Covenant (CSA) - Meltdown: “War of ‘84"
By end of 1983, Ellison had begun to envision himself as a founding father of the second American revolution, even though his campaign of terror had produced nothing of the kind. In a four-page declaration, entitled the “War of ‘84,” Ellison avowed, “It is inevitable that war is coming to the United States of America...It is predestined!” He implored his warriors “to attack the enemy at every opportunity.” For Ellison, this was judgement day, the beginning of the great apocalyptic battle itself. The “War of ‘84" would prove to be one more example of Ellison’s delusions of grandeur. Instead, 1984 saw the CSA spiral downward in a series of events distinguished only by their rapacious violence and criminal ineptitude.
First came the absurd plan to strike the Oklahoma City Federal Building with rocket launchers. After casing the Murrah Building, Ellison designed a remote-controlled bomb and asked Kent Yates to put it together for him. In early December 1983, Yates began preparing and testing rockets for the attack. In one of his first test runs, however, a rocket blew up in Yates’ hands, burning them severely. Unable to handle anything, let alone a rocket, Yates’ tenure as the CSA’s munitions expert came to an end. And with it came an end to the CSA’s plan to bomb the Murrah Building. For now at least. Yates’s accident “was interpreted as a sign from God,” Noble warned, “that another plan was to be implemented [at a later date].”
Next came the equally preposterous plan to poison municipal water supplies with thirty gallons of cyanide. As Jessica Stern observes, potassium cyanide is not a sophisticated weapon of mass destruction. It is commonly found in rat poison, silver and metal polishes, photographic solutions, and cleaning products. Although cyanide is highly toxic, it is not a simple task to deliver it in a fashion capable of killing large numbers of people. Citing a United Nations study, Stern shows that the amount of potassium cyanide required to poison an untreated reservoir is ten tons. The effects of water dilution on thirty gallons of cyanide would have rendered it completely ineffective. Even if the CSA had dumped the cyanide into the reservoir of a major city–the most frequently mentioned target was the nation’s capitol–reservoir water is routinely tested and treated.
“At one point we put some of the cyanide into hollow point bullets and sealed them with hot wax,” Noble said in my 2004 interview with him. “But other than that, we kept it locked up. Back then there were no books on [chemical warfare], we didn’t have the Internet, and we didn’t really know what we could do with it [the cyanide]. We were ignorant on that kind of thing.” Another reason for the CSA’s ignorance is that Ellison had failed to recruit a specialist in the area of chemical weaponry. In fact, by 1984 the CSA had lost all of its specialists.
That included Randall Rader, who had been gone since late 1982. It was then that Rader was ostracized by the CSA following the tragic death of his thirteen-month-old daughter, who drowned in a basement full of water at the main compound while Rader was supposed to be watching her. Rader drifted aimlessly until he was invited to Idaho to run paramilitary training operations for the Order. “After Rader left,” write Flynn and Gerhardt, “CSA went over the edge.” That became clear with Richard Snell’s final act as a serial predator.
On the morning of June 30, 1984, Snell and Scott were pulled over for a routine traffic violation by state trooper Louis Bryant, a black officer, in DeQueen, Arkansas. Snell opened his door, got out of the vehicle, and drew a .45 caliber pistol that he had previously stolen in the pawnshop robbery. As Bryant approached, Snell shot him in the mid-section, then shot him again as he lay on the ground, killing him. A trucker saw the incident and called the police. Roadblocks immediately went up twenty-five miles away in Broken Bow, in the direction that Snell would likely be traveling. When Snell reached the roadblock forty minutes later, he again rolled out of his van, pulled a Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle on dozens of officers, and starting firing. The officers shot back and Snell took seven bullets.
The 54-year-old racist was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. His heart stopped beating twice along the way, but he was revived both times. When Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent Bill Buford arrived in Broken Bow to examine the cache of weapons found at the roadblock, he found the Ruger Mini-14 used in the shootout, along with several hand grenades, a silencer for a MAC-10, and a Ruger .22-caliber semi-automatic pistol. Buford also found a crude sketch of his own home. Agent Buford, it seems, was to have been Snell’s next victim.
After running a firearms trace, Buford learned that the Ruger Mini-14 had been purchased in Jacksonville, Arkansas, by one James D. Ellison back in 1979. And the .22 Ruger semi-automatic–which subsequent ballistics tests determined was the weapon used in the killing of pawnshop owner William Strumpp–had been purchased several months earlier by Ellison in Marshville, Missouri.
This was the beginning of the end for Ellison and the CSA. At the request of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, Snell was extradited to Arkansas and charged with capital murder in the Strumpp case. Later that month, Kent Yates was arrested at the compound on an outstanding New Mexico warrant for federal firearms violations. Bill Thomas was later arrested in Missouri on charges stemming from the pawnshop murder. Facing the death penalty, he turned state’s evidence against Snell and revealed information about other illegal activities at the CSA. Then, in late August, Ellison received a summons from a federal grand jury in Muskogee, Oklahoma, investigating the murder of trooper Bryant. The grand jury wanted to question Ellison about the guns found in Snell’s van at the Broken Bow roadblock.
Ellison had no intention of cooperating and sent a letter back to the grand jury, saying that he was unable to appear due to problems with the mortgage on his property. A misdemeanor warrant was issued for his arrest and a federal marshal, accompanied by state and federal officers, eventually tracked Ellison to his attorney’s office in Yellville, Arkansas. Accompanying Ellison was his “spiritual advisor,” Robert Millar. As the agents questioned Millar about his relationship with Ellison, Ellison slipped out the back door, jumped off a thirty-foot cliff, and escaped into the pines. Two days later, however, Ellison was taken into custody in Harrison, Arkansas. Ellison made his grand jury appearance on September 26, three months after the murder of trooper Bryant.
Ellison presented himself as a humble “woodcutter” with an interest in the religious lives of wayward youth, especially those with drug and alcohol problems. When asked about the firearms, Ellison claimed that he had traded the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle to Richard Snell for a load of scrap automobile alternators. Ellison said he had no knowledge of Snell’s involvement in the killing of officer Bryant, nor did he know anything about the .22- caliber Ruger used in the Strumpp murder. Ellison went on to say that while Snell was a frequent visitor to CSA, Snell was not a member of his congregation, nor did he live at the commune. And with this, Ellison was dismissed.
Yet the federal government was not through with James Ellison. In fact, Bill Buford had been gathering intelligence on the CSA since 1978. Through local people and CSA informants, Buford had learned that Ellison’s organization was preparing for a confrontation with federal agents by stockpiling food, supplies, weapons, ammunition, and explosives. Inside his house, Ellison was said to have hidden thirty to forty pounds of C-4 plastic explosives and a .90-caliber automatic weapon. Also hidden on the property were another two-hundred pounds of C-4 and C3 explosives, hundreds of assault rifles, unlimited quantities of ammunition, infrared night-vision devices, various types of hand grenades, four anti-aircraft weapons, and a military rocket launcher with a C-4 hand grenade in place and ready to fire–a weapon capable of destroying an armored personnel carrier. Claymore mines surrounded the camp, sources said, and the trees were rigged with trip wires and booby traps. In addition to these dangers, Buford’s sources said that the CSA had kidnaped a number of children who were being “kept for Elohim City.”
Around the time of Ellison’s grand jury appearance, Buford started sharing his intelligence with Jack Knox of the FBI’s Fayetteville office (his office was not in Fort Smith as Snell and the others thought when they set out to assassinate him in late December). This was mainly a bureaucratic strategy: If ATF agent Buford could prove that the CSA was involved in terrorist-related activities, then Ellison could be prosecuted under the Department of Justice’s racketeering law, which demanded FBI participation in the case. Hence, Buford’s collaboration with Knox.
Also around this time, the physically-imposing Ellison (he stood 5' 10" with wide shoulders, a thick chest and large forearms) began to beat Ollie – sending her into an even deeper state of depression. “The abuse started after Ellison took his second wife,” said Noble. “It was both physical and psychological.” Then, after months of failing to make payments, the bank foreclosed on the CSA property and a judge ordered Ellison get out within ten days. With his paranoia at an all-time high, Ellison ordered Noble to prepare CSA’s Home Guard for a possible incursion by ZOG. Far from a formidable threat, the Home Guard included such inexperienced and troubled young men as Mike McNabb. Due to a gunshot blast to the face at age thirteen, McNabb had only one eye and a damaged brain. The boy was stabbed in the stomach two years later, causing even further harm to his system. Indeed, Noble described the Home Guard as “a unit that had a man fifteen years older than me that had an artificial leg;... an epileptic, retarded man; two half-blind, fat, young men; and two men who could care less about the military than I did.”
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