TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Tradition-Rooted ‘Patriot’ Groups Strive to Curtail Modern ‘Tyranny’

They operate under such public-spirited names as the Guardians of American Liberties, the Constitutionalists, the Arizona Patriots and the Assn. of the Sons of Liberty. They hold fund-raisers, religious meetings and lecture series and sell videos, bumper stickers and books. They keep in touch through the Internet and the American Patriot Fax Network.

And their leaders almost without exception insist that they neither advocate nor foment violence.

But the so-called “patriots movement,” according to federal investigators, provided the soil from which the Oklahoma City bombers may have sprung. President Clinton announced Sunday that he plans to seek expanded federal powers to investigate the many, diverse groups in the movement.

Its roots reach all the way to the American Revolution. The latter-day “patriots” regard themselves as direct descendants of those who overthrew British tyranny more than 200 years ago.

It has been much noted that April 19, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, came two years to the day after the inferno in Waco, Tex., that so enraged many members of the patriots movement.

But April 19 is an important day in American history for another reason. April 19, 1775, is the date of the battles of Lexington and Concord, where “the shot heard round the world” touched off the American Revolution.

“These patriots regard themselves as the inheritors of that tradition,” said Thomas Halpern, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “They believe they are opposing the tyranny of the American federal government.”

The paramilitary militias are only one component of the patriots movement, according to Tzivia Schwartz, counsel for the Anti-Defamation League in Los Angeles. “But they all generally share a common agenda and buy radical conspiracy theories,” she said.

The latest, circulated widely this past weekend over the American Patriot Fax Network, is telling. The Oklahoma City bombing, contended James P. Wickstrom, a member of the network and a former Constitution Party candidate for the U.S. Senate and governor of Wisconsin, was in fact carried out by the federal government itself.

He called the Oklahoma City disaster “a clandestine, inner-federal-government plot to create national hysteria and destruction in an attempt to further a more complete police state over the masses in the United States.”

The carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing may be without precedent but the concept is not. In 1986, six members of the Arizona Patriots allegedly plotted to blow up a federal building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles--as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and two Jewish Defense Leagues offices there, a Phoenix synagogue and an Internal Revenue Service office in Utah.

The Arizona rancher who led the group planned to use a car bomb or mail truck packed with explosives to blow up the IRS office in Utah, according to a federal indictment. The plot was uncovered during a two-year undercover FBI investigation, which stopped the plot before any bombings occurred and sent several leaders to jail.

Seditious and white supremacist groups have existed in the United States from the beginning, according to Bruce Hoffman, a former terrorism expert at the RAND Corp. think tank in Santa Monica who now is based at St. Andrews University in Scotland. In the 1980s, he said, they began evolving in different and more dangerous directions.

“They were no longer just racists, anti-Semites and traditional hate groups,” he said. “They also began to bring in militant tax resisters, anti-abortion advocates, the anti-gun control movement, opponents of government intervention or even any government above the county level. They also plugged into communities with particular problems, such as in the Farm Belt during its economic plight.

“Since the 1980s, these radical right-wing movements have been constantly reinventing themselves to appeal to new and more diverse constituencies,” he said.

California, reflecting the national diversity, has at least three groups that are part of the patriots movement, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

One, called State Citizens, is headed by Richard J. McDonald, a Los Angeles-area legal researcher and former police officer who urges his followers to resist the federal government’s drive to take away individual rights by turning in their Social Security cards, driver’s licenses and license plates.

McDonald, 66, himself drives a white 1972 BMW without license plates. He said Sunday that he has been stopped by police nine times but ticketed only once for driving illegally. An eighth-grade dropout, he lives in a Box Canyon house stocked with law and history books--proof, he says, that a government-provided education is not necessary to become a learned person.

At the regular weekly Sunday meeting of his group, McDonald and other members stressed that their movement was strictly political, with no direct or indirect connection to the Oklahoma City bombing or any militant organization.

“I don’t even have a gun, “ McDonald said.

Regarding the bombing, McDonald said: “It gives everybody a black eye who is not affiliated with it. It’s like a Mexican goes out and kills somebody; then people say all Mexicans are bad.”

McDonald added that the Oklahoma City suspects “may have called and downloaded information from my bulletin board,” an Internet chat line designed to foster discussion on political issues. But, he said, “I never even heard of them. They are off on their own bandwagon. A lot of people pick up on what I say and run off with it.”

Aside from the Sunday meetings at his house, which typically attract several dozen people, McDonald runs the bulletin board, syndicates a cable television show to 50 markets around the country and sells $795 kits that allow people to reject their federal citizenship. He has served a year in federal prison on tax charges.

In addition to State Citizens, Bakersfield has an active branch of Guardians of American Liberty, which is headquartered in Boulder, Colo. Members sell videos with conspiratorial themes about U.S. intelligence and media manipulation.

The Guardians group describes itself as a “national grass-roots network of American citizens formed to ensure our government is free of corruption.” One of its slogans: “Kick the Feds Out of the Counties.”

The third California group is the Militia of Northern California, which has some 200 members. Although it is one of few that is clearly racially mixed, according to the Anti-Defamation League, it shares the standard agenda of opposition to taxes, government and gun control.

Arizona--where Timothy J. McVeigh, the suspect arrested Friday in the Oklahoma City bombing had lived--has provided fertile ground for the patriots movement.

William Cooper, a leader of Arizona’s new generation of patriots, was the keynote speaker at a December patriots convention in Mesa attended by hundreds. His target on nightly shortwave radio broadcasts is the “new world order,” from the United Nations to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Linda Thompson, an Indianapolis lawyer, heads the American Justice Federation, another group committed “to stopping the new world order and getting the truth out to the American public.” She lectures and promotes her videos at patriots movement rallies, gun shows and militia meetings.

One of Thompson’s videos, “The Traitor Files,” alleges that Clinton and his wife are linked to a “Marxist-terrorist network.” She was arrested in Indianapolis last July when her car blocked a bus carrying supporters of Clinton’s health plan and police said that she was carrying two pistols and had an assault rifle with 295 rounds of ammunition in her car.

Wright reported from Washington and Meyer reported from Los Angeles. Times staff writer John Goldman in New York and researcher Ann Rovin in Denver contributed to this article.

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Measures to Fight Terrorism

Highlights of the President’s new antiterrorism initiative, announced Sunday:

* Clinton is urging Congress to pass the Omnibus Antiterrorist Act, already authored by Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). The act makes planning a terrorist act to occur on U.S. territory a federal crime, even if the planning occurs overseas, and tightens laws against raising money in the United States for terrorism abroad.

* Clinton will ask Congress for new legislation to support more vigorous counterterrorism programs, including the creation of an interagency Domestic Counterterrorism Center led by the FBI, creation of a special FBI counterterrorist and counterintelligence fund, and giving the FBI authority for increased use of “pen registers” to trace telephone calls, and increased access to records of consumer reporting agencies, hotels, motels and transportation carriers.

* Atty. Gen. Janet Reno will review vulnerability of all federal facilities, to be completed within 60 days. Clinton also ordered all Cabinet members and agency heads to review the security of their own facilities.

* The General Services Administration will build a new federal office building in Oklahoma City to replace the one destroyed by the blast.

* Clinton asked Reno, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and national security adviser Anthony Lake to prepare an overall “decision directive” to authorize further steps to fight foreign and domestic terrorism.