Covenant (CSA) - The Plot
The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord did not emerge in a social vacuum. By the early 1980s, mainstream American culture had become anchored in conservatism, patriotism, and traditional family values that were at the heart of a growing religious revival waged by the fundamentalist Christian right. These were the days of the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s “moral majority,” a 6.5-million member political action group, which was waging a well-heeled campaign for the acceptance of Christian education in public schools and legal sanctions against abortion, pornography, homosexuality, and other forms of “immorality.” Of the 80 million television sets studied by the Neilsen rating service during this period, 68 million were tuned at least once a month to such fundamentalist programs as Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club, The Jimmy Swaggart Ministry, The Oral Roberts Ministry, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL Club.
Terrorism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan argues that “Ellison’s compound...[exhibited a] complete alienation from the surrounding culture.” That is true, but only up to a point. The CSA was certainly isolated physically from the surrounding culture. There were no telephones, radios, or TVs at the compound. The nearest town was forty miles away and the nearest paved highway was nine miles away. Yet despite these obstacles, the CSA managed to stay connected with the local culture by marching in lockstep with the Reagan-era Zeitgeist.
“We were isolated, but in ‘80 we started going public with our beliefs,” said Noble. Himself a former counselor for The 700 Club and a father of six children, Noble recalls that the CSA was the focus of extensive media coverage in the early 1980s. The Los Angeles Times, the Arizona Republic, the Dallas Morning News, ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corporation, along with television reporters from St. Louis and Chicago–all visited Bull Shoals Lake and filed favorable reports about the one-hundred men, women, and children who lived there. “Although our doctrine was extreme,” writes Nobel, “we were considered hard workers by neighbors [and] we didn’t cause problems....We had our own private school, with children unaffected by drugs, violence, abusive parents, child molesters, or kidnappers.”
The CSA operated not as a cult, therefore, but as an open religious community with strong conservative values that resonated deeply with the mainstream political establishment. Ellison’s flock did not conceal their contempt for the federal government – or, for what PresidentReagan derisively called “big government” – instead they disseminated their views widely in the C.S.A. Journal. Along with its editorials, the Journal regularly carried instructions for the use of fully automatic weapons, as well as detailed guides for hand-to-hand combat (one article describes how to slit the throat of an enemy with a buck knife). For awhile, the CSA ran a health food store in Mountain Home, and Noble wrote letters to the editor of the town’s Baxter Bulletin, urging Christians to follow Biblical teachings rather than obey secular laws.
Ellison held an annual convention at the CSA. His advertisements for these gatherings were carried in such publications as the Eagle, a nationally-distributed survivalist magazine, and they included opportunities to participate in guerrilla training at Silhouette City. Randall Rader felt comfortable enough in the local community to once contemplate a run for the elected office of county constable. Ellison remained on good terms with the Marion county sheriff, Roger Edmondson. Their relationship was so agreeable, in fact, that at Ellison’s request Edmondson periodically ran background checks on individuals seeking refuge at the commune.
To advertise the group’s elite training and spread the news about its Identity ministry, in 1980 Ellison began publishing a monthly newsletter called the C.S.A. Journal. Along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans, Richard Snell became a subscriber. And after meeting Ellison and Rader at a 1981 Christian-Patriot Defense League meeting, Snell and his wife, Mary, became regular visitors at the CSA compound.
Born in 1931, Richard Wayne Snell spent his entire adult life in southern Oklahoma. Snell was a burly, white-bearded racist who worked as an international importer when he came to the CSA. He was also a man with profound personal problems. A court-appointed psychiatrist would later diagnose Snell as suffering from a “paranoid personality disorder” that manifested itself in a conspiratorial view of history. Specifically, Snell believed that the U.S. government had fallen prey to a shadowy group of conspirators known as ZOG–Zionist Occupied Government–and that members of this cabal had persecuted him personally. This persecution was first displayed in Snell’s loss of his photography business in the 1960s, with Snell believing that he had been driven from the business by agents of ZOG. Snell’s paranoia was exacerbated by the December 1978 suicide of his son, Ken, due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound while in the throws of drug addiction. Again, Snell saw his son’s suicide as the fault of ZOG–the government entity ultimately responsible for the proliferation of drugs in America.
Snell’s affiliation with the CSA occurred on the heals of yet another devastating personal loss. By 1982, after years of financial setbacks, Snell had become impoverished. Unable to pay back taxes he owed to the Internal Revenue Service, Snell was served an arrest warrant and the IRS hauled Snell into court, where they obtained an order to seize all of his personal property. A combined IRS and FBI task force raided Snell’s property, impounding his home, land, and vehicles. This was the event that pushed Snell over the edge. Snell would never forget the agents who had humiliated him. Nor would he forget where they worked – at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Spurred by the positive media attention and the favorable relationships CSA enjoyed with the locals, Ellison continued his pattern of re-forecasting doomsday prophesies. In his most recent vision, Ellison received word that he was sinless and invincible. He was nothing less than the reincarnation of the biblical King David. This led Ellison to proclaim in 1982 that he was “King James of the Ozarks.” Ellison was so-coronated in a Christian Identity ceremony presided over by Pastor Robert Millar, who headed the four hundred-acre Identity commune near Muldrow, Oklahoma, called Elohim City (Elohim is the Hebrew word for God). Ellison said that God had warned him that war was still approaching, and that he must prepare to defend his congregation against the onslaught of urban infidels. In order finance the resources necessary to defend against that invasion, Ellison preached that it was proper to steal from non-Identity believers, a concept he termed “plundering the Egyptians.”
Ellison’s proclamation was met with disapproval by the commune’s more law-abiding members. Yet this was coupled by an even more unpopular decision made by Ellison in 1982: Because he was above sin, God had told him to take a second wife.
Women play an important role in the racist right. More than anything, racist groups emphasize women’s familial roles. At the CSA, according to terrorism scholar Jessica Stern’s interview with Kerry Noble’s wife, Kay, this was taken to an extreme. “Women called their husbands ‘lord’ as a sign of respect,” she said, “in imitation of the way the biblical Sarah referred to her husband, Abraham.” First and foremost, CSA women were expected to fulfill their obligations to their husbands–and to the movement–by bearing Aryan babies. The women were also expected to act as social facilitators by “going along with the program” as it were. According to sociologist Kathleen Blee, when social ties are strengthened individual racists come to view themselves as part of a larger social movement, thereby giving them a collective identity. In this way, women help create what Blee calls “the ‘oppositional subculture’ by which organized racism is sustained over time.”
Ollie Ellison had done much to fulfill these obligations. By 1982, she had provided her husband with hearth and home by bearing him six children. But Ollie could not go along with the program inspired by Ellison’s prophesy on polygamy. Instead, she became despondent over Ellison’s decision to take a twenty-nine-year-old minister’s daughter from Minnesota, named Annie, as his second wife.
Shortly after this, Ollie started wandering the woods at night, praying to be saved from the Identity philosophy that had influenced her life so deeply. “Ollie was a great woman,” said Noble. “But Ellison brought her shame and guilt when he took another wife. She also hated Identity and the paramilitary [training] was a problem for her. It was all over male dominance. She was not a hateful person.” Ollie was not alone.
Unwilling to commit crimes for Ellison, and unhappier still with his edict allowing polygamy, dozens of families fled the CSA settlement between 1982 and 1983. This left only the hard-core extremists, as evidenced by Noble’s description of life inside the compound: Ellison had begun letting people move to CSA that we wouldn’t have let in years earlier. Where cigarette smoking had once never been allowed, butts littered the grounds. Where beer drinking had previously not been tolerated, bottles cluttered the trash cans. Where years before a single cuss word was never uttered, foul language flowed steadily. Where once praise meetings were frequent and all were anxious to attend, we seldom had meetings. Ellison was no longer looking for spiritual leaders. Now, he just wanted to build an army.
That suited Rader just fine. In early 1982, he made plans to bomb a dam that controlled the water supply for a three-county area of northern Arkansas. Around the same time, while attending a survivalist seminar in Detroit, Rader and Ellison took possession of a thirty-gallon barrel of cyanide from Pastor Robert Miles, a Michigan Klan leader. “The purpose of the cyanide,” Nobel confessed, “was so that in the future, when the judgement time had arrived, we could dump the cyanide into the water supply systems of major cities, condemning hundreds of thousands of people to death for their sins.”
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