Dreams of a Bigot's Revolution

By Robert T. Zintl

The novel The Turner Diaries is an action thriller: a hardy band of U.S. patriots turns to guerrilla warfare to overthrow a tyrannical government. But the book is actually a bigot's fantasy. The guerrilla fighters are neo-Nazis who finance their revolution through bank robberies and counterfeiting, blow up the FBI building in Washington, D.C., murder American Jews, blacks and Hispanics, and use nuclear bombs to annihilate Israel.

Written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald in 1978 by William Pierce, leader of a white supremacist group in Arlington, Va., The Turner Diaries was taken seriously by one militant group in the Northwest. Federal and state authorities say that members of a 30to-40-person gang calling itself The Order, apparently named for the revolutionaries in Pierce's book, were responsible for a $500,000 armored-car robbery last April in Seattle; a $3.6 million Brink's armored-car holdup last July in Ukiah, Calif.; and three shootouts with the police and FBI since October in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Eighteen people linked to the group have been arrested, including two Brink's managers charged last month with conspiring to rob Brink's main storage vault in San Francisco.

The gang's founder, Robert J. Mathews, 31, was killed during a gunfight with federal agents on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound last Dec. 7. A companion of Mathews, Gary Lee Yarbrough, 29, is a suspect in the murder last June 18 of Alan Berg, an outspoken Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver. Authorities say that members of The Order, which is also known as the Silent Brotherhood and the White American Bastion, were also involved in counterfeiting. Says Montana FBI Agent Toby Harding: "These are dangerous, violent people." Declares Idaho Undersheriff Larry Broadbent: "They actually believed that a revolution was possible."

The outburst of violence was the most recent indication that right-wing fringe groups, though they may be tiny in number and even dwindling, are heavily armed and well versed in paramilitary tactics. Although they encompass a variety of organizations--white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan and militant tax resisters--the groups share an ideology and seem in some instances to be cooperating. Says FBI Spokesman William Baker of those recently arrested: "We are finding that they belong to other right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan. It adds to our concern about violence." According to Lyn Wells, director of the Atlanta-based National Anti-Klan Network, Klan philosophy has become more Nazi-oriented. "These are generic Nazis," she says. "They want to reinstate segregation, overthrow the Government and, ultimately, establish a white republic."

A common thread in this network of bigotry is the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist organization in Hayden Lake, Idaho, that Mathews and Yarbrough belonged to before breaking off and forming their own action-oriented splinter group. In December, Oregon Senator Robert Packwood and his family received police protection after an informant told the FBI that the Aryan Nations planned to assassinate Packwood, a strong supporter of Israel. Aryan Nations and its "Church of Jesus Christ Christian" are run by Richard G. Butler, 66, a former flight engineer who moved to Idaho from California in 1973. Butler has claimed to have a mailing list of 6,000 names for the literature that he prints at his 20-acre compound. During the summer he sponsors wellattended conferences and paramilitary training sessions for Klan members, neo-Nazis and other ultra-right groups.

B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which investigates extremist groups, says that Ayran Nations and the Klan have set up computer networks that can be reached through telephone numbers in Idaho, Texas and North Carolina. The computer system was established by Louis Beam, a Texas Klan leader and the Aryan Nations' "ambassador-at-larg e." It provides anti- Semitic and racist reading for hackers, as well as an "enemies" list of organizations like the A.D.L.

Butler's Church of Jesus Christ Christian is part of the so-called Identity movement, which claims Jesus was an Aryan and that white Anglo-Saxons, rather % than the Jews, are the true chosen people. The A.D.L. says Identity beliefs have influenced the Klan and many other white supremacist groups. A prominent spokesman for the movement is William P. Gale of the Ministry of Christ Church in Mariposa, Calif., once a member of General Douglas MacArthur's staff. Gale has worked closely with Posse Comitatus, a right-wing antitax organization active in the Midwest. In 1983, Posse Comitatus Member Gordon W. Kahl and two others murdered a pair of federal marshals who were trying to serve him with a warrant in North Dakota. Kahl was killed when his stores of ammunition exploded during a gun battle with police and FBI agents at a hideout in Arkansas.

With the spread of fringe-group violence, ten states have enacted laws against paramilitary training. Laws against malicious harassment of people for racial or religious reasons exist in 29 states. Idaho's law was passed in 1983 after an Aryan Nations follower hounded a racially mixed family. Authorities have taken other steps to make Idaho extremists pay for their legacy of violence. The FBI and other federal agencies have mounted a "major investigation" of the state's right-wing cults. The Aryan Nations "church" has lost its federal and state tax exemption.

Law officials and private organizations that monitor hate groups point out that the recent violence comes at a time when the membership in fringe cults seems to be declining. The FBI says it keeps a close watch on fewer than a dozen radical-right groups. The A.D.L. estimates that, thanks to stricter state laws, the Klan has declined to about 6,500 members, although the Anti- Klan Network puts the number as high as 9,000. Says Irwin Suall, A.D.L. director of fact-finding: "These terror gangs are resorting to violence precisely because they find themselves politically and socially rejected."

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Hayden Lake, with other bureaus