Covenant (CSA) - Conflict Resolution
As helicopter gun ships hovered near the compound, negotiations began between Noble and Coulson, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team commander. “April 19 was our D day,” Coulson would later write in his penetrating account of his negotiations with the CSA. “They expected ZOG to come in and shoot the place up... We had to convince them that we weren’t the devils they were waiting for, and that we were patient and that we weren’t going away.” Of special concern to the FBI were the sixteen women and at least two dozen children inside the camp. By Saturday morning, April 20, the siege was receiving extensive coverage by local and national media.
One of the reporters, James Coates of the Chicago Tribune, filed this account: A solid chain link gate closed off the dirt road leading up to the CSA compound, and all visitors were greeted by a group of roughly a half dozen obviously frightened and surly young men carrying Mini-14s, MAC 10s, and other automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Other armed CSA soldiers were clearly visible in a fifty-foot-tall guard tower overlooking the front gate, from which they pointed machine guns at reporters....[A] large number of buzzards... circled lazily overhead, almost as if they had some foreknowledge that blood soon would spill....FBI commandos congregated on the fringes of the compound. Trim men in spit-shined paratroop boots sat around assault helicopters just out of sight from the CSA guard tower and painted one another’s faces in camouflage makeup.
Ellison was still refusing to surrender, primarily because of a drama being played out inside the coompound. Early in the day, Randy Evans tried to marshal the CSA forces into a shoot out with the FBI because it was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Ellison stifled this Aryan bravado by punching Evans in the eye, knocking him down and shutting him up. After that, the negotiations began in earnest. This was due to several key events that transpired over the next two days.
First, on Sunday, April 21, Ellison allowed four women and twelve children to leave the camp, thus removing a major source of concern on both sides. Second, later that day a filthy and exhausted David Tate was captured in a city park near Branson without a shot being fired (he had simply laid down his MAC-11), thereby eliminating another source of concern for both Ellison and the FBI. “Tate was ready to give up,” the county sheriff told reporters. “The man was getting hungry.”
Finally, and most importantly, Coulson allowed Ellison to bring in two third-party negotiators. The first was Ollie Ellison. Appreciating the social role of women in Identity circles, Coulson remarked: “In that culture, women are honored for their intuition. Our meeting was very brief. Her purpose was to size us up. To see if I was a man of honor.” In his memoir, No Heroes, Couslon is almost rhapsodic in his description of their meeting at the siege perimeter on April 21: "Ollie Ellison gave me a Mona Lisa smile and a slight nod....This was not the terrified, beaten-down gun nut’s wife I had envisioned. Ollie was a true beauty, five feet seven or five feet eight inches tall, with long dark hair, and high cheekbones that reminded me of Emmylou Harris or Rita Coolidge. In a modest sleeveless print dress that hung loosely below her knees, she might have been a flower child or a Berkeley grad student...The lives of every man, woman, and child depended on her, including eleven children under her own roof. We had to be her worst nightmare, ZOG warriors, men poised to launch an attack upon her home. Yet her eyes were cool and intelligent. She stood ramrod straight, shoulders back, chin up."
After Coulson assured Ollie that only Ellison would be arrested, though others inside the compound may be arrested in the future, and that the agents would not bust up their homes during the search for evidence, Ollie convinced her husband to surrender. Never has a woman in the American racist right played such a defining role in mediating conflict. “She was totally unique,” said Coulson, who had managed dozens of hostage situations during his acclaimed career. “I was very impressed with her. Our meeting was the first place for failure and we had a lot of stigma to break through. I play for breaks and I got one with Ollie.”
But Evans and the other neo-Nazis were still inside and they had no intention of laying down their weapons. Toward that end, Coulson permitted Ellison to call in the second third-party negotiator: Robert Millar. Coulson dispatched a plane to Oklahoma to pick up the Identity patriarch. He arrived around noon and was permitted to join Ellison for a prayer meeting with Evans and the others. At 3:30 p.m., Millar radioed Coulson with the bad news: While he was making progress, Millar needed to stay over night. Again, the request was granted. At 10:05 a.m.–Monday, April 22–Ellison, Millar, and Noble came to the perimeter with a document listing the CSA’s terms of surrender. Most of the twenty-three items in the document dealt with Ellison’s legal counsel and the conditions of his incarceration. Before surrendering though, Ellison demanded that he be able to return to his house so that he could comb his hair for the media photographers at the roadblock. Coulson agreed and shortly after noon, four days into the siege, sixty-four occupants of the CSA camp, including the four wanted members of the Order, walked out of the encampment with hands on head. Agents then entered the CSA where they confiscated evidence leading to a 19-part indictment against Ellison and five accomplices. The Order fugitives would be tried separately.
The next day, the Baxter Bulletin carried a photograph of the backside of an ATF agent with a blond-haired girl laying her head on his shoulder. The photo was picked up by wire services and carried nationwide. It later became a symbol on plaques awarded by the ATF to agents for outstanding service. The plaque–called “In the Arms of the Law”–symbolized everything federal law enforcement stood for: the need to rescue innocents from evil. It would endure as a symbol of federal law enforcement until it was replaced by another iconic photograph, this one taken on April 19, 1995. That photo showed a fireman turning from the hellish jumble of glass, steel, and concrete of the demolished Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In his arms is the body of a dead baby.
Richard Wayne Snell was an Aryan National figurehead who was executed in the state of Arkansas on April 19, 1995 for the murder of Lewis Bryant, an Arkansas State Trooper of African American descent. Snell had with James Ellison the leader of the group known as the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, planned to bomb the MFB in 1983. The March, 1995 issue of ``Taking Aim'' the monthly newsletter published by the Militia of Montana (MOM) was heavily devoted to Richard Wayne Snell. The newsletter called Snell a "Patriot to be executed by the Beast". MOM linked the execution date to the 1993 burning of the Branch Davidian Complex in Waco, to the British attack on Lexington and Concord in 1776 and in typical fashion of ignoring important facts to the shoot-out and subsequent standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
