Citizen Militias in the United States

(There are) about 800 … groups across the country (…) These days the movement is almost quiet, in Michigan and elsewhere; the old leaders have scurried underground, and those who remain have adopted a lower profile. At most, 150 groups are active, experts say (…) These days illegal immigration is near the top of the list of perceived threats that keep militia members on edge, along with national identity cards, and government land seizures. (…)

The so-called citizen militias, if they’re recognized at all, are composed of blustering and ostentatiously armed figures more likely to provoke curiosity than fear. (…)

In 1983, before there was a militia movement, Randy Weaver hunkered down in the wilds of Idaho to prepare for the end of the world. Eight years later, he was busted for selling guns, and when he skipped his court date, U.S. Marshals went looking for him. As they conducted surveillance on his cabin, shots rang out, and the marshals began trading fire with the cabin’s inhabitants. After two days, a U.S. Marshal and Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son were dead. A nine-day standoff ensued, and gun-owning sympathizers across the country painted Weaver and his family as martyrs. A year later, after federal agents stormed the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex., and President Bill Clinton signed the Brady gun-control law, the radical right had all the evidence it needed to conclude that the government was conspiring to make war on its own citizens. The battle cry went out, and militias sprang up seemingly wherever angry gun owners came together.

The Michigan Militia flourished under the leadership of Norm Olson, a pastor and former high-school teacher with a booming voice. In 1994, on a 120-acre compound in Northern Michigan, Olson went into the business of training “guerrilla fighters to be ruthless, merciless,” he said. He armed them, too, opening the Alanson Armory, a no-frills gun shop and militia supplier built off the side of his garage. The place was crammed with rifles and military supplies, as well as militia patches and flags. “We wanted to be visible,” Olson said, “to put the government on notice.” For a time, Olson was the public face of the national militia movement. During a 1995 Senate committee hearing on domestic terror, the sleeves of his battle dress uniform rolled up and a camouflaged militia hat on his head, Olson launched into a tirade about government corruption and encroachment into citizens’ lives. The next day’s national newspapers were full of his incendiary statements, including his suggestion that militias needed to provide government with “a good spanking to make it behave.”

Olson’s rhetoric might have gained little notice had it not been for a notorious loner linked to the Michigan Militia. On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh mixed two tons of fertilizer with fuel oil to detonate a Ryder truck in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day care center. Foreign terrorists were initially suspected, but police charged McVeigh with the crime two days later. The case prompted terrorism experts to develop a more nuanced theory of why militias were dangerous. For all their tough posturing, the experts concluded, militia leaders were mostly talk. But their rhetoric—calls to urgent and armed resistance against apocalyptic government conspiracies—could push a member to strike. “It was never the militia leader actually bombing or killing,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-find-ing at the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that monitors extremists. “But they coax the others to violence.” When police pulled McVeigh over for driving without plates hours after he bombed the Murrah Federal Building, he was no ranting militia leader. He was a former Army private, passed over by a Special Forces unit, disaffected and deranged on a diet of militant, racist rhetoric. “McVeigh was a nobody who was inspired by what others told him,” Pitcavage said. “It’s the nobodies that scare us.”

AS MILITIAS INSPIRE LONERS LIKE MCVEIGH TO ACT, they try to instill an understanding that anyone arrested for committing violence will deny a militia connection. The idea is to protect others in a militia cell, to make it appear that the so-called lone wolf is an unallied loon. But those who plot terror rarely get there alone. “The leaders of these groups create a justification for action and urgency,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and counterterrorism instructor for the bureau. “They say, ‘Here’s what you should do and here’s how you should do it.’ And then they stand back, they create space, and they say, ‘I had no idea this guy wanted to blow up buildings.’ ” What often pushes loners away from the group is the realization that an attack may never come, that all the talk and training may be for naught. So the loner splinters off and prepares to attack on his own. “It’s the meet, eat, and then retreat phenomenon that makes these people break apart from the groups,” Pitcavage said. “A lot of these places are finishing schools for people of a certain ideology. With all those weapons and all that talk, they feel that something has to happen.”

In 2003, Norman Somerville, loaded with weapons and seething with militant urgency, was prepared to make something happen in rural Northern Michigan. A Special Forces veteran linked to militia cells, Somerville was fed up and itching for a showdown. Police had recently killed Scott Woodring, a fellow militia member, in a shootout as they attempted to arrest him for the killing of a state trooper. Woodring’s death touched off angry web-postings among militia sympathizers and galvanized Somerville to strike at police. On a 40-acre compound outside the hamlet of Mesick, he plotted what prosecutors would later describe as “a violent militia conspiracy” to avenge Woodring’s death. Somerville fortified his property, built an underground bunker, and collected machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. He kept photographs of President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with the crosshairs of rifle scopes drawn over their faces. Above the ground, hidden by tree limbs, Somerville positioned a massive anti-aircraft gun that he trained on the approach to his property. And he readied the pride of his arsenal—vehicles he referred to as the twin “war wagons.” Somerville had outfitted his Jeep and van with M1919 .30 caliber machine guns capable of emptying 550 rounds in a minute. The Jeep, with its passenger seat removed, boasted a mounted gun turret. Somerville planned to use the Jeep to cause a traffic accident and then to open fire on police when they arrived at the scene. In late 2003, authorities learned that Somerville was about to carry out his plan, and they moved in. He was convicted on weapons charges and sentenced to six and a half years in prison. In court, prosecutors called the rural handyman a “psychologically deranged man who was armed to the teeth, filled with hate, high on dope and had his finger on the trigger.” After his arrest, Somerville said he had handed out or traded illegal machine guns to others, and he warned authorities of a network of “shadowy rebels” preparing for “a quiet civil war” in rural Michigan. (…)

According to stories published in The New York Times, the case involved an Islamic terror organization suspected of joining forces with a domestic militia group. “I told people at the FBI that this case is going to be on the front page of the paper,” German recalled. “It’s either going to be good for us, or bad for us.” When the FBI didn’t commit more resources to the investigation, German said he grew confused. He said he also noticed that the bureau had created what he believed were false documents concerning the case, and when he raised his voice to protest, the FBI effectively benched him. “Over the next four or five months, the work just stopped,” he said.

Experts who track militias stress that while visible numbers are down, members today appear more committed to their cause. “If anything, the people who have stayed with the militias have gotten more militant and dedicated,” said Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door, a respected account of the antecedents to the militia movement. “Judging by their rhetoric today, they’re more aggressive in their embrace of destruction.” A report released in 2004 by the Anti-Defamation League claimed evidence of “a quiet attempt to revive the antigovernment movement.” Despite the militias’ deep distrust and fear about operating in public, outfits around the country, the report said, are putting out the call for “like minded folks.” The ADL cited newly vigorous recruitment campaigns in West Virginia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Washington.

In his annual threat assessment delivered to Congress last February, FBI Director Robert Mueller characterized the danger posed by militia groups as a “continuing threat.” And John Lewis, a 28-year veteran of the FBI and now its deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said the bureau is mindful of the dangers posed by far-right militia outfits. “The shock and awe of Oklahoma City still permeates this building,” he said, sitting at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “We’re minding the store.” (…) Lewis said he believed that the FBI was not shortchanging the fight against domestic terror. “We think we’ve got the right ratio here,” he said, “when it comes to [international terror] and [domestic terror].”

But fighting international terror has become the bureau’s highest priority since September 11, Lewis explained. While the FBI has poured more money and manpower into counterterrorism efforts generally, the global war on terror has absorbed most of the resources.

He acknowledged that his resources for dealing with home-grown terrorists are limited. “This is a huge country,” he said. “Do we have everyone covered? I wouldn’t bet my last 20 on it.” Making the challenge more difficult is the FBI’s obligation to balance the rights of militia members under the First and Second Amendments with the need to stop terror before it strikes. “There’s nothing wrong with collecting weapons and explosives,” Lewis explained. “There’s nothing wrong with collecting lots and lots of weapons. Some could say that these people are dangerous, and they’d be right. But until a line is crossed, we have to stand back.”

Most FBI critics don’t quibble with its decision to make international terror a higher priority than extremists at home. But many find the bureau’s domestic choices confusing. In May, Lewis told a Senate hearing that groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front had become the bureau’s chief domestic priority. According to the FBI, in the last 15 years, over 1,000 attacks against property have been documented and attributed to radical left-wing groups. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Lewis said, “that these groups rank higher [in priority] than militia groups.”

But militia expert Daniel Levitas was surprised. “I find that both laughable and terrifying,” Levitas said of the bureau’s emphasis on eco-terrorists. He’s among the critics who say the FBI’s soft stance on militia groups may have already had consequences.

IN JANUARY 2002, WITH THE NATION’S ATTENTION ON FOREIGN TERROR and anthrax mailings, a curious package arrived on the doorstep of a Staten Island family. It had come from Tyler, Tex., and contained a stash of fake identification documents, including a social security card, a birth certificate, and a United Nations ID card. Included was a note from the package’s sender, William Krar. “We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands,” Krar wrote to the intended recipient, New Jersey Militia member Edward S. Feltus.

A longtime player in the New Hampshire Militia, Krar was a weapons salesman who also made guns. Federal authorities first noticed him in 1995, after a foiled plot to kidnap a television newscaster in retaliation for media coverage that criticized the Oklahoma City bombing. One of the plotters, Sean Bottoms, told investigators that Krar was active in the militia movement and was an explosives expert who dealt in ammunition and military supplies. About the same time, according to the FBI, an informant told the bureau that Krar was a “good source of covert weaponry.”

After the terrorists struck on September 11, police in New Hampshire were warned that Krar was engaged in “suspicious activity.” An employee at a self-storage facility told authorities that Krar claimed he knew about the attacks before they occurred and knew about future attacks. Police noted in their report that Krar was storing “army-type equipment.”

As it turned out, the trove of fake documents had shown up in Staten Island by mistake. The family who received it passed it along to local police, who handed it over to FBI agents in Newark, N.J. Seven months after the intercept, the FBI spoke with Feltus, who revealed that he had ordered the phony documents from Krar, hoping they would help him travel in the event of a disaster or government siege. Feltus also told agents that he and another militia activist had stockpiled more than 100 guns in Vermont.

Three months after their interview with Feltus, FBI agents in Texas drove out to have a look at Krar’s home. Still unaware that he had come to the FBI’s attention seven years before, agents decided they’d monitor Krar’s mail. Nothing happened for three months, until January 2003—a full year after the FBI received his package of bogus IDs—when police in western Tennessee pulled over a rental car driven by Krar.

The officers found marijuana and syringes containing atropine, an antidote for nerve gas. They also found documents with vague titles (one was called “procedure”) that the FBI said “appear to be instructions for executing a covert type plans/operations.” Over the following month, FBI agents put the pieces together, and a picture of Krar finally emerged. That’s when field offices in New England and Texas shared information related to the militia connections, the September 11 complaint, and the investigation into the 1995 plot. They requested a warrant to search Krar’s property, and in Krar’s east Texas storage locker, agents found an arsenal that included a hydrogen cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands of people. Among other things, Krar had been hoarding blasting caps, detonators for military devices, trip wire, grenades, pipe bombs, machine guns, half a million rounds of ammunition—even a landmine. Krar, 63, was convicted and sentenced in May 2004 to 11 years in prison.

When asked this past summer about the Krar case, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Lewis said he was familiar with it and believed the bureau had acted promptly. When refreshed on the chronology of the case, he expressed skepticism. “I can’t believe a scenario in which we’d sit on something like that,” he said. “But again, I don’t know about the details of that case.” (…)

By Geoffrey Gagnon