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

by Stuart Wexler

  Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that McVeigh and Nichols pursued the bombing plot with limited outside assistance comes from an ironic and unlikely source. In 2007 Nichols revealed to private and government investigators a wider conspiracy in the Murrah bombing. Already serving several years of a life sentence at a super-maximum-security prison, Nichols offered a number of shocking claims in an affidavit. Among other things, Nichols insisted that McVeigh and Roger Moore were agent provocateurs who, at the behest of FBI agent Larry Potts (who had managed the raid at Ruby Ridge), had used the bomb plot to lure “others unknown” into some kind of sting operation. Nichols said that McVeigh eventually made contact with the intended targets but that Nichols never met and could not identify any of them, although Nichols implied that these others were connected to Andreas Strassmeir, a friend of McVeigh’s per Nichols’s affidavit. Nichols insisted that McVeigh and Moore had staged the robbery of Moore’s rare gun collection to provide Moore with plausible cover in the event that McVeigh’s crimes in “the line of duty” could be connected back to Moore. Nichols said that McVeigh admitted all of this to him not long before the bombing. Nichols’s affidavit fundamentally limits his own role. He claimed that the bomb that eventually detonated in Oklahoma City was different from the one that he and McVeigh had designed together in Kansas, and he insisted that he had gone to the Philippines to avoid any connection to McVeigh’s deeds. In its essence, Nichols implied something along the lines of what Strassmeir told Evans-Pritchard: that the bombing was a government operation gone awry.48

  On the face of it, the Nichols story is absurd, and the timing of its release is highly suspicious. For one thing, if McVeigh had detonated the bomb as some sort of bungled government operation, he has to go down as the most dutiful FBI undercover agent in history, because McVeigh not only carried out the operation but he steadfastly allowed himself to be executed without so much as hinting at his service to the FBI. He also put on an Oscar-caliber performance for more than a decade, convincing everyone from associates to family members, friends, investigative reporters, and defense lawyers that he hated the federal government. None questioned his sincerity. More to the point, Nichols’s decision to keep this information from the public for more than a decade is completely counterintuitive. If the account is true, Nichols denied himself an incredibly powerful defense that could have minimized his role in one of the most gruesome attacks in American history. He had no reason to protect McVeigh, who, if Nichols’s account is correct, allowed his onetime army buddy to spend the rest of his life in a federal prison for unwittingly helping a government operation.

  But if one discounts Nichols’s story, which conveniently melds together elements from various well-publicized conspiracy theories, the question persists: Why didn’t Nichols tell a pro-conspiracy story back in 1995? Why doesn’t he have a more plausible story to tell now? Nichols could have minimized his involvement and possibly reduced his own sentence by implicating coconspirators. Fortier received a reduced sentence for doing just that (testifying against McVeigh and Nichols). It stands to reason that if the Oklahoma City Bombing was a top-down plot originating from Elohim City and sponsored by the ARA, Nichols would have been privy to some or most of the particulars. Yet Nichols seems content to spend the rest of his life in prison hiding this fact. A more logical suggestion is that if some individuals aided and abetted Nichols and McVeigh, their roles were either too minor or too indirect to warrant Nichols’s attention. Or, said individuals found their way into the conspiracy at the last minute, as McVeigh literally moved closer to Oklahoma City while Nichols became less important to the execution of the attack.

  The reports of early warnings and roving bomb-squad units at the Murrah Federal Building, if accurate, suggest that the government was responding in an ad hoc fashion to prevent an attack because it had limited information. Rumors of a McVeigh–Nichols plot may have spread from places like Elohim City throughout the wider extremist community and even dovetailed with parallel plots being proposed by other radicals. Perhaps these rumors reached the ears of federal agents through undercover informants. Strassmeir painted a picture to Evans-Pritchard of bureaucratic compartmentalization, with one agency trying to prevent an attack while another agency was simultaneously trying to harness the plot in some sort of major sting operation. That too remains a disturbing possibility.

  The most likely scenario, which helps explain the most data, suggests that McVeigh reached out for assistance at various times when the circumstances demanded it or when the opportunity presented itself—for instance, when he needed money to finance the bombing operation or when he needed expertise to help design the ANFO bomb. In obtaining or pursuing that assistance, McVeigh may well have exposed the broad outlines of his intended operation to government informants, whose handlers either failed to take the McVeigh plot seriously or saw an opportunity to mount a sting operation. In either of those two scenarios, federal agencies, in their incompetence, failed to prevent the actual attack and would have ample reason to cover up any connection between McVeigh and their undercover operatives. But until additional materials are released by the government, all of this remains speculative.

  Less speculative are the leading roles played by Nichols and especially McVeigh in planning the bombing. McVeigh’s claims that antigovernment hostility motivated his activity to the exclusion of all other impulses seems to be a case of the subject gilding his own biography. As noted earlier, it is very likely that anti-Jewish and racist sentiments, maybe even a sense of a divine calling, combined with McVeigh’s radical patriotism to produce the Oklahoma City bombing. In that sense, McVeigh, at the very least, represents some sort of unwitting soldier in the Christian Identity army. To the extent that he had help, McVeigh also represents a transitional figure between the type of organized violence sponsored by the Order and the ARA and the grassroots, lone-wolf violence anticipated by Louis Beam. By the mid-1990s, Beam’s vision was increasingly becoming a reality for domestic religious terrorism. It remains a reality to this day.

  14

  ZEALOUS FOR HONOR

  LONE-WOLF TERRORISM through the NEW MILLENNIUM

  America in the 1990s saw an alarming amount of racist and anti-Jewish violence, rivaling the horrors of the 1960s. The year 1999 stood out for the number of high-profile attacks. The Associated Press reported on June 19, 1999: “Arsonists Set Three Synagogues on Fire in Sacramento Area.”

  The fires, that the Associated Press said were set by arsonists within minutes of each other, “caused moderate damage to two synagogues and gutted a third temple’s library.” Months later, two brothers, twenty-nine-year-old James Tyler Williams and thirty-one-year old Benjamin Williams, pled guilty to charges of “conspiracy, arson and destruction of religious property.”1

  They were also charged with firebombing of an abortion clinic. In a separate trial, a jury found the two brothers guilty of murdering a gay couple, Winfield Mowder and Gary Matson, in northern California on July 1, 1999. Both brothers, raised in a devout, fundamentalist Christian household, had become enamored with Christian Identity theology as teenagers. Of the arson, which caused $3 million in damages, Ben Williams said, “I kind of regretted they didn’t burn to the ground.” Of the murder, he asserted, “I am not guilty of murder. I’m guilty of obeying the laws of the Creator.” Hoping for a death sentence that he ultimately did not receive, he hoped he would become a “Christian martyr,” according to the AP, and “encourage others to kill homosexuals, Jews and other minorities.”2

  Days after the Matson and Mowder murder, white supremacist violence struck America’s heartland. The AP reported, “Gunman on Spree Kills 2nd Victim: White Supremacist Terrorizes Midwest.”

  During that Independence Day weekend, Benjamin Smith, a twenty-one-year-old “ex-member of a white supremacist church” traveled through Chicago and Indiana, engaging in a series of “drive-by shootings, targeting his .380 semiautomatic and .22 caliber handgun at Asians, Orthodox Jews, and blacks. A dozen peo
ple were injured and three killed—including Smith, who pointed a gun under his chin during a chase by police.”3 Smith left no note or explanation for his actions. But he belonged to the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), the social-Darwinian, pantheistic theology started by Ben Klassen in the 1970s, which argued that a race war—and the triumph of the white race—was the preordained and inevitable destiny of mankind.

  “In Wake of Shooting, a Frantic Search Ensues,” wrote the Associated Press on August 11, 1999. One day before, Buford Oneal Furrow had “strode into” the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles “and wordlessly started pulling the trigger,” firing “more than 70 bullets from an assault-style gun before slipping away and vanishing in metropolitan Los Angeles.” Isabelle Shalometh, a receptionist, “dove behind the counter as bullets shredded a stack of papers on a desk, grazed her back and arm and hammered into the walls… . In seconds, a setting of swimming lessons, art classes and summer fun turned into a scene filled with random horror.”4 Furrow wounded five people at the center, including a five-year-old boy, who sustained bullet wounds to his abdomen and leg and required six hours of surgery. An hour later, on the lam, Furrow killed a postal worker, Joseph Ileto. Furrow later said that he saw Ileto, whom he shot nine times, as “a target of opportunity,” in part because Ileto worked for the federal government but also because Furrow thought the Filipino mail carrier was Hispanic.

  When he turned himself in to authorities on August 12, Furrow, who had once worked at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, assumed that he had killed far more people. “You are looking for me” he matter-of-factly told police in Las Vegas. “I killed the kids in Los Angeles.” Like Ben Williams, he wanted his attack on the Jewish community center “to be a wake-up call to America to kill Jews” according to an FBI source who spoke anonymously to the AP.5

  The series of attacks in the summer of 1999 worried Jews and minority groups across the nation. On September 6, 1999, the New York Times printed the headline, “Synagogues, Responding to Violence, Add Security as High Holy Days Near.” The article began, “After a year of high-profile anti-Semitic violence … Jewish groups in the New York metropolitan region are planning increased security for services during the approaching High Holy Days.”

  The groups, which the Times described as paying for “extra police patrols, private security guards and new alarms and surveillance cameras,” were prescient. Within just a few days of the Times article, “the tires of three cars parked at the South Huntington (L.I.) Jewish Center were slashed while their owners attended pre-High Holy Day services Saturday night, and a few hours later in Centereach, L.I., other vandals scrawled swastikas and anti-Semitic and anti-black epithets on a public school.” Given the concentration of these transgressions in Suffolk County, New York, many questioned whether the vandalism was connected to an August 15, 1999, arson fire at the business office of Temple Beth Chai in Hauppauge, New York. That crime has never been solved.

  The anti-Jewish and racist attacks did not abate as the new millennium approached.

  On November 30, 1999, an eight-liter bottle filled with concrete smashed against a window of Temple Emanu-El in Reno, Nevada’s oldest Jewish house of worship. Carl DeAmicis, an “unemployed drifter from the Sacramento area,” then threw a Molotov cocktail at the front of the window, thinking it would breach damaged glass and ignite inside the synagogue. But the first projectile had only damaged, not shattered, the window; the firebomb “only scorched the sidewalk.” Despite his failed effort, DeAmicis, who joined three other men in the attack, still received his mark of honor from his fellow supremacists: a “4-inch-high swastika just above the right ear on DeAmicis’ shaved head. It was outlined in black and red in the middle.”6

  Law enforcement investigators at first thought the Reno attack might be connected to the attacks in Sacramento. But the fact was that nothing connected the multiple racist and anti-Semitic attacks across the United States that started during the summer of 1999. In 1999 no group assumed the role the Confederate Underground had played in 1957–1958, linking synagogue fire bombings from region to region. There were no obvious puppet masters, no J.B. Stoners or Sam Bowers masterminding events. By 1999 Louis Beam’s vision of leaderless resistance seemed prophetic; it appeared as if individuals and very small groups were spontaneously engaging in violence, in aggregate sparking fear in the supposed “Zionist Occupied Government.”

  In that sense, and in many other ways, the events of 1999 represented a culmination of the domestic, religious-based terrorism during the fifteen years that preceded the millennium and foreshadowed the fifteen years of domestic, religious-based terrorism that followed it. The developments followed federal raids against the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord and its close cousin, the Order, in the early to mid-1980s, and their effects could be seen as late as December 2014 in a Christian Identity shooting spree in Austin, Texas. From 1985 to 2014, with the far right more decentralized than ever, religious terrorism evolved in a number of significant ways: to target a wider range of “infidels,” as was the case with the Williams brothers’ offenses; to involve a more diverse set of racist theologies, as was the case with Ben Smith’s attack; to embrace lone-wolf terrorism not simply as a tactic but as religious imperative, as was the case with Buford Furrow; and to exploit an increasingly younger, more suburban, and more urban caste of radicals, as was the case with the arson attempt in Nevada. At the same time, federal and local law enforcement finally started to appreciate the nuances and challenges of dealing with religiously motivated terrorists. That they have yet to fully internalize those insights is reflected in their myopic approach to the events in Hauppauge.

  The Williams brothers were true lone wolves—self-radicalized into Christian Identity without the mentorship of someone like CSA founder Jim Ellison. They lacked any of the connections to white supremacist leaders and organizations enjoyed by Robert Mathews and his close aides in the Order. Nor did the Williams brothers embrace the kind of paramilitary, survivalist lifestyle favored by these groups. They lived in and operated out of suburban areas, not in some isolated rural or mountain compound. But in other key ways, the groups led by Mathews and Ellison anticipated the activities of the Williams brothers. Like the Williams brothers, the Order had composed a hit list for assassinations. Significantly, Robert Mathews’s list included not only Jews like Alan Berg but also prominent homosexuals, a target largely ignored by hate groups in the 1960s and 1970s. But as homosexuals became increasingly open and accepted in American society, they became targets for white supremacists, especially Christian Identity adherents. As early as 1983, individuals from the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord had set fire to a gay-friendly church in Missouri. Christian Identity–influenced skinhead groups, of which much more will be said shortly, increasingly engaged in gay bashing throughout the 1990s. In murdering a gay couple in 1999, the Williams brothers took this trend even further.

  Similarly, in targeting an abortion clinic, the brothers assailed another class of enemy increasingly popular among religious terrorists. For obvious reasons, attacks against abortion clinics were all but unknown prior 1973. Then the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, forbade state legislatures from criminalizing the medical procedure. The first reports of antiabortion arson date to 1976. Attacks inspired by religion tended to increase and track with the general increase in antiabortion activism that grew to a crescendo in the early 1980s, fueled by the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian right. The number of attacks reached its apex in 1984 with “eighteen bombings, six cases of arson, six cases of attempted bombing or arson, twenty-three death threats, and nearly seventy clinic invasions with acts of vandalism.”7 The group most associated with antiabortion violence was the Army of God, led by minister Michael Bray. In his ethical defense of antiabortion violence, called A Time to Kill, Bray argued, “We do not know the best strategy to resist the evil of ‘abortion.’ But we cannot condemn that forceful, even lethal, action which is applied f
or the purpose of saving innocent children.”8 Many mistake the Army of God for a Christian Identity group or offshoot—partly because both groups share an orthodox view of the Bible, honoring Old Testament practices that have been abandoned by even most fundamentalist Christians. But whereas both groups believe that human beings must help bring the secular world in line with God’s teachings to facilitate the end-times, the Army of God does not share the radical reinterpretation of the book of Genesis that is unique to Christian Identity and that shapes the character of its eschatology. In short, the Army of God does not share Christian Identity’s anti-Semitism and racism.

  Part of the confusion over the connection between Christian Identity and the Army of God may stem from the actions of Eric Rudolph, infamous for bombing abortion clinics throughout the Southeast and for detonating explosives at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Rudolph grew up in Topton, North Carolina. His mother exposed him to Identity teachings from minister Nord Davis, who operated a nearby compound. He also spent part of his teenage years in Schell City, Missouri, where he was influenced by the teachings of Identity preacher Dan Gayman. As noted in Chapter 9, Davis and Gayman both became influential figures in contemporary Christian Identity circles. But while both advocated two-seedline theology, they did not push for the same kind of proactive violence advocated by predecessors like William Gale and Wesley Swift. Davis’s followers still stockpile weapons in preparation for Armageddon, but they are separatists who divorce themselves from America’s mixed-race society. Moreover, it is not clear that Christian Identity ideas even resonated with Rudolph in adulthood, and he specifically denied any affinity for them. Nor did Rudolph have any direct connection to the Army of God, although some suspect that the group provided Rudolph with aid and comfort for the five-year period (1998 to 2003) when he evaded law enforcement while ensconcing himself in the dense forests of Appalachia. Rudolph appears to be another lone wolf, but one who opposed abortion for different reasons than the Williams brothers. For Christian Identity zealots like the two brothers, opposition to abortion, and violence against abortion clinics, was rooted in the threat that widespread abortion supposedly posed to the future of the white race. For Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, legal abortion was part of the “Jewish anti-Christ strategy” for “TOTAL ELIMINATION OF THE WHITE ARYAN NATIONS FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.”9