4 Held in Plot to Cut Lines Near Nuclear Plants

Agents firing a flare into the desert night surprised two men and a woman who were cutting the legs off a power line tower with a blowtorch and arrested the two men, charging them with plotting to sabotage power lines simultaneously near nuclear plants in California, Arizona and Colorado, the FBI said Wednesday.

Eleven hours after the arrest late Tuesday, FBI agents took another man into custody at his home in Tucson. He was identified by associates as one of the five founders of Earth First!, a radical environmental group. Agents identified the Tucson man as David Foreman, 42. They accused him of financing the three-state nuclear plant conspiracy.

The woman who was surprised with the two men on the desert fled across the sand on foot. Lawmen in helicopters pursued her with spotlights and infrared sensors. She escaped to a road, where bloodhounds lost her scent. Officers on horses called off the search when she turned up in Prescott, Ariz., where she works, and was taken into custody.

The woman was identified in an FBI complaint as Margaret Katherine Millett, 35, who gave her address as Palace Station, Ariz., near Prescott. The two men arrested at the tower on the desert were identified as Mark Leslie Davis, 39, and Marc Andre Baker, 37, both of Prescott. At the request of a U.S. attorney, who described them as dangerous, the three men were being held without bond.

Charges Detailed

The four were plotting to cut electrical transmission lines to the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Generating Station near San Luis Obispo, Calif.; the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Phoenix, and the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility near Denver, the FBI said. They conspired to “cause a significant interruption and impairment of the function of the (facilities),” the agency said in a complaint.

Earth First! opposes anything that it considers damaging to the environment. Some members of the group use guerrilla warfare, which they call “monkey wrenching,” after a 1975 novel by Arizona author Edward Abbey, called the “Monkey Wrench Gang.” Abbey, who died last March, has said that, while he didn’t idolize Foreman, he admired him and his work. “He’s willing to stick his head on the chopping block,” Abbey once said.

The FBI complaint said that Davis had inspected electrical power lines leading to Diablo Canyon within the past 45 days and tried to enter the plant. Gregg Pruett, a spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates the plant, said its officials were aware of Davis’ attempt to enter the facility. He said Davis posed as a hiker who wanted to walk into hills behind the plant but that security guards turned him away.

The tower-cutting effort that triggered the arrest was a dry run “to practice techniques and to perfect procedures” for toppling electrical transmission towers at the three nuclear facilities, the FBI complaint said. The practice run was directed at power lines that carry electricity to Central Arizona Project water pumping stations in rural La Paz County, about 90 miles northwest of Phoenix. A separate count in the complaint charges Davis, Millett and Baker with trying to “damage and destroy” a CAP tower.

Davis and Millett also were charged with sabotaging a chair lift at the Fairfield Snowbowl Ski and Summer Resort seven miles north of Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1987. Davis was charged in a separate incident of sabotage at the Snowbowl ski lift in 1988. And both were charged with an effort to sabotage power lines leading to a uranium mine near the Grand Canyon last year. In that attempt they damaged 29 power poles, the FBI said.

‘Significant Interruption’

Damage to the ski lift stopped short of causing anyone physical harm, manager J. R. Murray said. But FBI agents said the damage to the 29 poles caused “a significant interruption in power” at the uranium mine.

At the time, a group calling itself the Ev Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy, or EMETIC, claimed responsibility for damaging the ski lift and interrupting power at the mine. In letters to newspapers and broadcast stations, EMETIC demanded a halt to development at the ski resort, located at the San Francisco Peaks.

The peaks are sacred to the Navajo and Hopi Indian tribes.

EMETIC also demanded a halt to uranium mining because it, too, disturbed ground sacred to the Indians.

Evan Mecham, the Arizona governor who was impeached last year, and apparently the person for whom the group named itself, disavowed any connection with the environmentalists.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea of what they’re up to or who they are or anything else,” Mecham said by telephone from his office in suburban Glendale, Ariz., where he was gearing up for his sixth gubernatorial bid.

“The first I’ve heard of it is today.”

At a news conference in Phoenix, David L. Small, agent in charge of an FBI anti-terrorism unit, said his agents were involved because anti-terrorism as defined by the Justice Department “includes any individual committing criminal acts under federal, state or local laws in furtherance of their political or social goals.”

Stephen M. McNamee, the U.S. attorney handling the case, told reporters that the arrests represent “a significant development in law enforcement.” He added: “I don’t know if you can use the word terrorists (to describe the suspects) . . . but if you would topple one of these towers and the electricity were to be interrupted, you can reasonably conclude that this is a very dangerous problem.”

Publisher on Scene

The arrests on the desert took place at 8:24 p.m. Tuesday, according to Jim Loyd, publisher of a La Paz County weekly newspaper called The Gem.

Loyd, the only newsman at the scene, said that about 50 FBI agents took part.

“The arrest took place about 11 miles north of Wenden, off the Lake Alamo Road,” Loyd said. ‘ . . . The group were going to cut towers so that one would fall into another and create real fireworks in the desert.

“The FBI had a person inside as part of the group, and they knew they were going to do it. The agents had a swat team in position when the group arrived. The suspects walked up a dirt road a half mile off the Lake Alamo Road and then a few hundred feet to the base of the first tower. They put together a propane and oxygen torch and cut about half of one leg.

“Then the swat team shot a flare up in the air and moved in on them,” Loyd said. “They dropped what they were doing and took off running. One guy had square boards bigger than shoes taped to the bottom of his feet to hide his footprints, so he couldn’t run fast. He and the other man were arrested on the spot.

“The woman slipped into the night. She had tape on the bottom of her feet, and that made strange footprints, so at first they had no trouble searching for her.”

The footprints headed south toward Wenden, Loyd said.

“They tracked her for a mile or so, but she got to the main highway, and they lost her,” he said. “She might have gotten a ride.”

FBI agents borrowed a bloodhound named Buford T. Justice from the Tempe, Ariz., Police Department and searched through the night. They used helicopters they called Black Hawk and The Night Stalker. When daylight returned, they were joined by several other bloodhounds and men on horseback from the Arizona Department of Corrections. But it was to no avail.

All they found were vehicles apparently used by the suspects, Loyd said. “They had guns in their vehicles, numerous weapons.

“They had no weapons on their persons, however,” he said.

Foreman was arrested in Tucson at about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Loyd said.

He said agents told him that Millett turned herself in to Yavapai County officials in Prescott at about 1 p.m.

FBI agents in La Paz County were upset that they were not notified that she had been taken into custody--and searched several hours for nothing, Loyd said.

At its press conference in Phoenix, the FBI insisted that their agents had arrested Millett at the Prescott office of Planned Parenthood, which they identified as her place of work.

Staff writers Carol McGraw, Ron Harris and Nieson Himmel and researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.