THE RHETORIC OF TERROR

By DOUGLAS FRANTZ

TRAINEE HAIRDRESSER JOHN SALVI, who is charged with killing two abortion-clinic workers in Massachusetts, certainly fits the profile of a lone gunman: socially awkward, emotionally volatile, paranoid and somewhat delusional-judging from his rambling statement to police after his arrest in December. But Salvi's lawyers will go to court in the next month and argue that he is unfit to stand trial. To bolster the argument, they intend to portray him as a mentally unstable young misfit pushed over the edge by the exhortations of radical antiabortionists. Phone numbers and literature found in Salvi's possession indicate that he knew-or knew of-the militants who believe that killing doctors is justified to save unborn babies. "When someone who is experiencing mental illness is exposed to these extreme statements, the line between rhetoric and reality is blurred," Salvi lawyer J.W. Carney Jr. told TIME. "It is viewed truly as a call to arms."

The extent to which Salvi was a pawn of others remains unclear. Tantalizing bits of evidence link him to the most murderous offshoots of the antiabortion movement. After the carnage in Brookline, Massachusetts, for example, Salvi drove to Norfolk, Virginia, and allegedly blasted out the windows of the Hillcrest Clinic, which even locals have trouble finding. In his pocket was the telephone number of Donald Spitz, a Norfolk-area proponent of "justifiable homicide'' who has been a frequent protester at Hillcrest. Yet so far an extensive federal investigation has failed to establish a criminal conspiracy in the Salvi case or any other abortion-related shooting.

What is clear, however, is that more than a few lone crazies have answered the call to arms. Boldly, and calmly, some people are advocating murder as well as arson and bombing to drive abortion providers out of business. "More violence is inevitable, and it is righteous," says C. Roy McMillan, a Mississippi activist whose obstetrician wife once performed abortions. "It wouldn't bother me if every abortionist in the country today fell dead from a bullet."

Such talk is not illegal--unless it can be directly linked to a crime. But a different strategy to attack proponents of violence was used in a lawsuit filed this month by the family of Dr. David Gunn. The suit, authored by attorney Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, seeks to hold antiabortionist John Burt and his group, Rescue America, liable for Gunn's murder outside a Florida clinic two years ago. It claims that the gunman, Michael Griffin, was influenced by the group's violent rhetoric. "We don't have to show that anyone else pulled the trigger but that the shooting was encouraged to stop abortions," explains Dees, who has won two similar "wrongful death'' cases, against the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama and a white supremacist group in Oregon.

Certainly threads do link the most outspoken antiabortionists into a loose network. Many have signed a petition that justifies the murder of abortion doctors with arguments rooted in Christian theology. Major players are in frequent contact, sometimes through couriers to avoid possible government surveillance. They swap tactics and quietly circulate a how-to manual for clinic attacks that explains how to superglue locks, build bombs and burn clinics. Most alarming, in January a new group called the American Coalition of Life Activists released a "deadly dozen" list of abortion doctors. The Justice Department quickly dispatched U.S. marshals to protect the physicians, one of whom was tracked down on vacation in the Caribbean and met by marshals at the airport.

Federal authorities know it would be foolhardy to regard the 12 names as anything other than a hit list, since doctors identified in antiabortion literature have a habit of becoming targets. Moreover, at least one shooter remains at large. Last October, McMillan was quoted in the New York Times Sunday magazine, apropos of the case in which Paul Hill killed a doctor in front of a clinic, as saying, "Why would a person do it publicly, when maybe he could have done it clandestinely, with a high-powered rifle ...'' Nine days later, Dr. Gary Romalis was gravely wounded as he sat at his breakfast table in Vancouver, British Columbia. The rifle bullet had come through the window; the sniper was never caught. The question now is whether this attack-rather than Salvi's alleged rampage seven weeks later-represents the cutting edge of antiabortion extremism, and whether the reign of terror can be stopped before more people are injured or killed.

LAST SPRING 80 ANTIABORTION ACTIVISTS from around the country gathered in a hotel conference room near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. They had come to hammer out a common strategy, but by the time the two-day session ended, the group had suffered a permanent rift over the murder of Gunn 13 months earlier. Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, had arrived in Chicago with a petition, signed by more than 30 activists, that called the shooting justified. Flip Benham, director of Operation Rescue, which was once considered the radical wing of the antiabortion movement, spoke against the attack and later confronted Hill. "For the cause of Christ, for the sake of the children and the sake of your own family, cease and desist from spewing this misrepresentation of the Scripture," Benham recalls telling Hill in a corridor. Hill refused, but he promised others that he would never pull the trigger.

Three months later, Hill did pull the trigger. Twice. He killed Dr. John Britton and his escort, retired Air Force officer James Barrett, outside a Pensacola, Florida, clinic, not far from the one where Griffin had killed Gunn. Griffin too had ties to the extreme wing of the movement. The week before the Gunn shooting, Griffin had met five times with Burt, the Pensacola-based official of Rescue America. Burt showed Griffin and his wife gory videos of dismembered fetuses and a life-size effigy of Gunn with bloodstained hands and the biblical inscription, "If man sheds man's blood, by man will it be shed." Burt had also urged Griffin to attend a protest outside the Pensacola clinic the day of the shooting.

At Griffin's trial, a clinic nurse testified that she saw Burt and another protester shake hands moments after Griffin fired his gun, something that Burt denies. Though he is now a target of the Morris Dees civil suit, Burt was never charged in the murder. He defended his role on a television talk show, saying, "If I am a general with troops under me and I give them a game plan and send them out, I can't be responsible for every soldier in that army."

Within two hours of the Gunn murder, Don Treshman, the national director of Rescue America, based in Houston, was heralding the shooting in a press release that solicited donations for Griffin's family. "While we think that Gunn's death is unfortunate, the fact is that a number of mothers would have been put at risk today and over a dozen babies would have died at his hands," wrote Treshman, a former metal salesman who now devotes all his time to organizing clinic protests.

Five months later, an Oregon housewife named Shelley Shannon shot and wounded Dr. George Tiller outside a Wichita, Kansas, abortion clinic. Evidence seized after Shannon's arrest linked her to arsons at clinics in four other states. It also hinted at the existence of a clandestine network. Police found correspondence with two men who were imprisoned for abortion-related violence buried in Shannon's backyard. Also unearthed was a manual for attacking abortion facilities, published by something called the Army of God.

Shannon's trail led to a modest blue house in Portland, Oregon, where Andrew Burnett publishes Life Advocate, a magazine regarded as the handbook for abortion militants. Each month it chronicles movement activities and carries a list of prisoners serving time for clinic attacks. But the magazine specializes in identifying doctors who perform abortions. A September 1993 article described how Burt and Hill went about learning the identity of Gunn's replacement in Pensacola. Ten months later the replacement and his escort were dead, and Hill was under arrest.

Burnett insists he would never commit violence but refuses to condemn those who do. As for a conspiracy, he claims that if there is one, he knows nothing about it. Burnett says he and several magazine staff members were called last year before a federal grand jury in Portland that was investigating Shannon's involvement in a series of arsons. When the indictment was handed up, only Shannon was charged in attacks at nine clinics in Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho. Prosecutors and federal agents are still pressuring her to implicate others. "There is no question that the government thinks she possesses a wealth of knowledge about the radical end of the antiabortion movement," says Andrew Bates, her lawyer. But so far, Shannon has refused to talk.

THE REV. MICHAEL BRAY SPENT nearly four years in prison for the bombing of 10 clinics and related facilities. Today he ministers to a small Fundamentalist Christian church and writes a newsletter about stopping abortion, through which he markets a bumper sticker that reads EXECUTE ABORTIONISTS-MURDERERS. His recent book, A Time to Kill, was published by Burnett.

Sitting in his home in Bowie, Maryland, Bray had to raise his voice to be heard above the chatter of five of his eight children, who were playing in the next room. "These unborn babies are people worthy of protection," he explains. "There's nothing un-Christian about protecting the lives of the unborn." Although he signed Hill's justifiable homicide petition, Bray says he would never pull the trigger. "Of course," he adds, "if I had the zeal to go out and take some action, I wouldn't tell you."

Bray and other radical antiabortion activists like to compare themselves to the abolitionists who fought slavery more than a century ago and frequently invoke the name of John Brown. Legal abortion, they say, robs unborn children of their rights the same way slavery denied rights to blacks.

Others draw a more stinging comparison. "They are terrorists," says Gary R. Perlstein, a terrorism expert at Portland State University in Oregon. "They believe killing is for fear, to intimidate, to terrorize. There's really no difference between these Fundamentalist Christians in the militant antiabortion movement and Muslim fundamentalists in Hamas."

Vancouver's Dr. Gary Romalis sees no difference after what happened to him last November. "I was just sitting in the kitchen, and I felt a kind of whump underneath," he recalls. "The first shot hit me and knocked me slowly off my chair. I felt that my left thigh was warm and wet. But I had no pain. Then there was another shot, and I realized I had been shot. I looked down, and I had a huge hole in my thigh that I could put my fist in. I was bleeding very, very heavily. I thought this was it."

Romalis fashioned his bathrobe belt into a tourniquet that kept him from bleeding to death. But his peaceful life has been shattered. His wife shivers when she walks into the kitchen, where the new curtains are always drawn. His family drives to and from their house a different way each day as part of a strict security regimen. Romalis, completing his physical rehabilitation, admits that he does not know if he will have the courage to perform another abortion.

Nearly 2,000 miles away in Houston, over a plate of barbecued sausage and ribs, Treshman sounds like a sports analyst when he sizes up the Romalis shooting. "From a standpoint of tactics, it would be far better to get away, throwing fear in the hearts of others because you are still out there," he says, insisting all the while that he does not advocate violence.

The fear is real, as Bonnie DeAngelis, director of Norfolk's Hillcrest Clinic knows only too well. Even before John Salvi allegedly shot up the clinic's windows, four Hillcrest doctors had decided to quit performing abortions. "Providers and pro-choice people don't want to admit that the antiabortion movement in this country has been succeeding in their terrorist tactics," she said. "But a very, very small group of people is winning the war."