Blood and Politics (54 page)

That story began with a fishing expedition into the Aryan Nations by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents. The agents concocted a plan to catch Weaver breaking the law, threaten him with arrest and jail, then turn him into an informant, using him to gather evidence on those higher up the organizational ladder. It didn’t work. They did trap him selling illegally sawed-off shotguns in October 1989, a misdemeanor. He was indicted the following month. But he would not agree to become an informant. It wasn’t his unwillingness to snitch on others that changed the course of events, however, but his refusal to turn himself over to authorities. Rather than have Randy face arrest, the Weaver family decided to stay up on their mountain ridge. Vicki wrote a letter to Aryan Nations explaining their situation: “We cannot make deals with the enemy. This is war against white sons of Issac [
sic
]. We have decided to stay on this mountain. You could not drag our children away from us with chains.”
⁴
It was their belief that Satan personally walked the
earth in the guise of (Jew-controlled) federal agents who turned Randy Weaver’s mountainside misdemeanor into a spark in the tinderbox of history.

Finally, on January 17, 1991, ATF agents managed to arrest Randy Weaver on the outstanding firearms charges. According to
Every Knee Shall Bow
, a book on the Weavers by the reporter Jess Walter, the local authorities had mishandled the original notification of trial. In any case, the Aryan Nations security chief vouched for Randy Weaver’s good character in a bond hearing, and he was released. Once again it was wife Vicki who wrote a letter explaining the family’s beliefs to the authorities: “Whether we live or die, we will not bow to your evil commandments.” Randy Weaver subsequently failed to show for trial, and a fugitive warrant was issued. Meanwhile, the family members fortified themselves at their ridgetop cabin and refused to come down. To complicate matters, friendly neighbors and Aryan comrades trekked up the mountainside’s dirt trail and kept them in fresh supplies.
⁵

Federal marshals charged with arresting Weaver faced several difficulties. The marshals actually knew very little about Randy Weaver or his family, even after targeting him for an arrest on gun charges. The ridgetop was inaccessible to casual entrance, and the entire family was known to be armed. In addition, a twenty-four-year-old friend who had been living with the family, Kevin Harris, was believed to be similarly armed and willing to use his weapons, adding to the family’s potential firepower. Marshals began establishing posts in the woods that summer, surrounding the Weaver home, listening, watching, and presumably waiting for an opportune moment to nab the fugitive. The presence of the marshals, who were armed as if for war, was subsequently discovered by the Weavers, who were themselves heavily armed whenever they left their cabin.

On August 21, 1991, the unavoidable happened. A brief firefight erupted out on the ridge after a federal marshal shot the family dog, which had barked at the marshals in the trees. Federal Marshal William Degan was killed. Samuel Weaver, fourteen, was shot in the back and died. Overnight the reconnaissance and capture mission turned into a siege. Hundreds of law enforcement personnel ferried into the region and established a military-style barricade and command post. Road-building equipment moved up the mountain to construct a path to the cabin. Armed personnel carriers, helicopters, and a robot were deployed. The next day gunfire again erupted, this time near the house. Kevin Harris was shot in the arm and chest. Randy Weaver was wounded. An FBI sharpshooter, Lon Horiuchi, shot Vicki Weaver through the head while she stood in the doorway, holding her ten-month-old baby, Elishiba.
⁶

Violent conflicts between movement activists and law enforcement were not new. After killing two federal marshals in North Dakota, Gordon Kahl was shot and his Arkansas hideout burned down by the FBI. After a fifteen-month spree of robberies and murders, Order founder Robert Mathews was killed when he refused to surrender, and FBI agents burned down his safe house. And Arthur Kirk, a hopeless Nebraska farmer, was shot and killed by an area SWAT team after a short exchange of gunfire. A similar pattern had marked other violent standoffs. When law enforcement cornered members of a leftist California group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, a short gunfight ended after the safe house burned to the ground, killing several men and women in the fire. And in 1985 six people were burned to death and an entire city block in Philadelphia destroyed when local police tried to dislodge a radical black group known as MOVE.
⁷
As the Weaver siege began in earnest, it appeared that there could be only one horrible end to the story. Something unprecedented developed at the foot of the mountain, however, changing once again the course of events.

A twenty-four-hour vigil of movement activists and neighbors began, quickly growing to a permanent presence of almost two hundred men, women, and children standing nose to nose with the FBI at the barricades. Aryan Nations members gathered from Canada, Montana, and, of course, Idaho. Skinheads traveled from Las Vegas, Utah, and Oregon. Identity believers from throughout the Northwest joined with unbelievers to bear witness against federal agents. A camplike cook kitchen fed the protesters, who formed bonds across ideological lines. They cried with grief at the news of the deaths and screamed with rage at each newly arrived federal agent. They held aloft a bevy of homemade signs:
DEATH TO ZOG
, of course.
F.B.I. BURN IN HELL
. But also more temperate pleas:
KIDS KILLED TOO. TELL THE TRUTH. STOP. COME WALK WITH US. THE WEAVERS TODAY! OUR FAMILIES TOMORROW
. And an even more remarkable sign that read
REMEMBER KENT STATE. RED SQUARE. TIANANMEN SQ. MY LAI. RUBY RIDGE
.
⁸

As the vigil grew in size and self-consciousness, participants invoked the names of Gordon Kahl and Bob Mathews. Some understood that their presence at the foot of what they now called Weaver Mountain was acting as a brake on further bloodshed. Others wanted to join the battle, and five skinheads were arrested in a vehicle stuffed with weapons when they attempted to sneak up a back road to the cabin.
⁹
Violent or nonviolent, enraged or prayerful, the protest represented a break with the movement’s past practices. It brought together mainstreamers and vanguardists alongside nonmovement people who were concerned about
the immediate situation, but not sympathetic to the movement’s final goals. All were engaged in an action with direct consequences.

At the same time, a similarly remarkable sequence of events ensued off-site. Before the siege ended,
The Spotlight
published the first in what became a long line of articles on the Weaver incident. Under the headline “Confrontation in Idaho Harbinger for America,” Liberty Lobby’s tabloid declared: “George Bush and the U.S. military may not be able to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad, but it looks like one man and his family in Idaho are goners.” Similarly, Tom Metzger began broadcasting messages in the midst of the siege. He claimed Weaver was “a subscriber associate” of White Aryan Resistance, meaning Weaver probably subscribed to the
WAR
tabloid. Metzger encouraged “white separatists and anti-Iron Heel citizens . . . to move into the area to protest a planned murder” but did not get directly involved otherwise.
¹⁰
These first indirect reports occurred about the same time that Bo Gritz decided to make a direct intervention.

Five days into the siege, Gritz arrived with a sidekick, Jack McLamb. Before Bo appeared on the scene, however, Pete Peters had contacted him. Peters was at that moment convening his annual summer Bible camp in Colorado. After a year of planning, the camp started on August 22, the second day of the siege. Everyone already knew that Weaver’s son Sam and the federal marshal were dead, although they did not yet know that Vicki Weaver was also dead. Peters convened a late-night three-hour session of “Elders” to decide what to do. They issued a press release signed by someone not known by the media as an anti-Semite. That small decision indicated that Peters intended to speak out beyond the confines of the white supremacist movement. The Elders also asked campers to phone the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney general’s office in protest.
¹¹

Knowing that Bo Gritz was then en route to Idaho, Peters also wrote a letter to Randy Weaver and sent it to Gritz, asking that it be delivered to the family. “Dear Randy,” it began, “Please know that the murder of your son has not gone unnoticed. Five hundred Christian Israelites from 40 states gathered at my 1992 camp in Colorado are right now praying for you and the Gideon situation you face.”
¹²
There is no evidence that Gritz delivered the letter or that it had any impact on the final outcome. (As we shall see, one late-night camp decision by Peters’s crew did have broad repercussions later, after he had convened a meeting of “Christian men” specifically to discuss the Weaver episode.)

Meanwhile, Gritz arrived at Weaver Mountain and began a complex dance that ultimately ended with Randy Weaver’s safe surrender to federal
authorities. At first, Gritz read with great fanfare a multipage “Citizen’s Warrant for Citizen’s Arrest,” at the behest of the protesters, then placed it under a rock at the FBI’s barricades. The next day Gritz handwrote a personal note to the special agent in charge of the siege: “We aren’t trying to make your task more difficult. We want to help. We believe that we can convince Randy to come out . . .”
¹³
The FBI, stuck at an impasse, agreed to let Gritz try to negotiate directly with Weaver. On the second day of negotiations, Gritz talked the severely wounded Kevin Harris into surrendering. The next day, August 31, Randy and his daughters came down the mountain. The immediate crisis ended quietly.
¹⁴

Despite Gritz’s success at diffusing the situation, an anticlimactic moment at the bottom of the hill proved more revealing about his character. While explaining the last stages of his negotiations to a group of protesters (and the press), Gritz stopped, raised his right arm in the typical Nazi salute, and said: “By the way, [Weaver] told me to tell you guys to give you a salute. He said you know what that is.” Certainly, a skinhead in the back of the crowd understood, even if Gritz then pretended that he didn’t. The skinhead returned the Sieg Heil white power salute and then turned his thumb up. Gritz continued explaining the surrender. When a local television station, KXLY-TV, aired tape of the incident, it appeared as if Gritz, who had started the year chastising David Duke for his Hitlerian sympathies, was about to end the year subject to the same criticism. That day he told the press that he gave the Nazi salute at Weaver’s request. But two nights later he told the audience of Chuck Harder’s right-wing
For the People
nationwide radio broadcast that the Nazi salute was not a salute at all; he was merely waving to supporters. When questioned about the incident again, he continued to deny what was manifestly evident to the naked eye.
¹⁵

The whole affair was pure Gritz. In his speeches, “intelligence briefings,” burning of United Nations symbols, and other histrionics, Gritz continually flirted with the imagery, code words, and stock phrases of the movement, all the while acting as if he weren’t sending signals to his audience. At that point in his life, Gritz did not want to be known as anything other than a true American patriot, a fighter against evil conspiracies, and a brave candidate for president. And the successful negotiation of Weaver’s surrender certainly gave his Populist Party candidacy a moment of fame.

Gritz went back to electioneering, and he drew larger crowds during the presidential campaign’s last months than during the first months. But the venues hadn’t changed. He still rode the Christian patriot and survivalist circuit, primarily in the West. He told five hundred people in Nampa, Idaho, “We’ll either take it with ballots in 1992, or we may be
required to defend our rights with bullets in 1996.”
¹⁶
In Spokane he drew eight hundred one night and five hundred two nights later. He repeated the performance in Seattle, stumping a bit (just a bit) for president and selling his book. In Montana he drew enthusiastic crowds, which watched him shred a United Nations flag and declare himself a steadfast defender of American sovereignty. To the outside world he may have still been a crank third party candidate, but to these crowds his negotiation skills had made him a celebrity.
¹⁷
Nevertheless, for Bo Gritz the events on Ruby Ridge became just one more talking point. For other activists, by contrast, the battle over Randy Weaver was just beginning.

September 19, 1992.
Another preparedness expo, another town; this time Spokane, Washington, an hour’s drive from the Aryan Nations camp, two hours from Ruby Ridge. Crowds of herbalists and food hoarders mixed with defenders of the Second Amendment and opponents of the New World Order. Vendors stood at their exhibit tables, hawking their wares like salesmen with the latest in home show gadgets. From the main stage, Bo Gritz and a few celebrity marketeers pitched their latest theories of dismay and disarray. Despite these and other distractions, the Weaver debacle was most on everyone’s mind. Off to the side, Louis Beam sat in a natty brown suit and casually discussed plans to buy land in the Northwest. Four years after the Fort Smith seditious conspiracy trial, he still hunted out conflagration like a coon dog searching for prey. (And there was plenty of conflict to come.)

In the evening Beam met with a dozen men and women from the area and began making plans. First on his list was the relatively mundane task of distributing a flyer that looked like a wanted poster, much like the bulletin the FBI had issued in 1987, when Beam was hiding out in Mexico. Across the top in bold type it read, “Wanted by Citizen Committee for Justice” a “U.S. Marshal, FBI or ATF Agent.” Two rows of fingerprints were pasted underneath the headline, a faceless photo to the left, and a description on the right. “The U.S. Marshall, FBI or ATF agent is usually accompanied by others whose specialty is persecution, the suppression of religious beliefs and/or the assassination of Christian Patriots and their family members.” Beam told the group he had printed an initial ten thousand flyers and wanted to distribute one million ultimately. If anyone needed more copies, Beam said, he had an 800 number to call. Ask for “Rudolf Hess”
¹
(as in, the aide to Hitler who had
flown to Britain in 1941 and was imprisoned ever after). Distributing the flyer was only a small first step in a long propaganda campaign. In fact, at Beam’s side that night was Chris Temple, then one of the most adept and analytical organizers in the movement. Over the next few years Temple’s strategic acumen blended with Beam’s thirst for militia-style madness and shaped the post-shoot-out Weaver campaign.