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

by Stuart Wexler

  But if the Obama administration is making a mistake in conceiving of the problem too broadly, the president’s critics are failing to apprehend the dangers that come with lack of precision in defining one’s enemy. Here too the history of Christian Identity terrorism would benefit those sincerely concerned with domestic security. As noted many times, not all Christian Identity believers favor proactive violence. The failure to make that distinction may well have inspired almost a decade’s worth of terrorism in the 1990s. No event did more to radicalize domestic terrorists than the raid on Randy Weaver’s Idaho estate in 1992, when Weaver’s wife and son were killed by federal agents. As noted in Chapter 13, Weaver believed in a passive form of Christian Identity. He was a survivalist and a white separatist, not a Robert Mathews type convinced that violence would bring about a white utopia and ready to die in a blaze of glory. But in conflating Weaver with the latter type of Identity militant, the government grossly mistook him as a threat and responded in a disproportionate manner.

  A similar lack of nuance applied to the raid on Waco in 1993. David Koresh may have deserved some level of scrutiny from law enforcement, but the Branch Davidians were not the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. The irony is that in the latter raid, the government did a better job of negotiating a surrender. The unintended consequences of this lack of precision also include the Oklahoma City Bombing, as well as many lone-wolf attacks.

  Even a label as exacting as “militant Salafi jihadist” could be problematic in the so-called War on Terror, as Al Qaeda and ISIS are actually rivals that compete for the same pool of potential recruits. Al Qaeda favors the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian religious scholar whose time spent in the United States in the 1940s convinced him that the “far enemy”—the United States and the West—represented the greatest threat to the Muslim community by way of cultural imperialism and moral corruption. His student Ayman Al-Zawarhiri became Osama Bin Laden’s chief advisor and has run the group since Bin Laden’s death. On the other hand, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in placing an emphasis on a caliphate in the Middle East, is more concerned with the “near enemy”—nations like Jordan and Saudi Arabia that do not apply an orthodox-enough version of Sharia law. This distinction is a matter of priorities more than anything else; Al-Zawarhiri despises the “infidels” in the West, and al-Baghdadi despises what he sees as Western puppet governments in the Arab world. Differences between the two groups suggest different responses and courses of action—possibly attempting to pit one group against the other.

  Fomenting factionalism, not just between but within groups, became an important part of law enforcement’s efforts to subvert white supremacist organizations in the United States, whether the group was secular or influenced by Christian Identity. Anyone who shares a religious worldview like Christian Identity—who imagines that the forces of the devil are constantly conspiring against him—is inherently prone to paranoia. So infiltrating, surveilling, coopting, and subverting such people are all highly effective strategies. Such human intelligence is as important as electronic intelligence in fighting terrorist organizations. But targeting nonviolent groups such as the SCLC with the same tactics one would apply to the Black Panthers has not only undermined legitimate forms of dissent that are valuable within a democracy but also wasted valuable resources.

  Conserving resources also means taking stock of the government’s failures when employing human sources rather than burying and concealing these failures. One can only imagine the time and money wasted infiltrating subversive groups that cannot be punished because the government operation veered into any number of improprieties, from informants running amuck to informants provoking actual violence. This is to say nothing about the cost in human lives and property when terrorists start operating with some sense of immunity. Ignoring the mistakes of the past or hiding them from future law enforcement agents and task forces contributes to a lack of institutional memory, which makes the same failures much more likely in the future. (Federal law enforcement agencies can start to rectify this deficit by releasing files and materials related to the crimes discussed in this book, many of which are more than thirty years old.)

  The type of pseudo-entrapment seen in the Newburgh case was not new in domestic counterterrorism, and the practice has continued after 2011. This has helped contribute to the impression that the government is profiling or out to get Muslims—an impression that is likely to persist if politicians continue speaking broadly about “Islamic radicalism” without being more precise. In so doing, the United States is making itself less, not more, safe, because the government is increasingly alienating one of the most important resources America has in preventing a domestic attack: the Muslim American community. America’s frontline defense against any effort by an Al Qaeda phantom cell to launch a mass-casualty attack would be Muslim Americans who could work in conjunction with the FBI and local police to identify suspicious characters in their own communities. As terrorism expert Tony Gaskew has argued, “Muslim Americans are the resident experts on Islam in the United States and the only reliable eyes and ears for law enforcement in their often ‘exclusive’ communities.”10

  Pundits ranging in ideological orientation from Sean Hannity to Bill Maher have shown a disrespect, bordering on contempt, toward Muslims in general, American Muslims included. If the goal is to protect American security rather than score points in some sort of culture war, to officially label the current conflict the “war on radical Islam” suggests bad faith. The spirit behind President Obama’s refusal to use the term radical Islam is important; the country does not benefit from alienating its law-abiding Muslim community. If Muslim Americans distrust the government and law enforcement, if they fear they could be targets rather than allies in the fight against terrorists, it could undermine the very security Obama’s critics claim to hold dear.

  If those same pundits argue that a more precise definition of the enemy, “militant Salafi jihadism,” is too complicated for Americans to understand, they miss the point of naming one’s enemy in the first place. The goal is to understand the threat and to direct limited resources against those most likely to do the country harm. American law enforcement would be making a huge mistake if it treated members of the Westboro Baptist Church, however abhorrent one may find their views and practices, with the same scrutiny and tactics that it directs at the Aryan Nations. The latter is violent; the former is a nuisance.

  In his article for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood highlights a similar distinction between militant Salafis and what he calls Salafi quietists. The latter are reminiscent of Randy Weaver in that they embrace the hardcore belief system of their fellow militants, but they do not favor violence. In Wood’s estimation, the kind of propaganda war implied in President Obama’s approach of combatting “extremism” can go only so far. It might prevent someone from becoming radicalized, but it is unlikely to “reform” someone who has already become radical. Defining one’s enemy precisely, in this case, means accepting the reality of “extremist” thought, perhaps by funneling budding extremists into the quietest camp, to minimize the potential for extremist violence.

  A similarly pragmatic, if risky, approach has never been tried with homegrown religious terrorism in part because it has yet to be taken as seriously as it should be. Many of the very same people who demand that the Obama administration make “radical Islam” the centerpiece of America’s antiterrorism campaign have openly worked against acknowledging almost any kind of homegrown terrorism. A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that pointed out the sharp rise in hate groups since President Obama’s election and argued that economic and political conditions (as they always have) could push right-wing groups to violence was lambasted by conservative media icons. Conservative blogger and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin called it a “piece of crap report” and a “hit job on conservatives,” and her views were hardly exceptional. In fairness to Malkin, the term right-wing, and even far right, is in
many ways too imprecise, and the DHS report should have been more nuanced.

  But a 2013 report that did attempt to draw those kinds of distinctions, written by Professor Arie Perliger, a scholar at West Point Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, drew a similar, if more muted, reaction.11 Although Perliger continued with the broad label “far-right terrorists,” he divided terrorist groups into three main subgroups: racist/white supremacy groups (like the KKK, the Hammerskins, and the National Alliance), anti-federalist groups (like militias), and religious fundamentalist groups (like antiabortion and Christian Identity organizations). The conservative overreaction was almost breathtakingly defensive: the head of the American Life League, Julie Brown, called the report a smear tactic against prolife activists. A constitutional law professor, Herb Titus, called Perliger a “propagandist” for the Obama administration who “disagrees with those who favor small government, cutting back of federal government encroachments upon the powers of the state, and to discredit this movement [he] focuses on a few gun-toting militia.”12

  Politicizing Perliger’s report meant ignoring very important data. He had tabulated twenty years’ worth of incidents of domestic terrorism and violence and offered some important insights. The KKK had perpetrated the largest number of attacks (264) in that span, but it was much less likely than other groups to engage in mass-casualty attacks that targeted human beings (as opposed to property). Skinheads had engaged in 205 violent acts, numerous enough to secure second place among radical groups, but these young militants were much more likely to target human beings (96 percent of the time) than the KKK (28 percent of the time.) Christian Identity groups, to whom Perliger attributed only sixty-six attacks since 1991, had targeted human beings nearly as often as skinheads (94 percent of the time) but did so through mass-casualty attacks far more often than skinheads (13.6 percent versus 2.4 percent). The only groups to “outperform” Christian Identity terrorists were militias, but the numbers were highly skewed by Timothy McVeigh’s and Terry Nichols’s 1995 Oklahoma City attack.

  That the bombing of the Murrah Building qualifies as a militia attack illustrates one of the weaknesses of Perliger’s report. Without question, McVeigh and Nichols both actively associated with militia groups, but they never were officially tied to any group. On the other hand, McVeigh may have been influenced by Christian Identity ideas and likely looked for help and assistance from Christian Identity radicals. Skinheads, as noted in Chapter 14, were highly influenced by Christian Identity teachings as well as Odinist and Creativity theologies, neither of which are counted in Perliger’s statistics. To his credit, Perliger recognized the influences of Identity on other groups, writing that the theology:

  Functioned as a source of intellectual inspiration and moral justification for the violent activities and operations of ideologically related movements. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the prominent ideologues of the white supremacist and anti-federalist movements intensively cooperated with—and at times saw themselves as part of—the fundamentalist movement. This dynamic allowed the penetration of non-identity ideas into the movement, and in many ways facilitated the narrowing of the gaps between the fundamentalist movement and other streams of the American far right.13

  But his quantitative analysis does not consider the degree to which these movements cross-affiliated and shared ideological influences. As noted time and time again, Identity leaders control and Identity theology permeates many KKK groups and skinhead organizations, even patriot militias. Part of Perliger’s problem is his misreading of history. In echoes of the Megiddo report, he asserts that “the fundamentalist movement’s militant and violent nature was relatively late to develop. For many years … the fundamentalist movement did not produce violent subgroups.”14 Had he understood the dynamics of groups such as the Christian Defense League, the National States Rights Party, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi (under Sam Bowers), or the Minutemen, perhaps he would have been more open to the idea that Identity leaders spent their “early development” appropriating the agenda of groups like the KKK. They did the same over the next four decades with farmers’ protest movements, anti-immigration groups, anti-federalist groups, and skinheads, becoming more open about their goals for a race war while the white supremacist movement became more and more decentralized in the face of law enforcement scrutiny.

  But for a fortunate stroke of fate, Perliger and others may have become much more aware of this history in the early 1990s. Scott Shepherd, the onetime Grand Dragon for the Tennessee KKK, recently discussed a journey he once took with Byron de la Beckwith, Medgar Evers’s convicted assassin. In the late 1980s, Shepherd developed a close relationship with the onetime White Knight; Beckwith even attempted to convince Shepherd to become a Phineas priest. Beckwith rarely asked Shepherd to go on long car rides, but, as Shepherd would learn, this was a special occasion. The trip occurred sometime near the turn of the decade (1980s to 1990s). The destination was Meridian, Mississippi, and a meeting with Sam Bowers. Joining Bowers and Beckwith was J.B. Stoner.

  Both Bowers and Stoner had been more or less inactive in recent years—Stoner for the obvious reason that he had only just been released from prison, and Bowers because the WKKKKOM had vanished over time under the management of L.E. Matthews in the 1970s (while Bowers was in prison). They did not discuss the Order at that meeting, but on later occasions Beckwith made it clear to Shepherd that the Silent Brotherhood helped inspire the old hands to return to terrorism. Bowers and Stoner made it clear at the meeting that they wanted back in, and in a major way.

  According to Shepherd, the men began outlining the contours of a major terrorist operation. The idea would be to harness the growing skinhead movement, by way of the Hammerskins. Records show that both Stoner and his friend Ed Fields had developed ties to skinheads in Georgia. The plan would involve decentralizing the Hammerskins into strike teams, similar in structure and function to the phantom cells described by Louis Beam. Some signal would trigger the strike teams to begin their operation: blowing up federal buildings and assassinating prominent African Americans. But the 1990s marked renewed interest by law enforcement in solving decades-old civil rights cold cases, such as the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing (likely masterminded by Stoner) and the murder of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer (ordered by Bowers). The three old hands at that meeting in Meridian faced law enforcement scrutiny at a level they had not experienced since the 1960s and were forced to abandon their plans. The prosecution of Beckwith in 1994 jump-started a wave of new prosecutions. In 1998 justice also found Sam Bowers, who was convicted of ordering the Dahmer slaying. Both men died in prison, Beckwith in 2001 and Bowers in 2006. Stoner escaped further justice for his past crimes but suffered from ill health, according to Shepherd. He died in 2005 in his home state of Georgia.

  If the foiled plot outlined by Stoner, Bowers, and Beckwith at that Meridian meeting bore striking similarities to Identity conspiracies of the past, it was no accident. Bowers, who in 1964 had talked about strike teams and assassination plots to an audience of White Knights days before the Neshoba murders, said that he wanted to revive the old playbook. The three zealots discussed their objective openly in front of Shepherd: “It was a race war plan,” they argued, “that was the plan from the start.”15

  APPENDIX: List of Key People and Groups

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  The Reverend Wesley Albert Swift, from California. Once an active leader in a KKK group, Swift formed the Church of Jesus Christ—Christian in 1946. Under his interpretation of the Christian scripture, Armageddon would come from a race war that would “cleanse” the world of Jews and other minorities. Tapes of Swift’s sermons were sent across North America through a mailing list and his message was amplified through a network of traveling ministers.

  Source: FBI Field Office.

  Samuel Holloway Bowers, Jr. The Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Bowers was heavily influenced by th
e racist message of Wesley Swift. Under his leadership, the White Knights were the most violent Klan group in America in the 1960s according to the FBI. Source: The Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  Sidney Crockett Barnes. An extremist who left Florida for Alabama in the 1960s, Barnes was one of Wesley Swift’s most devoted followers. He helped spread the Christian Identity message and the vision of an end-times race war to a number of individuals in the southeast, including to a young Tommy Tarrants, who become a terrorist for Sam Bowers. Files show that Barnes plotted to kill Martin Luther King in 1963 and 1964. Source: Jackson Field Office.

  J.B. Stoner, a leader and cofounder for the racist National States Rights Party. Stoner would run on the NSRP ticket as their Vice Presidential candidate in 1964. Alongside Connie Lynch, a minister for Wesley Swift, Stoner inflamed audiences across the country with his message of white supremacy. He was one of James Earl Ray’s attorneys.