Covenant (CSA) - Organization
In July 1983, Ellison was invited to give the closing address before the Aryan World Congress. The event, scurrilously billed as the “Annual Summer Conference and Nigger Shoot,” was hosted by American neo-Nazi Identity preacher Richard Butler at his rural compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho. In his speech, Ellison announced that the FBI’s recent killing in southern Arkansas of tax protestor Gordon Kahl was a call to arms. Kahl was a member of yet another paramilitary group–the Posse Comitatus–with a sense of living in apocalyptic time. “Kahl was the catalyst,” Ellison said later, “that made everyone come forth and change the [various neoNazi] organizations from thinkers to doers.”
That process began with a series of late-night meetings in which Ellison, Butler, Miles, Louis Beam (“ambassador-at-large” for the Aryan Nations), and other Identity leaders discussed how to overthrow the United States Government and create a separate Aryan homeland in the Northwest. These discussions centered on William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, an extremist novel that envisions the Government’s overthrow by a white-supremacist guerrilla force known as The Order. In the book, the group systematically kills Jews and blacks, and then wages war against the U.S. Government through the bombing of FBI headquarters in Washington. From these discussions emerged a sort of specialization within the radical right.
Because Butler’s organization served as the annual Mecca for movement gatherings, Aryan Nations would become the public face of the campaign. The organization would issue press releases, recruit new members, and establish communications systems, including a computer bulletin board. The CSA would serve as the movement’s armorer and training center. Finally, an elite cadre of “Silent Warriors” would mount attacks against the government and its agents, including armed robberies to finance the revolution. This group would be composed of select CSA members, along with a new contingent of activists called the Order.
Ellison returned from the Aryan Congress with more enthusiasm than he’d had in years. He called his elders together and told them that it was finally time to make war. “If the left wing could do it in the sixties,” he said, “the right wing can do it in the eighties.” Emblematic of this new campaign, Ellison delivered his sermons wearing camouflage gear and carrying a gun. He also placed a swastika over the cross in the Sanctuary and ended his prayers with the straight-arm salute. The war, as Noble recalls Ellison’s telling of it, involved “Dumping cyanide into the reservoirs of major cities, killing federal agents, blowing up an [Anti-Defamation League] building or overpass in major cities; maybe even blowing up a federal building.”
In early August 1983, at Ellison’s command CSA member James Morris stole a load of helmets, uniforms, and other military equipment upon his discharge from the Marines. While this was just the beginning of Ellison’s war on ZOG, in many ways it would be the CSA’s most successful crime. Though long on ideology, the group was short on criminal skill. “The CSA was not very successful,” said Danny Coulson, then head of the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit, “but they were very dangerous.”
On August 9, 1983, Ellison drove CSA elder Bill Thomas to Springfield, Missouri. As Ellison waited in the car under the cover of night, Thomas approached the Metropolitan Community Church, which openly supported gay rights, carrying a gallon of gasoline. Thomas shoved the gas can into the mail slot of the front door and lighted it. Yet the attack was an abject failure: Beyond charring the door, no major damage was done.
Six days later, Ellison and Thomas drove to Bloomington, Indiana, where they cased banks for a robbery. Unable to locate a suitable target, they firebombed the Beth Shalom synagogue. The small explosion destroyed an old Torah and burned a curtain. Beyond that, there was no major damage.
Richard Snell made his debut as an Aryan warrior on November 2 when he, Thomas, and CSA member Steve Scott strapped twenty-three sticks of dynamite to a natural gas pipeline where it crossed the Red River between Mena and Texarkana, Arkansas. Snell and his confederates believed that the pipeline was the major feeder from the gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico to the metropolitan arteries of Chicago, with its vast African American and Latino populations. “It was winter [sic],” Noble remembered. “We thought people would freeze, that they might start riots.” The dynamite dented the pipe but failed to rupture it. Once more, the CSA had failed to kick off its holy war.
By this time, with most of the hard-working timber and salvage workers gone from the CSA, money had become a serious problem for Ellison. So he ordered his men to step up their efforts to plunder the Egyptians. Small groups were dispatched to nearby towns on shoplifting sprees, concentrating on CB radios, car stereos, portable TVs, and jewelry. (Several vehicles were also stolen and driven to the CSA.) Members would later return this stolen merchandise for cash. Ellison himself participated in the crime spree, but he was not much of a criminal. On one trip to Forth Smith, Arkansas, Ellison was caught shoplifting at a grocery store; the manager simply threw Ellison out without calling the police. Some CSA members planned to rob a pawnshop in Springfield, Missouri, but the robbery never took place. Others planned a jewelry heist in Las Vegas, but it was canceled, too.
The only successful CSA robbery was committed with a ruthlessness that far exceeded its benefit. On November 11, Snell and Thomas robbed a pawnshop in Texarkana. During the holdup, Snell put a Ruger .22-caliber semi-automatic pistol to the head of the proprietor, William Strumpp, assuming him to be Jewish (he was not), and fired three times, killing him. After stealing guns, jewelry, and several thousand dollars in cash, Snell reported back to Ellison and proclaimed that Strumpp was “an evil man, he was a Jew, and he just needed to die.” Later that evening, overcome with guilt, Bill Thomas fled the CSA commune.
By this time–the fall of 1983–Richard and Mary Snell had purchased a small plot of land in Muse, Oklahoma (population 306), where they lived in a house trailer. Snell’s daughter had recently moved to Robert Millar’s Identity enclave up at Elohim City, so there was just the two of them. Outback, Snell and Steve Scott had built a crude survival training camp, and the two had begun to attract a small following. They recruited their men through the usual methods: gun shows, Klan breakfasts, and the like. A newspaper editor in the area interviewed a Broken Bow (Okla.) gun store owner (now deceased) who knew Snell. One day, according to this source, Snell and Scott were in the store but they weren’t interested in buying anything. Instead, they had come to recruit the man into their paramilitary brigade, thinking that a gun store owner could help them. When the owner declined, Snell looked at him with what was described as the “coldest, deadest eyes of any human being you ever saw.”
Around this time, Snell took a step toward avenging his personal hatred of the federal government. Consistent with The Turner Diaries, this plot called for mass murder. According to court documents, in October 1983, Snell came to Ellison and asked him if “in his opinion would it be practical to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, or possibly a federal building in Dallas or Fort Worth, Texas.” This discussion evolved into a plan to park a vehicle in front of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, and blow it up with rockets detonated by a timer. Snell, Ellison, and Scott subsequently traveled to Oklahoma City where, posing as maintenance workers in brown uniforms, they entered the Murrah Federal Building and assessed what it would take to destroy it. Ellison carried a notepad on which he made sketches showing where the building was most vulnerable to collapse from the explosion of rocket launchers that were to be placed in a van. Ellison said: “[The van] could be driven up to a given spot, parked there, and a timed detonating device could be triggered so that the driver could walk away and leave the vehicle in a position and he would have time to clear the area before the rockets launched.”
As these plans progressed, the CSA continued its bleak crusade of terror. In December, 68-year-old William Wade approached Ellison with a plan that also came from the pages of The Turner Diaries. Wade owned the land where Gordon Kahl had been killed by federal agents a year earlier. Still bitter over the affair, Wade solicited the CSA’s help in assassinating the judge, U.S. attorney, and federal agent who were involved in the prosecution of those who had harbored Kahl. Accordingly, on December 26, Richard Snell along with CSA members Ivan Wade, Lambert Miller, and David McGuire set out for Fort Smith to kill FBI special agent Jack Knox, U.S. District Judge H. Franklin Waters, and U.S. Attorney Asa Hutchinson. But a snow storm prevented the group from reaching Fort Smith, and the assassinations never occurred.
Shortly thereafter Noble began pleading with Ellison to abandon violence and return to spiritual matters. After Ellison accused his top lieutenant of being a traitor, Noble made a desperate bid to prove his loyalty. He traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, with a briefcase full of C-4, dynamite, and a .22 pistol with a silencer on it. Noble had been given orders to blow up an adult bookstore and then go on a shooting rampage at a “queer park.” When the bookstore owner wouldn’t let him in with his briefcase, Noble decided to bomb a church that ministered to homosexuals. When it came time to set the switch, however, Noble picked up his briefcase and walked away.
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