Against Abortion : Clinic Fires a Holy War, Bomber Says

From the picket line, from the spot where he stood with a sign protesting abortion, Curtis Beseda could see the pregnant women.

They would arrive and disappear into the Everett (Wash.) Feminist Women’s Health Center. And then they would leave after their abortions.

“I saw women walking in and then walking out without their child,” Beseda recalled. “It’s as close as you can get in an abortion to understanding that a life has been taken. . . .”

So Curtis Anton Beseda set out to do something about it. He decided to destroy the clinic.

Flames of Protest

He set fire to it twice, each time damaging but not closing it. Finally, on a third successful nighttime attack last April 19, he kicked out a window, poured gas inside and touched off the conflagration that had thus far eluded him: The flames of protest finally shuttered the abortion clinic for good.

“The lives I could save (from abortion) the next day were precious,” Beseda said. “There were lives that were saved.”

With such thoughts and with such deeds, Beseda, 29, became one of the nation’s first practitioners of what has now become a tidal surge of violence against abortion clinics around the country. From three arsons and bombings of clinics in 1982, the number of such attacks burst to 24 last year. With one more thus far in 1985, there have been 30 fires and explosions aimed at abortion clinics and related facilities across the country.

Violence has sometimes taken other forms. Shots from a high-powered rifle or machine gun were fired into two Florida clinics last April 28, for example.

Denunciations

The violence has brought calls for an investigation into the possibility of a national conspiracy against clinics and, last week, strong denunciations from President Reagan and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell.

But at least one of the clinic bombers predicts more violence until abortion is curbed.

“All the bombings that are taking place are to convey the message to Washington: ‘Let our children live,’ ” Don Benny Anderson, 44, said last week in an interview at the federal prison near Oxford, Wis. Anderson is serving 42 years for a clinic bombing in suburban Washington, D.C., two more bombings in Florida and the kidnaping of an Illinois doctor who performed abortions.

He coined the “Army of God” description that has been used by others in claiming responsibility for clinic attacks.

“These are just warning blasts,” Anderson added. “We are in the embryonic stages of civil war, holy war.”

Barbara Radford, executive director of the National Abortion Federation, whose Washington, D.C., headquarters were bombed last July 4, said: “The anti-abortion community has become frustrated with their attempts to make abortion illegal through the democratic process, and the criminal activity has escalated. It’s very sophisticated stuff, and I do not think it’s reached its peak.”

Although Radford praises efforts by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in probing the individual arsons and bombings, she has long called for a broader investigation by the FBI to determine any greater conspiracy to shut down clinics.

“I’m not saying there’s a group going around the country,” Radford said. “I’m saying it’s worth looking into. We believe the number of incidents and the seriousness of incidents should be demanding of a broader investigation. We’ve seen two attacks on opposite ends of the country (Atlanta and San Diego) on the same day (last Sept. 13), and for (FBI Director William H.) Webster to say there’s no coordinated conspiracy (and thus not a case for the FBI)--it’s hard to believe that.”

Geographic Link

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms information officer Dot Koester said: “We have found no evidence of a national conspiracy. There may be some geographic connection--in Washington, (D.C.) we’ve been hit in Washington, Maryland and Virginia--but there’s no national conspiracy. Some may be copycat (attacks). We are looking at conspiracy; it remains a possibility when it happens in clusters.”

Most of the arsons and bombings have occurred in clusters:

--Six attacks occurred in the Houston area within a three-month period last year, including two on Sept. 7 and one on each of the next two days.

--The Washington, D.C., area has seen eight attacks, ranging from Anderson’s June 6, 1982, assault in suburban Virginia to the nation’s latest attack, the bombing of a Washington clinic on New Year’s Day.

--And a small number of people have apparently been responsible for many of the arsons and bombings, judging by arrests. Beseda claims responsibility for all four Washington state incidents, and Anderson and two others were convicted of three attacks, including the nation’s first ones in St. Petersburg and Clearwater, Fla., on May 29, 1982. Two other men have been charged with a June 25, 1984, bombing in Pensacola, Fla.; the same two, the wife of one and the girlfriend of the other have been charged with the three Christmas Day bombings in Pensacola.

12 Arrests

Arrests have been made in 12 of the 30 attacks, resulting in the convictions of Beseda, Anderson and his two accomplices and another man in Virginia, and the confessions of the four Pensacola suspects. But there is no evidence that those arrested in one region know the attackers in another.

So far no one has been killed or injured in the arsons and bombings. But they have precipitated high levels of fear and anxiety, and caused dislocation among women’s health clinics.

“Even though (Beseda) said he didn’t want to hurt anyone, it was coincidental nobody was there when the fires were set,” said Beverly Whipple, executive director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Yakima, Wash., and of the now-closed facility in Everett. “We were in the clinic the night before the final fire was set at the same hour (about 9:30).”

The clinic was forced to close because the landlord revoked its lease, the three fires drained the clinic of $20,000 in damages and its fire insurance was canceled, Whipple said.

In addition, the verbal harassment and picketing that preceded the bombing took its toll. One Everett clinic worker sold her house and moved away because of telephone threats to her home.

Heavy Sentences

Radford said that although she is displeased with the lack of a broader investigation, the heavy sentences imposed on Beseda and Anderson were strong messages to others. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, in sentencing Beseda to two consecutive 10-year prison terms, said he was sending a warning that although “right-thinking men and women have disagreed over abortion,” he wanted to deter “other actions by single-minded people.”

The bombings have also drawn strong condemnations from foes of abortion. Falwell, the leader of an effort seeking a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, denounced the bombings as the acts of “deranged” people who are committing “criminal acts of the lowest sort.”

President Reagan, who also opposes abortion, called the attacks “violent anarchistic activities.”

Amid the current wave of violence against abortion clinics, both Anderson and Beseda agreed last week to be interviewed. Speaking about their thoughts and actions that led to their imprisonment, they provided the most revealing insight yet into their--and perhaps others’--motives in attacking abortion clinics.

Both say they are strongly religious. Neither Beseda, who was being held in the Pierce County Corrections Center in Tacoma while awaiting transfer to a federal prison, nor Anderson expressed remorse.

That condition is symptomatic of people in the grip of “righteous rage,” said Joseph Margolin, a Washington, D.C., social and clinical psychologist who has studied terrorism. Such people “do not have the same constraints on their behavior (as others). The ability to know proper behavior is somehow defective. A lot of people have the same rage and don’t act on it, (but others don’t) know there are boundaries.”

Anderson, a father of seven children who says he once controlled $1 million worth of real estate, said he began his journey to violence after “praying (to) see what God would like me to do. My chief goal in life is to do his will.”

Anderson, a Mormon, said: “I just decided this would be my full-time, shall we say, occupation.”

It began on May 29, 1982, with fires set at the two Florida clinics. On June 6 an explosion ripped through the Falls Church clinic, and on Aug. 12 of that year, Dr. Hector Zevallos and his wife were kidnaped from their home in a suburb of Edwardsville, Ill.

“The Army of God” claimed responsibility in each case. Zevallos and his wife were subsequently released after investigators found a note from the “Army” demanding that Reagan make a public statement denouncing abortion.

Of the “Army of God,” Anderson said: “It’s organized, but we say it’s organized by God.

“In effect,” Anderson said, “we’ve sacrificed our lives so others may live. In my conscience, no crime has been committed. I’m not guilty of anything.

“The end result (of the bombings) will be that millions of lives will be saved (from abortion). What I’m worried about is (the violence) going into other areas. I’m not threatening, I’m telling you it’s going to get worse.”

Beseda told a story of himself as a middle-class man, initially uncomfortable even holding a picket sign, gradually pulled into a moral vortex that inevitably carried him to arson.

Reared in a Catholic family in the Seattle-Everett area, Beseda was graduated in 1978 from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma with a degree in choral education. In a depressed teaching market, he eventually turned to cleaning and treating shake roofs for a living.

“Abortion--as Catholics, we were taught that was wrong,” Beseda said. “That was pretty well set in my mind back in high school.

“Then, for a time, religion left my life. When I came back (to religion) at Pacific Lutheran University, I found God for myself on a personal level. From there, it became a larger factor in my life. That doesn’t have anything to do with abortion per se, but (with) a reverence for life.”

So, in the fall of 1983, when the Feminist Women’s Health Center opened in Everett, a friend of Beseda’s brother called and said: “ ‘Why don’t you come down and picket?’ ” Beseda said. “I decided I should go down there.”

“At first,” Beseda recalled, “it was really difficult for me to hold a sign. I had never held a picket sign before. I thought, what am I doing out here holding a sign? It was difficult . . . and originally I still wasn’t thinking about doing anything more serious than that.”

By Thanksgiving, though, Beseda’s intentions had changed. “It just came to my mind that if they really are killing human beings in there--and I believe that, that that’s a human being like you or me or someone else--if you value human life and you value anyone’s life as being equal, you come to the point where you have to say: This is wrong. And then it becomes, am I willing to stop it or not?

“For me that wasn’t a difficult choice at all.”

So, in the early hours of Saturday, Dec. 3, 1983, just hours before the clinic would be open for abortions, after determining the building was unoccupied, Curtis Beseda set fire to the clinic. Thirty minutes later, he reported the fire to officials.

It began a series of events that would ultimately lead to his apprehension, and to the closing of the clinic.

“It just came down to the practical thing, what really works?” he said. “And what really works in that situation is doing what I did. Human life--you can’t say you’re halfway committed on it. You either are or you aren’t.”

Margolin suggested that such religion-motivated attackers “are not much different from earlier Palestinian or Israeli terrorists. Their motivations “may be very well rationalized or, in others, it may be utter frustration at there being no other way to achieve their end . . . and there is no compromising; it’s go or no go. There’s no such thing as a little abortion.”

But among at least one clinic operator, the violence has produced a determination to try to stay in business. Dr. William Permenter of Pensacola, whose gynecology clinic was leveled by a Christmas Day bomb, had said last month that he would stop doing abortions because no one would rent to him. But he is reconsidering.

“I don’t want the picketers to think they are running me out of business,” Permenter told the Miami Herald. “That only makes me angry and makes me want to stay in business and get back in and do twice as many.”

Permenter said he was opposed to abortion until he treated the wounds and infections of young women who used nails, catheters and knitting needles to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. In 1978 he performed his first abortion.

“It’s so hard to explain what I feel for my patients,” he said. “Why can’t they (the bombers) understand the trauma these kids are going through? My patients don’t have to answer to any man. They only have to answer to God.”