Blood and Politics (19 page)

Beam proposed, instead, a structure composed of cells (like the communists), each operating independently of the others, but without a headquarters. The thorny problem of command remained. Beam promised to elaborate in future issues of the
Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert
as he continued to wrestle with the problem of creating a leadership for a movement that defied leadership.
³⁵

At one point he briefly flirted with the idea that a single computer bulletin board could dispense the leadership’s “accumulated knowledge” to any patriot. (He was occupied with setting up Aryan bulletin boards at the time.) In another article, the newsletter reprinted a complex text on the “science of rebellion.” It proposed a quasi-centralized series of “bands” with “sleepers,” “couriers,” and auxiliaries. Although he described the functions necessary to create an underground, that essay did not solve the problem of command and control.

Finally, Louis Beam stood by an essay he had first published in the
Inter-Klan Newsletter
in 1983 entitled “Leaderless Resistance.” The strategic task at hand had already been established: utterly destroy the movement’s enemies. The underground would be composed of cells that already understood their mission, safely separated from one another and without a central tactical leadership.
³⁶
Beam’s ideas were not without critics from within vanguardist circles. One Aryan Nations state leader disputed the concept as a matter of national socialist principle. “There can be only one army,” he wrote. “There can be only one leader of the army.”
³⁷

William Pierce also disagreed and cogently argued for a centralized leadership. In his fictional
Turner Diaries
saga, the Organization is a complex multilayered apparatus, a “legal” political front operated on one hand and an illegal armed front operated on the other, both under a single military-style structure. Further, inside the larger Organization, a small mystical secret society known as the Order made all the commanding decisions. Pierce’s idealized Order was composed of only the most self-sacrificing and race-conscious cadres under a single authoritarian leadership.

.   .   .

Regardless of the actual strategy and organizational model promoted by Miles, Beam, or Pierce, the vanguardist wing of the movement had been gathering steam since before Duke quit the Knights. In 1981 the first attempt at actually overthrowing an existing government had failed miserably. In this case it was the government of Dominica, a tiny nation-state in the West Indies closer to Venezuela than to the United States. A small band of North American Klansmen and neo-Nazis, financed by Canadian mob sources, had planned to join a putsch and install a malleable former prime minister as a puppet dictator. They hoped to use the island as a criminal, financial, and paramilitary base camp for operations in the United States. But the Afro-Caribbean coconspirators on the island were arrested, and the entire plot collapsed even before it began. FBI agents arrested ten men in New Orleans as they prepared to set to the sea. Their rented boat contained several dozen weapons, dynamite, and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as well as Confederate and Nazi flags. The most notable of those arrested was Don Black.
³⁸

Black had started his movement career as an Alabama teenager enlisting in several organizations, notably a youth group of the National Socialist White People’s Party, then under the influence of William Pierce. An obviously intelligent and well-spoken youth, he briefly attended the University of Alabama and then joined David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975. Black became the Alabama state leader, known in Klan parlance as the Grand Dragon. When Duke resigned after the mailing list fiasco in 1980, Black was installed as Grand Wizard, or national director.
³⁹
After Black went to jail in the Dominica affair, a factional fight in the Knights broke out, and when he returned from the federal penitentiary, he lost his leadership post.
⁴⁰

Despite this setback, developments leading to the creation of a violent underground continued apace. Gordon Kahl had already started a one-man battle against ZOG, killing two federal marshals before being reduced to a burned corpse by the FBI. Richard Wayne Snell and the CSA had started their murderous crime spree. And at an Aryan Nations meeting in Idaho during July 1983, Robert Miles and Louis Beam turned up the rhetorical heat. Miles called for robbing armored bank cars, and Beam wanted blood spilled for a new nation.
⁴¹

Among the three hundred Aryans listening that day sat a well-muscled, strong-willed thirty-year-old named Robert Mathews, who joined Beam that summer in a propaganda effort called the National Organization of Farmers and Independent Truckers, or N.O.F.I.T.

Actually, that entire enterprise consisted of a couple of issues of a newsletter with an eye-catching slogan: “Don’t throw a fit, throw a bureaucrat.” The articles explicitly rejected any attempt at mainstream politics
and exhibited a shrillness that seemed more like screaming than just bad agitprop.
⁴²
This “organization’s” big moments were two pages of favorable coverage in
The Spotlight.
⁴³

Although N.O.F.I.T. did little else of substance, Robert Mathews was impressed by the experience. At that point, Mathews lived near the remote settlement of Metaline Falls, Washington, just south of the Canadian border but within driving distance of the Aryan Nations camp. He worked forty hours at a local cement plant, was clearing his small plot of land, and lived with his wife, Debbie, and their adopted boy, Clint. His résumé included youthful stints with the Birch Society and tax protesters. In 1980 he had joined the National Alliance. And in the recent past he had started frequenting Aryan Nations events. At a rally in a Spokane public park shortly after the congress, he easily warded off a handful of antiracist protesters and was accepted as one of Butler’s own. Despite the excitement of working with Louis Beam and attending Aryan Nations, Mathews’s primary political identification remained with William Pierce and the National Alliance—at least for the time being.
⁴⁴

September 4, 1983.
For the sixth time since founding the National Alliance, William Pierce gathered its members to a convention in Arlington, Virginia. They came from across the country for a chance to rub shoulders with Dr. Pierce, as he was always deferentially called, and to make new friends. Pierce used the occasions to cull the ranks for individuals he thought had leadership potential and to continue a process of instilling a new method of recruitment, personal solicitation. In years previously, most new members had joined through contact with the national office in Arlington. Now Pierce wanted his geographically dispersed cadres to advertise the organization, find qualified membership prospects, and sign them up.
¹
To help inspire others along this path, Pierce selected Bob Mathews to speak about his work with Louis Beam in the Northwest distributing N.O.F.I.T. newsletters.

Mathews’s speech blended the general approach taken by white supremacists toward (white) family farmers with the specific analysis the National Alliance made of its own vanguard role. Farmers were faced with losing their livelihood and their “whole life,” he reasoned, “mostly from the Jew usury system.” Since farmers were prime racial stock, “living monument[s] to masculinity,” he said, National Alliance members had special responsibilities. As “members of the vanguard of an Aryan resurgence,” he argued, they must “radicalize American yeomanry and bring them into our vanguard for victory.” And Mathews described a specific example of such a farmer he had met while distributing newsletters.

Notice the specific wording here. He did not argue for a plan of building the farmers’ own autonomous organizations. Neither did he call for a broad propaganda campaign against “Jews” and “usury.” Instead, he
urged the “radicalization” of farmers, which meant spotting those who already exhibited anti-Semitism and imparting to them a sharply defined ideology, then recruiting them into the National Alliance “vanguard.” Mathews’s formulation was akin to Lenin’s when he organized the Bolsheviks: those workers who were the most militant and angry at the czar and the bosses should be given an education about the capitalist system and recruited into the Communist Party.

Mathews’s convention speech revealed dual loyalties. On one hand, he leaned heavily on Pierce’s ideological underpinnings when discussing propaganda and recruitment to the “vanguard.” And he believed that only the National Alliance could lead their white revolution.
²
His belief was almost religious in nature. “Through the Alliance lies the salvation of our entire race,” he said.

On the other hand, Mathews’s talk also reflected the months he had spent with Beam. The erstwhile Klansman had “shown us the way,”
³
he claimed. He emulated Beam’s hot rhetorical style as well, including an invocation to “stand up like men and drive the enemy into the sea.” For Pierce, violent destruction of the enemy was a necessary, but future, task. Beam’s call to arms, by contrast, was immediate.

Mathews also exhibited two minds when thinking about white people. In his right brain, he had bitter contempt. “I was thoroughly disgusted with the American people,” he wrote; “our people have devolved into some of the most cowardly, sheepish, degenerates that have ever littered the face of the planet.”
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In his left brain, he was willing, even eager to give his life for a semimystical future for white children.
⁵
Just a few weeks after the convention, Mathews made up his mind. He decisively chose one direction only, from which there was no escape.

William Pierce called it the Aryan Resistance Movement. Robert Miles called it the
Bruder Schweigen
, German for Silent Brotherhood.
⁶
The press called it The Order. Most outsiders identified this band as an Aryan Nations splinter group, while others emphasized its connection to Pierce’s
Turner Diaries
. If Mathews’s Order resembled Pierce’s fictional Order, it also followed from the dicta in Miles and Beam’s
Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert
, which had prescribed the immediate creation of a Fifth Era–style underground. Mathews did not initially follow the precepts of “leaderless resistance,” but Beam’s influence during the months prior to The Order’s formation was unmistakable.

Although Mathews did draw recruits from Butler’s Idaho campground, The Order was much more than an Aryan Nations splinter group. Of the original nine, Mathews and two others came directly from the National Alliance. A fourth was simply Mathews’s closest neighbor and friend, and a fifth had joined a Colorado Klan faction before
trekking to Butler’s Idaho camp. Only four came directly and exclusively from the ranks of Aryan Nations. As the band of bandits and their immediate accomplices grew to include dozens more, they came from virtually every vanguardist corner: the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord; Posse Comitatus; Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; and Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The factional heterogeneity of Bob Mathews’s Order made it the product of the
entire
vanguardist wing of the movement. And its remarkable success endowed it with a prominence far exceeding its size.

The action began when Mathews and eight other men pledged their sacred honor and declared war against the Zionist Occupied Government in a makeshift ceremony at Mathews’s Metaline Falls homestead. The first nervous stickup occurred on October 28, 1983, at an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, with a total take of $300. Two months later a shifting cast of characters robbed $25,000 from a Seattle bank and $3,600 from a Spokane bank. In between they took $8,000 from a Shoney’s restaurant courier and started counterfeiting $50 bills. In March 1984 they hit their first armored car and came away with $43,000. A month later they targeted the same Seattle car, this time clearing $230,000 in cash. On April 29, a synagogue in Boise was bombed.
⁷

On June 1 they murdered one of their own. Two gang members took Walter West out in the woods, hit him on the head with a hammer, shot him, and buried him. They were afraid he would talk. His body was never recovered.

On June 17 Mathews and three others gunned down a Denver Jewish radio talk show host, Alan Berg, who was known for his on-air quarrels with anti-Semites.
⁸
The murder was the basis for Eric Bogosian’s play
Talk Radio
. Just one month later, on July 19, 1984, they staged their most successful heist, $3.6 million from a Brinks truck on the highway outside Ukiah, California.

In just nine months Mathews and company went from an anxious crew of wannabes to a self-confident and vicious band of Aryan guerrillas. A few intrepid women joined the overwhelmingly male battle group. They gave themselves salaries; bought weapons, camping gear, vehicles, and electronic equipment; and treated themselves to steaks and beer while hiding out in safe-houses from Idaho to Georgia. They paid cash for a 300-acre tract of land in southern Missouri and a 110-acre plot in Idaho. An electronic stress test specialist ran a buzz box, looking for informants. Code names, false identification, and elaborate communication systems became de rigueur. Each soldier was given a special silver medallion. Robbery proceeds were distributed across the movement,
from a couple of thousand for individual comrades in need to alleged hundred-thousand-dollar allotments given to a few key leaders. They hoped the money would help their cause.

At first, law enforcement officials knew little about this gang. That ended when Mathews inadvertently left a handgun behind in the armored car at Ukiah, however, and it became the FBI’s first real clue linking the robberies to white supremacists. Once the feds stumbled over the robberies and counterfeiting, an ever-widening dragnet enveloped the group.