America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States
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But a deeper analysis suggests that the CI terrorists were far more dangerous in the late 1960s than people realize. The Minutemen, who were radical anticommunists, hid their white supremacist bona fides behind a veneer of pro-American militancy and were positioned to take advantage of the situation on the ground during the 1960s era of social upheaval. J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Minutemen as mildly dangerous due to their fondness for violence and their disregard for federal firearms regulations. But the FBI director did not consider the group nearly as threatening as the communist Black Panther Party, which he dubbed public enemy number one. As with other segregationist groups, CI leaders were found in the highest ranks of the Minutemen—a group perhaps better situated than any organization before or since to become foot soldiers in a national race war. But for the activity of an increasingly engaged law enforcement community in its cities and states (and eventually the federal government), America may have experienced the worst wave of terrorism in its history.
Swift had groups like the Minutemen in mind when, early in 1966, he delivered a sermon titled “Coming Liberation of America.” He told his congregation and army of listeners:
There is a strategy to destroy these United States forever, and to crush Christian Civilization and destroy the ability of HIS church to stand out and proclaim the truth. This is something that stirs the people to search for truth. This stirs some men to stand and denounce this evil strategy. It causes some men to respond with patriotic fury. It causes some men to band together and arm themselves for the showdown day. This design of Treason to destroy these United States has caused many men to react in many ways. There are men who are standing to dedicate their lives and their future in their fight to save these United States. They are ready to fight in the streets in all the cities of our nation, if that be necessary. There are those who are doing their utmost to awaken the people to this danger, and others who realize that it is very late but they are still looking for a solution to the best way to meet this situation and to save America.22
For years Swift and his fellow travelers, notably Colonel William Potter Gale, had nurtured militant, antigovernment patriot groups—those who saw in the growing power and scope of the federal government a fundamental threat to the American way of life. Anticipating the modern-day militia movements, these groups, such as Gale’s California Rangers, acquired weapons and received paramilitary training to oppose what they believed would be a tyrannical government takeover of white society, not simply by the U.S. government but by the United Nations. Just as white supremacist groups aligned (often unknowingly) with Identity leaders on the issue of anti-black racism, antigovernment patriot groups aligned with CI ideology most clearly on the dangers posed by communism and one-world government.
As far back as at least 1963, religious terrorists like Gale and Swift envisioned these armed radicals as guerrilla-style strike teams that would go into action when the inevitable world-government takeover took place, per their Biblical interpretations. George Harding, who was a member of Swift’s church, told the FBI in May 1963 that he was recruited to be part of one of several eight-person military teams, with each group assigned to kill public officials and business leaders when the time came.23
This information is consistent with Miami police informant reports from April 1963 regarding a meeting of the Congress of Freedom, a white supremacist group with many Swift devotees in its leadership. At the April 1963 meeting, attendees also spoke about strike teams set to attack many leading (and mostly Jewish) officials in the event of a United Nations takeover. It is worth noting that in 1964, Sam Bowers also spoke about elite strike teams that would assassinate leading civil rights figures once federal troops had overwhelmed Mississippi. Obviously, neither event—a UN takeover or a federal usurpation of Mississippi—took place by 1964. But, in the minds of CI followers, developments since that time pointed to an even greater conflagration. More to the point, they were prepared to make it happen if necessary.24
The Christian Identity movement found the perfect partner for the revolutionary, guerrilla warfare it predicted in the Minutemen. The group’s membership and financial support appeared to increase after 1965. It was also an organization with national reach and a legacy of paramilitary training, Formed in 1960, supposedly by a group of duck hunters who wanted to prepare an insurgency against a future communist takeover, the group believed that “any further effort, time or money spent in trying to save our country by political means would be wasted… . Therefore the objectives of the Minutemen are to abandon useless efforts and begin immediately to prepare for the day when Americans will once again fight in the streets for their lives and their liberty. We feel there is overwhelming evidence to prove that this day must come.”25
Led by Robert Bolivar DePugh, a middle-aged businessman and biochemist from Missouri with strong organizational skills, the group did not at first embrace the strategy of provoking or instigating that day when, as Swift predicted in his sermon, “Americans will once again fight in the streets for their lives and liberty.” Known to students of terrorism as the propaganda of the deed, this strategy has been traced to anarcho-terrorists who attacked Western targets, including those in the United States, from the 1870s through the 1930s. “One deed is worth more than 10,000 pamphlets,” one anarchist famously insisted. The idea was not only that actions speak louder than words but that those actions could elicit the kind of retribution from a target that would illustrate the ultimate goal of an ideological terrorist group.
For the anarcho-terrorists, this meant encouraging the state to crack down oppressively on its population in its hunt for subversive terrorists, proving the capacity for tyranny and violence that anarchists insisted was endemic to any government. For modern-day Islamic terrorists, it means baiting the West into invading Muslim nations to reveal to potential recruits and the Muslim world at large that the United States and its allies are enemies of Islam. For the Christian Identity terrorists, this meant polarizing the races into a would-be race war.
At first, the Minutemen resisted provocative acts of violence. DePugh personally stopped his Minutemen from assassinating Senator William Fulbright and Neiman Marcus business tycoon Stanley Marcus. In addition, after conceiving the plot himself, DePugh decided against an attack on the United Nations that would have dispersed cyanide through the ventilation system of the much-hated institution.
DePugh referred to his approach as the “principle of deliberate delay … which means all the emphasis is on recruiting and propaganda and stockpiling arms, so you don’t zap anybody till the outfit’s ready to function fully underground.”26 And stockpile they did. In 1965 law enforcement raided the residence of Minuteman Richard Lauchli. There officers seized “1,000 submachine guns” as well as “eight M-2 carbines, 43 rifles, shotguns and pistols, 36,000 rounds of ammunition, 58 antitank grenades, 17 60-millimeter mortar shells, 11 antipersonnel mines, four Army hand grenades, 21 pounds of black powder and two military rockets.” That same year law enforcement found “gun caches in at least six other states,” belonging to groups connected with the Minutemen, with weapons that included “rifles, bazookas, antitank guns and bayonets.” An investigative report from journalists in Denver found that in Colorado, the Minutemen kept stashes of weapons hidden at several key locations in the mountains. In California law enforcement “confiscated 800,000 rounds of ammunition, 400 machine guns, 10 antitank guns, and other warfare items” from Minutemen sympathizers. Most alarmingly, when the Minutemen allowed investigative reporter Eric Norden into one of their secret compounds, they showed him thirty four-foot-long rockets, which senior Minuteman leader Roy Frankhouser said could reach a target over several miles away.27
While on “deliberate delay,” DePugh and his group gathered intelligence on potential targets. In the Minutemen periodical, DePugh urged,
We must know our enemies by name, address and phone number. Their leaders must be subject to special scrutiny. We must know their habits, their likes, their strong and we
ak points. We must have a complete physical description of them. We must know the license number of their cars and where they are apt to hide in time of danger… . We must show the left-wing professor and the pro-communist minister that liberalism is not always a bed of roses. There are penalties which they too must pay for selling their country out.28
Former FBI agent and journalist William Turner, who in 1966 was given considerable access to Minutemen headquarters at Norborne, Missouri, described filing cabinets full of this kind of information, with as many as sixty-five thousand names of those who “manifested an ultra-liberal philosophy” according to DePugh. Turner noted that “new members spend three tedious months as part of their First Phase of Training poring over some 600 ‘left wing’ periodicals culling names.” Among those selected were the noted television news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. The “First Phase of Training” referenced by Turner was one of “five rigorous phases of training” that culled would-be Minutemen down to a “fanatical hardcore who dangle Crusader’s Crosses inscribed ‘We Will Never Surrender’ around their necks and who fully understand that to defect automatically brings the mark of death.”29
In 1966, as race riots continued to rage inside the United States, the Minutemen became more proactive. They formed a separate political party, the Patriot Party, which ultimately endorsed George Wallace for president, and they began to engage in more overt acts of terrorism. But for the efforts of law enforcement, several major attacks could have caused serious damage and untold casualties.
One of the most publicized would-be attacks is also one of the most revealing when it comes to understanding the danger posed by the Minutemen. In 1966 multiple law enforcement agencies, in a joint sting operation, raided a Minuteman compound in upstate New York. The goal: stop an impending siege by the Minutemen on three leftist retreats. If the arsenal of weapons recovered by law enforcement was any indication, the Minutemen planned on a very bloody affair. The cache included “1,000,000 rounds of rifle and small-arms ammunition, chemicals for preparing bomb detonators, considerable radio equipment—including 30 walkie-talkies and shortwave sets tuned to police bands, 125 single-shot and automatic rifles, 10 dynamite bombs, 5 mortars, 12 .30-caliber machine guns, 25 pistols, 240 knives (hunting, throwing, cleaver and machete), 1 bazooka, 3 grenade launchers, 6 hand grenades and 50 80-millimeter mortar shells. For good measure, there was even a crossbow replete with curare-tipped arrows.”30
The dozen or so men arrested in the plot, which included a wealthy upstate businessman and senior Minuteman official, were described by Norden as “a cabdriver, a gardener, a subway conductor, a fireman, a mechanic, a plasterer, a truck driver, a heavy-equipment operator, a draftsman, several small businessman, a horse groom and two milkmen. Most were respectable family men in their late 20s or early 30s, known to their neighbors as solid, church-going pillars of the community.” Unbeknownst to their neighbors, these men were also stockpiling weapons. A copywriter cached “machine guns … bazookas … mortars” and an “antitank missile launcher.” A businessman stored “hyperdermic needles … rifles … shotguns … and 5000 rounds of ammunition.”
Just as disturbing to law enforcement was the discovery that three members of the New York State Police had secretly acquired the weapons for the Minutemen. For years, many members of law enforcement saw the group as toy soldiers and did not believe their boasts of having members hidden among all walks of American life, including in the business community and law enforcement agencies. By 1966, however, state law enforcement agencies had begun to take the Minutemen much more seriously. Speaking of the entire milieu of right-wing radicals, one New York investigator insisted, “Kooks they are, harmless they are not… . It’s only due to their incompetence, and not any lack of motivation, that they haven’t left a trail of corpses in their wake.”31
Another discovery by law enforcement confirmed what investigative reporters Eric Norden and William Turner unearthed: Machiavellian efforts by the Minutemen to provoke racial conflict by inflaming the black community. The reporters found fake pamphlets, designed to look like Black nationalist propaganda, urging blacks to riot. “Kill the white devils and have the women for your pleasure” the pamphlets read. At one point, Minutemen sped through black neighborhoods tossing these pamphlets out the window.
In FBI files, more alarming evidence emerged. Several independent informants spoke to plans by the Minutemen to provoke a racial civil war by assassinating key black civil rights figures such as James Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. If this sounds familiar, it should be noted that the shift away from a strategy of “deliberate delay” toward a more proactive stance that included alarming levels of weapons hoarding and efforts to antagonize the black community came as followers of the Christian Identity movement assumed highly influential roles inside the Minutemen. Indeed, almost every single leader—save perhaps for DePugh—had direct ties or exposure to Swift’s church. This group included Wally Peyson, DePugh’s “right-hand man”; the Reverend Kenneth Goff, head of the largest subunit of the Minutemen; Frankhouser, one of the leading Minutemen organizers on the East Coast; and Dennis Mower, another West Coast organizer. Peyson was a minister in Swift’s church; Goff was also a CI minister, and Frankhouser would soon become one; Mower was one of Swift’s chief aides. It is no wonder that, in their strategy, the Minutemen increasingly began to see their inevitable revolution inside the United States as a civil war and as a race war. They also increasingly became openly anti-Semitic in their rhetoric. Norden describes the following exchange with Frankhouser:
“Have Minutemen been involved in inciting the race riots?” I asked.
“You mean shooting at both sides to heat things up?” He smiled. “Not yet. Right now we can afford to just stand back on the side lines and pick up the pieces; we’re the inheritors of social bankruptcy, you might say. And the same holds true for the black nationalists; after each bloody riot they get a lot of uncommitted niggers going over to their side. It’s sort of a symbiotic situation. Let them shoot the Jews on their list, we’ll shoot the Jews on ours, and then we can shoot each other!”
Most of the group’s following—between five thousand and ten thousand direct members and thirty thousand to forty thousand supporters, according to the best estimates—likely had no connection to Christian Identity. They were simply antigovernment activists who saw, in the growth of the militant American left and black nationalism, evidence that America was heading toward communist subversion and widespread disorder—and they prepared accordingly. But those same fears could be harnessed by those who wanted to polarize the races to foment the race war.
What stood in their way was an equally cunning and Machiavellian response by the national government, one that at times created problems as surely as it solved them. Law enforcement agencies and the military feared extremists on both ends of the political spectrum and targeted them accordingly.
In the late 1960s, the radical right and militant left shared a deep hatred for the American political establishment. The militant left saw the consensus between New Deal liberals and moderate Republicans on America’s makeshift social safety net as a tonic that dulled the public from pursuing much more radical reforms of capitalism. The radical right saw that same consensus as evidence of a growing shift toward communism, especially with the advent of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. For the militant left, the broad foreign policy consensus behind cold war containment was an excuse to send working-class whites and urban blacks to die to expand the influence of capitalism around the world. For the radical right, the failure to go above and beyond in that fight showed weakness in the face of the alarming spread of world communism. Of course, for the religious radicals who followed Wesley Swift, all of this was part of the “beast system”—the beast being the Antichrist (aka Jews) working on Satan’s behalf in the time before God’s final judgment.
The establishment all but ignored the religious dimensions of the violence and disorder that marked the 1960s.
Yet, as the decade proceeded, more and more of those in power began to fear what the radical religious extremists coveted: another American civil war, even some kind of race war. Rightly or wrongly, the establishment realized something had to be done. Those in charge of America’s domestic security—the FBI, the National Guard, local law enforcement—acted accordingly.
The central military planners at the Department of Defense adjusted America’s entire national security posture. While keeping foreign policy focused on preventing the spread of communism, military leaders also concerned themselves with domestic security. They feared what one historian called a “made-in-America Tet Offensive”32 on domestic soil—a sudden, possibly coordinated series of urban uprisings that would spread like a wildfire and push America toward civil war. The growing violence associated with protests against the Vietnam War only reinforced this fear. In 1966, having found themselves forced into a supporting role during the Watts riots in 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created an ongoing, formal operation, first known as Operation Steep Hill and ultimately as Operation Garden Plot. The operation parlayed the recently created U.S. Army Intelligence Command, a collection of military intelligence groups with a focus on domestic security, into an intelligence-gathering operation aimed at watching America’s political and urban hotspots and spying on antiwar and radical-left groups. The focus increasingly became geared toward preemption or rapid response in the event of civil disorder.33