leaving the Freemen relatively open channels to those off-site, through lines of communication that were quietly monitored. Instead of immediately shutting down power and utilities, the FBI waited until late in the standoff to cut electricity to the ranch. The nonconfrontational approach was clearly noticeable to the naked eye, and
The New York Times
tied the change directly to the criticism leveled at the agency following the debacles at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
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No official wanted to give Louis Beam and John Trochmann and Pete Peters another set of martyrs to rally their troops behind. Also, when the Freemen refused to recognize that the FBI had jurisdiction in this case, the FBI enlisted one movement activist after another to negotiate on the government’s behalf over an eighty-one-day period.
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Montana politicians and a state senator from Colorado were among the more than forty individuals who took turns meeting with the
Freemen. The most colorful was Bo Gritz, who flew into Garfield County in his own small plane with sidekick Jack McLamb and Randy Weaver in tow. The feds would not let Weaver past the checkpoint, but they gave Gritz and McLamb a grand reception. Trying to reproduce their success at Ruby Ridge four years earlier, Gritz spent five days talking with those still billeted inside. He commiserated over the financial difficulties farmers faced. He even resorted to a personal prayer with each person. “I took each person firmly by the hand, looked deep into their eyes, called their name and gave them a blessing that we would meet again in this same form,” Gritz wrote of the session. All to no avail. Nevertheless, when Gritz finally left the area, he wrote an instructive seventeen-page intelligence assessment of the group and made it public. Among his conclusions: those Freemen still at the ranch wanted to communicate directly with one leader who had been arrested in the antenna sting.
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Enter then Kirk Lyons, Esquire. Lyons may have been married at the Aryan Nations campground in a ceremony conducted by Richard Butler, but his credentials northwest of the Mason-Dixon Line still needed burnishing. Randy Weaver, after all, had named Gerry Spence his attorney, not Lyons. And his contention that he was simply a “white separatist” who would gladly move to Sweden if someone just gave him enough money did not diffuse the “supremacist” and white nationalist politics he exuded. Early in this Freemen standoff, Lyons called the FBI and offered his services as a negotiator. After the collapse of Gritz’s negotiations, and of others, the FBI called him back. Soon Lyons and two colleagues were on a plane to Montana, courtesy of the federal government.
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Lyons presented an unusual plan, but after deliberations the FBI accepted it. It guaranteed uninterrupted passage to one of the indicted fugitives, alongside attorney Lyons, from the farmstead to a meeting with the leader already in jail. After the two men deliberated, the FBI then allowed the same indicted Freeman to return unimpeded to the farmstead.
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The Freemen wanted a surrender agreement that preserved their cache of multiple legal documents. The government gave Lyons the okay. Two days later, on June 13, 1996, all those still besieged surrendered to the FBI. Lyons watched as the papers in question were loaded on a truck. At an opportune moment he walked over to the Freemen’s flagpole at the perimeter, lowered the American flag (which had been flying upside down for the past three weeks), and raised a Confederate battle flag. It was exactly the same gesture he had made at the courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1988, after the seditious conspiracy acquittals. Wherever Lyons stood, North or South, it appeared that his flag was still the Confederate war banner, and his core allegiances were unchanged.

He may have walked away from the bloodless surrender with his reputation buffed up a bit, but for those who were paying attention, the FBI got the major credit for preventing the arrests of a dozen fugitive check-writing scam artists from turning into another apocalyptic ball of fire. The FBI had finally won a round in the court of public opinion. The feds’ softball tactics had also succeeded in splitting their militia opposition. During the standoff, several prominent militia figures had called for large-scale confrontations, including mobilizing at the Justus Township site itself, much as had been done at Weaver’s Ruby Ridge and at Waco. John Trochmann’s Militia of Montana, on the other hand, took an opposite tack in its newsletter: “Our position has been and will continue to be, as long as this operation remains peaceful . . . for patriots to remain in their own home.” Instead, the Trochmanns proposed working with Montana legislators to defuse the situation, and they excoriated those few who attempted to create a stir.
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At the same time that the FBI was rising in the public’s estimation, the Freemen were sinking. One movement personality after another had come to Montana sympathetic to their case. They usually left after several days with harsh words for the fugitives’ intransigence.

The most accurate assessment of the situation was Chris Temple’s. At Pete Peters’s Estes Park meeting Temple had proposed a two-stage strategy to take advantage of the feds’ incompetence during the Weaver debacle. At the time Temple still resided in Montana and regularly wrote commentary for a Christian Identity tabloid published in California. He had served successfully as cochair of the Weaver support committee, the United Citizens for Justice. And he had made his core national socialist beliefs a nonissue as he snuggled up close to the Robertson-style Christian right in the state. The Freemen “are at the center of the most significant clash between the . . . federal government and its citizens since Waco,” Chris Temple wrote at the time of the siege. Nevertheless, he couldn’t support the Freemen. They had stolen from regular everyday people, he complained, not just banks or government agencies. “Even local townspeople have been alienated deeply” by threats against some local officials, he lamented. The Freemen were simply greedy and had shown contempt for their neighbors.

Temple also recognized that the Freemen standoff had helped put a comma, if not a period, at the end of an era favorable to militia and common law court organizing. “Millions of people, after Ruby Ridge and Waco, started to seriously question their rulers for the first time in ages,” Temple wrote. “The sad reality for the moment is that this conduct on the part of some of the Freemen has allowed the FBI to significantly rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the average American,” he concluded.
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After the FBI and ATF quashed the Aryan Republican Army and concluded the Freemen siege, law enforcement authorities continued the post–Oklahoma City crackdown for several more years. A 1996 law called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded the FBI’s mandate, and two presidential directives in 1998 followed. As a result, FBI money specifically allocated for fighting terrorism doubled between 1995 and 1998—from $256 to $581 million—with a significant share of that going to snaring “domestic terrorists” such as those described above.
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The FBI’s definition of “domestic terrorism” needs complete mention: “the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against person or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Although this definition seems completely straightforward, its actual interpretation had long been subject to nuance and political gerrymandering. In the FBI’s 1983 “Analysis of Terrorist Incidents in the United States,” for example, thirty-one incidents were documented; they included eight “attempted bombings” alongside actual bombings, murder, and arson. Only one group from the white supremacist movement was cited, the Posse Comitatus, after Gordon Kahl shot two federal marshals in North Dakota. No Klan groups were listed. And none of the multiple bombings of medical clinics providing abortions was listed among the incidents—despite the perpetrators’ indisputable attempt to “intimidate or coerce” a civilian population in furtherance of political objectives.

After 1995 the FBI’s analytical emphasis shifted. At that point it decided the “face of domestic terrorism” had changed. It noted “an increase in activities associated with right wing groups,” along with a decline in incidents from the left.
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The militia and common law courts were now mentioned in its “risk assessment” of domestic terrorism. The agency shed any lingering hesitance about making difficult arrests. Preventing another Oklahoma City, not another Waco or Ruby Ridge, was now uppermost.

In one instance, a known fugitive in Montana, who had billeted himself away for three years at home, was finally served an old warrant for attempted murder.
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In Ohio a militia “chaplain” was shot to death during a routine traffic stop.
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In Oklahoma four people were arrested for planning a fertilizer and fuel oil bomb spree aimed at gay bars and civil
rights groups.
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In West Virginia seven arrests followed discovery of a plot to bomb an FBI building. In Arizona twelve militiamen were charged in a bomb plot, and in Georgia another three were arrested in a different plot.
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Authorities now investigated ideologically motivated crimes more thoroughly. The army also launched an internal inquiry after a North Carolina–based skinhead soldier was charged with the random killing of black pedestrians.
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