6 Arrested After Paramilitary Forest Activities

They first popped up more than two months ago, these men dressed in camouflage who built military-style encampments in national forests around the state.

They built a long trench at one site, and an underground bunker made of wood, large enough to hold men and equipment, at another.

They carried guns as well--pistols, shotguns and assault rifles--although none were illegal.

But law enforcement officials who ran into them in the forests said their answers to questions didn’t seem quite right, and once they passed themselves off as federal agents for something called the U.S. Enforcement Agency, which, as best anyone can tell, is not a government entity.

Although there were no confrontations with hikers or locals, there was one reported death threat against a sheriff’s deputy who got too snoopy.

Then investigators found out that some of them had used aliases in the past, and at least one had a criminal record. They decided there was more to this than a bunch of paramilitary fanatics from the city using the wilderness to play war games, though they believed them to be that as well.

So, over the weekend, federal agents-- real federal agents--made raids throughout the Los Angeles area, from the Simi Valley to Whittier, and arrested six men. A seventh was still at large Sunday afternoon.

They were charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, false impersonation of a U.S. officer and destruction of federal property. One of the men also faces a charge of possession of a firearm by a felon.

They were being held Sunday at the Downtown Federal Detention Center, pending arraignment today in U.S. District Court.

But the identities of the men were still under seal and what they were really up to is still a mystery, even to investigators.

Their story, according to authorities, is that they were merely training for their work as security specialists, dealing with the likes of bail bond skips and auto recovery and VIP protection.

“One person I interviewed said this was to get them in better shape for other operations,” said Ken Harp of the U.S. Forest Service. “He said they did a lot of running, hiking and other rigorous exercises to get in better shape.”

But Harp also described them as “weekend warrior, paramilitary types” whose equipment filled an entire van and a couple of small trucks. Camouflage netting and sleeping bags and Kevlar helmets and the like. “Gobs and gobs of it,” Harp said.

“I have to say we are not completely sure what their final agenda was,” said Rita Mears, the Forest Service’s resident special agent for the Angeles National Forest. “That’s the real tenuous part now.”

The first report of their strange activities came Feb. 5, in Sequoia National Forest, where Tulare County Deputy Sheriff Wayne Davis encountered a group of seven men who had dug a large trench and had weapons with them. No arrests were made, but Davis took down their names for his records, just in case.

The story got stranger a few days later, this time in Los Padres National Forest, north of Santa Barbara. Deputy Sheriff Jeff Rigby got a call from Jerry Jackson, a local ranch manager, who told him five men dressed in fatigues had asked permission to climb a steep cliff on the ranch property. Jackson said he had told them no, but thought the Sheriff’s Department should know about it anyway.

When Rigby followed in the direction the men had driven, he found two cars parked on the side of the road. When he approached the men, Rigby would later say in his report, one of them introduced himself with one name, though the identification he produced gave another. When asked about the discrepancy, the man said the first name was the one he used while a member of the French Foreign Legion.

According to Rigby’s report, another of the men told the deputy that two former members of their group had outstanding arrest warrants against them. He said the pair had recently suggested they might kill a Tulare County deputy sheriff who was snooping around their operations.

The group member said their operation included running back and forth to Mexico for training.

Like Davis in Tulare County, Rigby took down names. The deputy also said one of the men gave him the phone number of his “agency,” the U.S. Enforcement Agency.

That number, in turn, led to one Otis Cooper of Pomona, who said he used the U.S. Enforcement Agency name until last January--for his bail bond work.

“I closed that business down,” a startled Cooper recalled in an interview Sunday, adding that he may have trained one of the suspects to chase down fugitives who skipped bail.

“Somewhere along the line some of them decided they were going to be secret agents,” he said. “They are not federal agents, no sir.”

Finally, Forest Service officials said, the group showed up in the Angeles National Forest on March 19.

Harp said he got a call about some men in camouflage and went to check. He watched through binoculars from across the canyon and saw that they were building some kind of encampment. He then called Mears, who told him to get out of there quickly because the men were considered armed and dangerous.

The word of the two previous encounters had spread south.

Two days later, the men broke camp while, unknown to them, the investigation was heating up. The Forest Service was joined by other agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Then the bust began Saturday.

Were they just playing soldier? Were they just having fun by passing themselves off as federal agents and former soldiers of fortune? Mears said those questions remain to be answered.

“The not-so-simple side,” she said, “is that I can’t say all they were doing is playing games.”