By Matt Krasnowski
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
August 29, 1999
LOS ANGELES -- The goals haven't changed: kill non-whites, inspire more killing and start a revolution.
But the tactics used by white supremacists and members of the so-called militia movements are new, experts on hate groups and terrorism say. And while these hate groups have hardly achieved their revolutionary goals, the strategy has produced carnage.
From the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people to the Aug. 10 attack on a San Fernando Valley Jewish day-care center and killing of a letter carrier, federal investigators have struggled to link this terrorism to a network of violent right-wing groups.
What they have found is a growing style of terror known as "leaderless resistance," which has been pushed by white supremacy leaders for years, but only recently has received notoriety. Experts say it will require a massive change in thinking by law enforcement to stop it.
Under this terror strategy, small groups or individuals, acting independently, carry out attacks. And because it is an organization of one or, at best, three people, infiltration by law enforcement is nearly impossible.
Closer attention is being paid to this style in light of the day-care center shooting that police blame on Aryan Nation member Buford O. Furrow Jr., a shooting spree in Illinois and Indiana by World Church of the Creator member Benjamin Smith, and a killing and torching of three Sacramento synagogues linked to two brothers who are reportedly members of the group Christian Identity.
"All of these people quote-unquote acted alone," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. "But they also are associated with groups that know everything about leaderless resistance.
. . . But proving that it is a conspiracy is difficult."
"It's this grass-roots terrorism that's the real new threat," said
Bruce Hoffman, the head of terrorism research for the think tank RAND. "It's a new challenge to law enforcement; it could be one of the biggest. They have to start to think differently."
Hoffman and others say they believe Furrow is the latest example of this "lone wolf" strategy. Furrow, who is expected to be arraigned on murder and weapons charges tomorrow, reportedly confessed to shooting to death a Filipino-American postman in Chatsworth and opening fire in the Jewish center, wounding three boys, a teen-age girl and a 68-year-old woman.
He reportedly shot up the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills to send a "wake-up call," he said, for Americans to kill Jews. He also said he killed postman Joseph Ileto, 39, because he was a "target of opportunity" as a non-white federal worker.
Law enforcement officials have not said whether Furrow was acting alone or in concert with a larger terrorist organization.
But his admissions, background and purported choice of reading materials make his knowledge of the strategy likely, said observers familiar with the case.
"We know he's been a member of the Aryan Nation," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, former associate director of the FBI and an expert on terrorism. "It would not surprise me if we find that he has heard the (leaderless resistance) rhetoric many times before. There's a lot of that philosophy in this (attack.)"
Born of violence
This leaderless resistance movement was born out of two federal raids on white supremacists in the early 1990s. One was the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which federal agents shot and killed the wife and son of supremacist Randy Weaver.
The other critical showdown was with Bob Mathews, the founder of the group The Order. Mathews was killed when agents fired a tear gas canister into his residence and it caught fire. Hate crime watchdogs say Furrow lived with Mathews' widow for two years.
In the aftermath of those incidents, 160 of the nation's leading right-wing extremists met in Estes Park, Colo., in October 1992 to develop a way to elude law enforcement. Informants had infiltrated many organizations and tipped off authorities to planned attacks and individuals with stockpiles of weapons.
Hoffman said the central figure at the meeting was Louis Beam, a former grand dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan and leader in the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation. It was Beam who introduced the leaderless resistance concept.
Beam told those at that meeting that if "lone individuals committed acts of violence against the government, then there would be a spontaneous combustion of similar attacks that would lead to a white supremacist revolution," said Hoffman, who wrote the book "Inside Terrorism." Beam had been endorsing such tactics since the early 1980s, but in light of the recent law enforcement actions his message resonated.
"The tactic gives a wall of separation between the acts of the hate group and its followers," Cooper said.
The group can voice support for general upheaval -- speech that is protected by the Constitution -- but it does not call for a specific attack; that is supposedly left to the individual.
Hoffman said the philosophy has been embraced by hate groups and has benefited from new technology, particularly the Internet.
McVeigh's influence Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is considered the progenitor of this movement.
"When you have leaderless resistance, they're acting alone and without any support mechanism," said former FBI Deputy Director Weldon Kennedy, who oversaw the investigation into the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. "Even learning of the existence becomes very problematic. In the Oklahoma City bombing there was barely any planning of activity. There were only three people that knew about it. They were not going to meetings, not receiving any support."
Since then others believed to be lone-wolf terrorists include Eric Rudolph, who was accused in four bombings that left two people dead and 124 injured.
He has been accused in the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the 1997 attack on a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic and the 1997 bombings on an Atlanta abortion clinic and a nightclub. A massive manhunt for Rudolph in the Carolina woods has produced nothing.
Also associated with this leaderless movement are Benjamin Williams, 31, and his brother, James Williams, 29, who were arrested in connection with the July 1 shotgun slayings of a gay couple near Redding. The men are also suspected in the torching of three Sacramento synagogues June 18.
Their arrests came after the Midwest shooting spree by Benjamin Smith who methodically shot blacks, Asians and Jews over the Fourth of July weekend.
He left two people dead and injured nine before he killed himself during a police pursuit.
Smith was a member of the World Church of the Creator, an Illinois white supremacist group. That organization's literature also was reportedly found among the belongings of the Williams brothers.
'In the dark'
FBI officials say anticipating such seemingly arbitrary attacks is as difficult as stopping someone from thinking about the attack.
"As I've said, we can't know every guy on a mountaintop who is thinking about building a bomb," FBI spokesman Steve Berry said.
Experts say the FBI's job is even more complicated because of U.S. Department of Justice guidelines that were approved to prevent abuses that occurred during the J. Edgar Hoover administration's investigations of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War organizations.
Under the guidelines, the FBI is barred from infiltrating or spying on such organizations unless it has specific evidence to suspect the group plans to commit a crime.
Some believe the rules should change.
"It could be loosened up some," said Michael Reynolds, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based organization that tracks hate groups. "Why not allow (agents) to read their literature at least. It's not the same as opening people's mail or using harassment techniques that once existed.
"If they don't read the material, they're in the dark," Reynolds added. "There's so much (literature) out there on the Internet and in newsletters. They're not even getting the above-ground dynamic."
"It's like we're not going to listen to a guy on a street corner who is saying he's about to commit a murder," Revell said.
But others say changing the rules will embolden the hate groups and feed their beliefs that the government only cares about squashing personal freedom.
If changes come, "I can predict you will have another 30 or 50 (Web sites) saying, 'See, told you so, they're taking away our liberties,' " Cooper said.
He said he also has been monitoring the reactions on hate group Web sites to the day-care center shooting.
"Those who are committed to this cause, see it as a great victory," Cooper said.
Reynolds said he's seen other reactions posted on the Internet that actually criticize Furrow, though not his purported goal.
"The target is correct," Reynolds said some messages have stated, "but be a better shot." |
