vigilante history

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A PUBLIC GOOD PROJECT REPORT

OCTOBER 2005

Public Good ProjectPublic Good Project Phone 360 734 66421344 Humboldt Email [email protected], WA 98225 Web publicgood.org

Racist Origins of Border MilitiasRacist Origins of Border MilitiasRacist Origins of Border MilitiasRacist Origins of Border Militias

The history of white supremacist vigilantismand Tom Poseys Civilian Military Assistance

A sign on the US-Canadian border near Sumas, Washington

Paul de Armond


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The Public Good Project is a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and activists engaged in defending

democracy.

You can learn more about past Public Good projects by visiting our website at www.publicgood.org

Paul de Armond is an internationally recognized authority on American right-wing terrorism. He first gainedinternational attention on April 19, 1995, when he correctly identified the Oklahoma City bombing as the work

of Christian Patriot terrorists associated with white supremacist militias. This was two days before the FBI

abandoned their fruitless case theory that the bombing was the work of Arab terrorists. Mr.. de Armond has

provided consulting research and analysis on domestic terrorism to the United Nations, the Department of

Defense, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, various local and state law enforcement agencies as well as

congressional committees, state agencies and local governments. His recent articles have been published in

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board Forum, as

well as in TheAlbion Monitor, EastsideWeek, Bellinghams Every Other Weekly, and The Whatcom

Independent. He has contributed chapters to two ground-breaking books, Networks and Netwars: The Future

of Terror, Crime and Militancy, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, 2001 and Hype or Reality?: The New

Terrorism and Mass Casualty Attacks, Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, Washington DC, 1999.


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Overview

The current outbreak of right-wing paramilitary activity is the tenth time in the last 90years that extremists, criminals, white supremacists and domestic terrorists have

organized armed vigilante groups in the United States. This quasi-criminal activity has a

regular pattern of resurgence every decade. The last cycle in Whatcom County ended

with the FBI arresting seven members of John Pitners Washington State Militia on

weapons, explosives and conspiracy charges. All were convicted in federal court.

To date, the current crop of extremists does not appear to have gathered enough of a

local following to be an immediate threat to life and property. However, the usual pattern

is that after the public organizing fails to immediately accomplish their stated goals,

disgruntled members will turn to criminal activity. This has not happened yet and the

coordinated actions of local political and law enforcement leaders will have a profound

influence on how things go this time.

Sheriff Elfos unfortunate decision to pander to these troublemakers has already

drawn national attention to the area. Its not too late for Sheriff Elfo to disengage himself

from his support of these hooligans, but there is no need for any other local officials to

climb onto the Minutemens sinking ship.

In order to dispel any notions that the current resurgence is some sort of isolated

instance or a sui generis occurance, this report is a brief rundown on the past history of

this region regarding similar criminal and terrorist activities. There is continuity between

these events and the present indeed several characters appear repeatedly over the last

forty years and some of them are still present and active here. Several lessons can be

drawn from past history:

! Since the original Minutemen and the John Birch Society operated in the 1960s,

these groups have always made the cooption of law enforcement the first priority.

! Beginning in the 1970s with the Posse Comitatus, these attempts at subversion have

always initially focused on County Sheriffs departments.

! The failure of public organizing efforts has often been followed by a shift to

underground and criminal activities, some of which are violent domestic terrorism.

! There is a long history of involvement by white supremacists in paramilitary vigilante

activity.

! This area has been a hotbed of paramilitary organizing repeatedly evolving intodomestic terrorism for over forty years.

! Many of the individuals who participate in one cycle of vigilante / terrorist activity

reemerge in later cycles.

! All of these groups misrepresent themselves and over-claim membership far beyond

the actual number of participants


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1960s

Robert DePugh organized the original Minutemen group as a white supremacist

paramilitary group inside the John Birch Society. DePughs virulent anti-Semitism led to

his expulsion by Robert Welch JBS founder in 1963. Shortly afterward, Welch wrote a

pamphlet, The Neutralizers, denouncing the infiltration of the JBS by anti-Semites likeDePugh and Revilo Oliver. This sordid episode in American history is told in great detail

in Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raabs The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing

Extremism in America, 1790 1977, beginning on page 265.

After the public rejection of the Minutemen, the group transformed itself into an

underground terrorist organization. In Seattle, one cell attempted to blow up power

substations and stage bank robberies. The FBI quickly rounded them up. Other

Minutemen remained on the loose throughout Washington state. DePugh went on the

lam and was captured several years later. For the next ten years, various Minutemen

factions engaged in a series of robberies, assassination attempts and terrorist attacks.

In San Diego, a Minutemen group calling itself the Secret Army Organization (SAO)

staged a series of terrorist attacks against a local newspaper, attempted to assassinate a

local political leader wounding a woman in the attempt, planned an attack on the 1972

Republican national convention with crew-served weapons and called openly for the

assassination of President Richard Nixon. SAO supporters in Bellingham distributed flyers

for the assassination program and were investigated by the Secret Service and the FBI.

1970s

With the establishment of the Aryan Nations in Idaho, white supremacists throughout

the region rallied around a paramilitary group called the Posse Comitatus. Originally

formed in California by William Potter Gale, the Posse had a very large presence in thePacific Northwest.

In Portland, Oregon, Mike Beach attempted to wrest leadership of the Posse from

Gale and establish himself as the national leader. Posse vigilante action often involved

right-wing tax resistance, a continuing problem here in Whatcom County.

A central part of the Posse pseudo-legal theories was the claim that the County

Sheriff was the highest law enforcement office in the nation, the federal government being

an illegal fraud imposed on the country by secret conspirators working for the

international Zionist conspiracy. Hence the use of the acronym ZOG for Zionist

Occupation Government. Henceforth, Sheriffs across the country would find themselves

the initial target for white supremacist subversion campaigns.

Posse activities in Whatcom, Skagit and Snohomish counties continue at varying

levels from the 1970s to the present. More information on local Posse activity and its role

as the progenitor of the 1990s Washington State Militia can be found in Daniel Levitas

book The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.


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1980s

The Aryan Nations World Congress in the early 1980s marked the beginning of an

openly declared terrorist program that continues to this day. The slogan of the 1983 World

Congress was War in 84 and this was made manifest by the activities of the Bruders

Schweigen (Silent Brotherhood), more popularly known as the Order. Led by RobertMathews, the Order went on a rampage of murder, robbery and terrorism that culminated

in Mathews death in a shootout on Whidbey Island in December 1984. It is not often

mentioned that immediately prior to the shootout, key members of the Order holed up in

the Chuckanut mountains. More detailed information about the Order can be found in

Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardts book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside Americas Racist

Right.

In the Seattle area, Homer Brand and Gene Gooseman formed a local branch of the

Duck Club. This comically named right-wing group drew on many of the participants in

JBS and Posse activities from the preceding two decades. Ostensibly an anti-

Communist organization, the Duck Club was actually a nexus of right-wing tax resistance

and terrorism. Brand and Gooseman were deeply implicated in David Rices horrific

murder of the entire Goldmark family, having identified the Goldmarks as leaders of a

Communist conspiracy. Brand also cleaned up and sheltered the killer after he showed

up on Brands doorstep and announced, Ive killed them.

Brand and Gooseman would both be very active in Whatcom County for the next two

decades. Brand was one of the people providing tax advice to Whatcom County tax

resisters in the 1990s and also was a frequent attendee at the Washington State Militia

trial. Gene Gooseman made an appearance in Bellingham at a 1997 Citizens for Liberty

meeting in which he provided lessons on bomb-making. The Goldmark murders are

described in chapter 3: Reification and Sacrifice: The Goldmark Case in James Ahos

book, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy.

In California, Posse founder William Potter Gale established the prototype of all latermilitia groups as the Unorganized Militia. The use of the word unorganized comes from

Gales famous misinterpretation of the federal law establishing the relationship between

the state National Guard units and the Army Reserver. This law states that all American

males between the ages of 18 and 45 are considered members of the unorganized

militia and can be called up for national service. Gale misinterpreted this law to mean that

it authorized forming private armies to actively resist the federal government.

Gales bizarre theory of the unorganized militia would play a very prominent role in

the militia outbreak of the 1990s. Gale and others were indicted and convicted of

conspiracy to interfere with the Internal Revenue Service through terrorist activity. One of

the initial members of Gales Unorganized Militia was killed in a shootout with law

enforcement. For more information on William Potter Gale, see Levitas book mentioned

previously, Cheri Seymours Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Rightand JamesAhos The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism.

Following the Order shootout, the FBI launched a belated and somewhat hapless

national drive to suppress right-wing domestic terrorism. This culminated in a spectacular

trial for conspiracy and sedition in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The trial was a disaster for the

federal government and actually strengthened the white supremacist terrorist networks.

One of the indictees, Louis Beam, was a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in


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Texas and also founder of the Texas Emergency Reserve, a racist militia that harassed

Vietnamese shrimp fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico.

Beam wrote a paper on Leaderless Resistance that would become a key part of the

militia organizing strategy in the 1990s. Leaderless resistance suggests that to avoid

debacles like the Fort Smith indictments, racist leaders should concentrate on organizing

phantom cell terrorist networks.

The basic idea was to split the movement into two independent factions: the

leadership would operate legally and aboveground; providing propaganda that indicates

targets to attack, the underground would consist of independent phantom cells operating

independent terrorist operations. The leadership could avoid prosecution while the

phantom cells protected the rest of the terrorist network from arrest and prosecution.

Anarchists (using the slogan of propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed)

and the Irish Republican Army (divided into political and paramilitary wings) employed

similar strategies.

The other very important development of the 1980s was the appearance of the first

border watch groups. First organized by Tom Posey as part of his Civilian Military

Assistance (CMA) organization, the CMA operated as a shadow wing of the Reaganadministrations illegal Contra network. Posey and the CMA began as an adjunct to the

Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

They were first active in smuggling weapons to Central America with the assistance of

a Defense Intelligence Agency operation called Yellow Fruit and later absorbed into

Oliver Norths Contra re-supply operation. Posey was later indicted for violations of the

Neutrality Act for his gunrunning activities. North and Reagan administration officials

intervened in the trial and the charges were dismissed under the curious grounds that the

Neutrality Act only applied during peacetime and the Contra operation was the equivalent

of a formal state of war.

This report contains a collection of newspaper and magazine articles detailing the

CMAs criminal activities on the southern US border. What is significant about the CMA

case was the unofficial use of criminal gangs by the federal administration to promote its

political agenda. This is very similar to the current flirtation between the Border Patrol and

the Minutemen. It also suggests that the ultimate resolution to the national problem posed

by paramilitary subversion is a Congressional responsibility, since law enforcement is

lacking adequate statutory guidance. One solution would be a federal ban on private

armies and several such laws were proposed after the Oklahoma City bombing. To date,

no such legislation has been passed.

1990s

The initial Whatcom County militia organizing started in March 1994 at a CLUE

meeting at the Rome Grange featuring Wise Use agitator Chuck Cushman. At this

meeting, Ben Hinkle, maximum leader of the Citizens for Liberty and former northern

Washington organizer for KKK leader David Dukes presidential campaign on the Populist

Party ticket, distributed Militia of Montana literature. In October, CLUE sponsored a militia

organizing meeting at the Laurel Grange featuring white supremacists from Snohomish

County. Hinkle lurked around the fringes of this meeting, but did not play an open role.


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In February, 1995, the same group of Snohomish County white supremacists hosted

a Militia of Montana meeting in Maltby on the King / Snohomish border. Ben Hinkle, John

Pitner, Fred Fisher and Harry Nagel were present as part of the Whatcom contingent. In

May, 1995, Hinkle hosted Sheriff Dale Brandland at a Citizens for Liberty Meeting

advertised as Meet The Sheriff. Sheiff Brandland promised to permit militia activities as

long as you dont take the law into your own hands. This was three months after a

standoff between Brandland and the militia over a federal tax foreclosure. An FBIinformant at this meeting reported Brandlands promise to the FBI and the FBI opened the

early stages of an investigation.

In November 1995, the Snohomish militia was shut down following the indictment of

Snohomish County Sheriff Pat Murphy on drug charges. Murphy was the most visble

public front for militia activities in Western Washington.

To fill the vacuum left by Murphys elimination, John Pitner announced his leadership

of the Washington State Militia at the Rome Grange on November 11, 1995. Sheriff

Brandland briefly attended the meeting but was called away on business. The FBI

immediately opened a full field investigation.

In early 1996, Pitner hosted a meeting in Mount Vernon featuring John Trochman.The meeting was attended by approximately 450 militia participants from around

Washington state. At this meeting, Trochmann explained how Leaderless Resistance

operated and repeatedly exhorted the crowd to follow the strategy of public meetings and

private cells. Shortly beforehand, the exposure of WSM second-in-command Fred

Fisher as a former child rapist caused a spilt in the WSM and the expulsion of Pitner from

the WSM. Fisher assumed partial control of the group. Fisher and other plotted Pitners

kidnapping, torture and possible murder over Pitners alleged theft of WSM funds.

By late summer 1996, the FBI was ready to arrest Whatcom County and Seattle area

militia members on charges including conspiracy, firearms and explosives violations. All

were later convicted.

The arrest was accomplished without incident after FBI undercover agent Mike

German convinced the suspects to handcuff themselves after promising to teach them

how to get out of handcuffs without tools. Sheriff Brandlands relations with the FBI were

permanently harmed by his dealings with the milita in 1995 and the Sheriffs department

was intentionally excluded from the FBI terrorism investigation as a security risk. There

were persistent reports, never confirmed or disproven, that two Whatcom County Sheriffs

deputies were active members of the WSM. It is more than possible that this rumor was

disinformation started by the militia themselves, but it severely harmed cooperation with

other agencies.

The Washington State Miltia is described in three books: Jay Tabers Blind Spots,

David Neiwerts In Gods Country, and Jane Kramers Lone Patriot: The Short Career of

an American Militiaman. Richard Abanes American Militias: Rebellion, Racism andReligion gives an excellent national overview of the militia phenomenon of the 1990s.


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Conclusions

Why do politicians and law enforcement officials repeatedly fall

into the traps set for them by extremists?

Briefly, there are two separate answers to this question. Oneanswer has to do with common errors of judgment. The otheranswer is more startling: the only ones who learn, do so throughexperience, usually terminal to their careers.

Everyone makes mistakes.

Cognitive psychologists have long known of how selective memories operate. Peopletend to remember good things and forget the bad ones. The last round with the militias in

Whatcom County has left some deep scars on the people most directly involved. Thosewho were not well informed at the time are no better informed now. There is alsosomething known as the Black Swan effect, where people completely miscalculateunfamiliar events and often act in ways utter contrary to enlightened self-interest. NassimNicholas Taleb has written a fascinating paper, The Black Swan: why we dont learn thatwe dont learn. It is available atwww.fooledbyrandomness.com And finally, P.T. Barnumprobably put it best when he said, Theres a sucker born every minute and two to takehim.

Officials who get tangled up with extremists are like suicide bombers

theres very little learning from experience.

Sheriff Murphy in Snohomish County is only one of many examples of officials committingpolitical suicide by embracing violent extremists. CLUE and the right-wing members of theWhatcom County and Bellingham City Councils all paid a heavy political price for theirflirtation with racist militias in the 1990s.

Public officials who play around with white supremacists, terrorists and anti-governmentsubversives usually dont last very long. So the institutional experience of these officials isquickly eliminated.

The reason that people dont seem to learn from these experiences is that after they havelearned their lesson, they arent around any more. Sheriff Brandland and UndersheriffDave Waring learned this and neither of them have any credibility among knowledgeablelaw enforcement professionals, such as the Washington State Patrol Organized CrimeIntelligence Unit or FBI Squad Six, both of whom have actively tracked these activities.

Since 9/11, there has been considerable reorganization of domestic intelligence units andthere is now less emphasis on domestic terrorism than any time since the Oklahoma Citybombing.

The widespread subversion of county sheriffs departments and local police forces wasone of the reasons for the national reorganization of the FBI in 1996 and the creation ofthe regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces. One explicit JTTF function is keeping an eye onloose cannons in law enforcement and private security, occasionally by placing theseindividuals on the regional JTTF committees.


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Tom Posey and Civilian Military Assistance

The following section contains selections from contemporary news articles describing the

trajectory of Tom Poseys Civilian Military Assistance, a white supremacist paramilitary

group that established the first Border Watch.

The image quality of many of the article is due to their being recorded on and copied from

microfilm.

Note that much of the rhetoric employed by Poseys CMA in the 1980s persists among

the current crop of militia agitators. Criminals and extremists are not very inventive or

innovative, their tactics and strategy are mostly imitative. John Pitners WSM also relied

heavily on the claim that their armed paramilitary group was just the same as a

neighborhood watch. There is no similarity at all between armed groups of extremists

operating outside the law and community groups organized, trained and supervised by

local law enforcement.


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vigilante history

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