Militia Members’ Threats, Attacks on Officials Escalate : Violence: Authorities confirm at least a dozen incidents with members of militant groups since last September. Alerts were issued in Central and Western states.

Months before the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, law enforcement agents across the Central and Western states had become the targets of an escalating series of threats and attacks by militants bound by a common hatred for government authority, records and interviews show.

Federal officials confirmed they have been alerted to at least a dozen confrontations since September, 1994, between suspected members of various heavily armed militia groups and federal, state and local authorities.

Among the episodes were several armed standoffs during searches and attempted arrests. In Indiana two months ago, militia members prevented authorities from enforcing a child custody order. And in rural Montana this month, members of one militia engaged in an armed standoff with a local law enforcement official when he tried to arrest a woman for a minor vehicle violation.

In the most violent incident reported, a man with militia ties is being sought for allegedly shooting a Missouri highway patrolman last September to avenge the arrest of a fellow anti-government activist.

After analyzing such seemingly unrelated incidents, federal authorities say they became concerned that they were facing a pattern of hostility against government employees and issued internal warnings about anti-government groups. Federal intelligence reports warn that some local police belong to militia groups and that radio transmissions about possible raids by federal agents have been intercepted by militia groups.

“We are concerned about the threats to law enforcement officers,” said one top law enforcement official in Washington. “The threats that they have made are fairly new, within the past year. We take them very seriously. We have to.”

The official, like a number of others, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the Oklahoma bombing investigation.

In California, officials have not reported the types of armed confrontations played out in some other states in recent months. But authorities say they have seen a potentially alarming rise in militia activity in the state, with several dozen groups concentrated in rural areas.

In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing that killed at least 98 on April 19, authorities are exploring links between certain militia members and bombing suspect Timothy J. McVeigh and two brothers charged with conspiring to make explosive devices. Officials also say they have intensified their efforts to monitor confrontations with a militia movement now thought to number more than 100,000 people spread through several hundred groups in 30 states.

Worried about increased hostility and intimidation from anti-government radicals, some federal employees in rural areas have altered their work habits or even stopped performing essential parts of their jobs.

After someone killed a gray wolf, wildlife investigators cut short their search of an Idaho ranch last month out of fear of an armed confrontation, according to records and interviews.

“This is a classic example of what our agents are facing in the Idaho, Montana area,” says a confidential federal intelligence alert. “I don’t have to remind you of the enormous agent safety issue this type of hysteria is creating for our people and all federal law enforcement in militia-dominated areas!”

Militia leaders have distanced themselves from the men linked to the bombing and say that they never espouse breaking the law. But their statements leave unclear under what circumstances they see fit to put their weaponry to use.

“If the government is going to come out here and take away our families and our land and our guns, then they’ll have to come here and find out what would happen,” said John Trochmann, a prominent national leader from the Militia of Montana.

Although there is no evidence to directly link past confrontations to the Oklahoma tragedy, watchdog groups agree that the angers, frustrations and hostilities may well have been harbingers for the deadly explosion that has rocked the nation’s psyche.

“This is a very scary phenomenon,” said Brian Levin, an Orange County hate-crime specialist with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “There’s a heavy-duty glorification of violence and of terrorist tactics in these groups.”

Experts say the militia movement has spread like a prairie fire in the last two years, fueled in large part by outrage over the government’s handling of the fiery 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Tex., that killed more than 80.

Although restrained by laws governing police surveillance and infiltration, authorities have begun tracking incidents involving paramilitary groups closely in recent months. Officials are disseminating state-by-state information to hundreds of federal field offices, sources said.

“We keep everybody apprised for their own safety,” said a federal law enforcement official.

Federal officials believe some militias are monitoring them as well, tapping in to radio frequencies to track conversations among agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and to alert members to potential raids, according to federal authorities.

“They say that they have (been taking ATF conversations and disseminating them) and I have no doubt that they are,” said Chris Nelson, the ATF special agent in charge of the Pacific Northwest division. “That is something we are concerned about, but hopefully we have limited our radio traffic so things we don’t want out there don’t get out.”

Some militias may also be aided by law enforcement officers, federal officials fear. In early April, federal authorities in Texas confirmed that local law enforcement officers themselves were involved with militia groups, according to law enforcement sources.

And in the San Joaquin Valley, federal law enforcement sources say militia members and supporters include local police and sheriffs and county supervisors.

“The southern San Joaquin Valley is a real hotbed,” said a federal law enforcement official based in Fresno. “The whole movement is very big time around here.”

Highway 99 near the Kern-Tulare line is peppered with homemade signs promoting violence against federal agents and judges: “I.R.S. In Range to Shoot,” “Less Government, More Body Bags” and “Pigs And Judges Aren’t Bulletproof.” One sign gives a phone number where people can obtain alternate identity documents to confound the IRS and other federal agencies.

Three times in the last year, Mark Koernke, the Michigan paramilitary figure now wanted for questioning concerning the Oklahoma blast, has brought his anti-government fury to Kern County at so-called “Intelligence meetings,” encouraging people to join the local militia and defend themselves against ATF and FBI “thugs.”

Some law enforcement authorities were shocked at the number of people who attended an Aug. 29, 1994, meeting at a Bakersfield restaurant and the incendiary nature of the Koernke’s five-hour presentation.

“It was a hot summer evening and there were close to 1,000 people packed into this banquet hall,” said one official.

Across California, the state attorney general’s office estimates there are 30 militia-style groups, most of them concentrated in the North and loosely linked by a common hatred of taxation and gun-control laws. Well-established militias operate in Placer, El Dorado, Butte, Tehama, Tulare, Kern and Mendocino counties, among others.

Richard Maness, who founded the Tulare County militia, said he was moved to form the group after a judge ordered him to pay child support out of his veteran’s disability benefits. He attempted to place the judge under citizen’s arrest for extortion and was arrested himself for obstruction of justice and disturbing the peace, he said.

“We’re trying to prevent people in government from trying to usurp our rights,” Maness said. “We’ve been pushed to the point where people are really fed up. They want less, less, less government.”

Law enforcement officials must be “on alert” to the potential threat posed by members of these groups, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren warned this week, but at the same time he said officials must be careful to respect their civil liberties. The ideas expressed by many of these groups “may be unpopular, but that doesn’t make them illegal,” he said.

Some militia groups--like one founded in San Bernardino in 1994--say their interests are as benign as cleaning up graffiti. Even the group’s name sounds almost harmless: the Morongo Basin Militia & Yacht Club.

“We call ourselves yacht club members, and only become a militia if all else fails us,” explained leader Ramon Mendoza.

However, many militia groups claim more militaristic interests, distributing tapes and literature on the coming of a foreign-dominated national government and meeting on weekends for survivalist and paramilitary training. Ex-Green Beret James (Bo) Gritz, who is building an Idaho compound for “Christian patriots” who want to prepare for Armageddon, leads one of the more popular militia training programs.

With similar themes echoed from coast to coast, militia members wrap their arguments in a lexicon of anti-government conspiracy theories.

The David Koresh followers in Waco were “sacrificial lambs,” killed in a carefully orchestrated government plot, said Montana militia leader Trochmann.

Government officials are secretly planning to nationalize all the police departments across the country so that they can take away guns from local citizens, according to United We Stand, America, Inc., district coordinator Richard F. Avard, a member of a newly formed militia group called the Orange County Corps.

And the murders of five children and wounding of 29 others in a Stockton schoolyard in 1989 were set up by the government, using “mind-control” tactics on shooter Patrick Purdy so that officials could later restrict access to semiautomatic weapons, said Bakersfield insurance agent Karen Gentry, a member of the Kern County Liberty Corps.

“What these kinds of extremist ideas do is to shift the center of the ideological spectrum,” said Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political science professor who wrote a book last year on the “racist right” and the religious movement. “It’s always worrisome when yesterday’s extremism becomes today’s moderation, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

Militia members are often the first to admit that their ideas sound strident.

“People ask me, ‘Are you as right wing as the John Birch Society?’ ” said Gentry of Bakersfield. “And I say, ‘No, I’m worse.’ ”

Indeed, some are so obsessed by government conspiracy theories that they claim the government itself blew up the Oklahoma City federal building.

“I believe that the CIA orchestrated that to justify declaring martial law to disarm the militia,” said Carl Jones, a paralegal and leader of the Ft. Bragg militia of Mendocino County. “If you wanted to cause a great amount of credibility problems (for the militia), the easiest way to do that is to harm children and women and innocent civilians.”

A series of confrontations in the months before the Oklahoma bombing have been reviewed by federal investigative officials as part of an effort to gauge the ongoing threat of violence. In the sniping incident last September, a man with ties to white supremacist and paramilitary groups is suspected of shooting a Missouri state trooper as he sat watching TV in his living room.

Missouri authorities say they believe Trooper Bobby Harper was shot and seriously wounded by Witts Spring, Ark., resident Timothy Coombs, 35, simply because Harper was among the officers who had arrested an associate of the suspect on charges of carrying a concealed weapon and evading arrest.

Authorities believe Coombs, who remains at large, received sniper training from a militia organization, said Missouri Highway Patrol investigator Miles Parks. Coombs, he added, is believed to be in hiding with colleagues in the militia movement.

Earlier this month in Ravalli County, Mont., militia members engaged in an armed standoff with authorities after police sought to arrest a woman with an expired license plate who, after being stopped, drove to her father’s home. The police left but the father was later arrested on charges of intimidating law officers.

“We’ve been having threats on county officials, and had an incident where the county put in an emergency ordinance to ban guns in and around the courthouse because at the time there was a militia member in jail,” said Drake Kiewit, editor of the Ravalli Republic newspaper. “Here, the Internal Revenue Service has been the root of our evils. Their investigations have led to people questioning the government.”

In Indiana’s rural Ripley County, about 45 miles west of Cincinnati, sheriff’s officials had two run-ins in February with a local man who refused to give up his two children to his ex-wife in a custody dispute.

Sheriff’s officials went to the man’s home two times to enforce custody orders, but he remained holed up with two other men believed to be fellow militia members, said Chief Deputy Sheriff Bob Alexander. The man had reportedly called the militia for help.

In phone conversations during the standoff, “they said basically they weren’t coming out and we’d have to go in and get them,” Alexander said.

The situation was defused through negotiations spearheaded by a leader of the Indiana militia--and, ironically, the man was allowed to retain custody of his children, Alexander said.

In Salmon, Ida., last month, three U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents sought to serve a federal search warrant at a ranch where someone had killed a federally protected Canadian gray wolf.

When the agents refused to leave the ranch at the request of the local sheriff and a rancher, the pair sped off. The agents then asked the rancher’s brother-in-law where the men were going, and he replied, “probably to get the militia,” recalled special agent Paul Weyland.

Fearing a gun battle, Weyland said he and two fellow agents left the scene, and they have yet to return to finish executing the warrant.

Sheriff Brett Barsalou says that he actually left the scene to call the governor and a congressman about the incident, to which he later testified at a Washington hearing.

“At the time, the agents didn’t perceive the way the populace of central Idaho viewed them,” the sheriff said. “The perception is that the people had had enough of the federal government as a whole.”

Said Weyland: “It makes you a little more tense knowing that something could happen out there.”

Times staff writers Mark Arax in Fresno, Virginia Ellis in Sacramento, Tom Gorman in Riverside, Richard C. Paddock in San Francisco, H. G. Reza in Orange County, Phil Sneiderman in Palmdale, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Ralph Frammolino in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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Growth in Militias

Organizations that track militia activities find a sharp rise in militia activity since last year. The militias sprouting up across the nation apparently have no centralized structure, though they do often share information. To most of them, the American government is the enemy, and they cite gun control efforts as their call to arms.

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States with active militias in 1994 ARIZONA COLORADO FLORIDA IDAHO INDIANA MICHIGAN MISSOURI MONTANA NEW HAMPSHIRE NEW MEXICO NORTH CAROLINA OHIO VIRGINIA ***

Additional states with active militias identified in 1995 CALIFORNIA GEORGIA KANSAS MASSACHUSETTS NEBRASKA NEW YORK OKLAHOMA OREGON PENNSYLVANIA TENNESSEE TEXAS WASHINGTON ***

States with hate-crime laws against paramilitary training ARKANSAS CALIFORNIA COLORADO CONNECTICUT FLORIDA GEORGIA IDAHO ILLINOIS IOWA LOUISIANA MICHIGAN MISSOURI NEBRASKA NEW JERSEY NEW YORK NORTH CAROLINA PENNSYLVANIA SOUTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE VIRGINIA WEST VIRGINIA ***

MILITIA ACTIVITIES

1. Form paramilitary groups that stockpile weapons and food.

2. File spurious lawsuits to clog judicial system.

3. Circulate phone money orders to trouble Federal Reserve system.

4. Recruit elected officials to their cause.

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The rise of militias around the country is being linked to these events:

The Waco showdown

* When: Feb. 28-April 19, 1993

* Where: Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Tex.

* Background: Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to raid the compound to arrest cult leader David Koresh. Koresh’s heavily armed followers resisted, and four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed by gunfire. A 51-day standoff followed. Finally, FBI agents used an armored vehicle and tear gas to try to force the cult members out. Fire engulfed the compound. Branch Davidians blamed federal agents for the fire that killed as many as 85. A government report sharply criticized ATF’s handling of the initial raid. A review cleared the FBI and Justice Department of any wrongdoing in the fire.

* Extremists’ view: Waco has come to symbolize federal intrusion. To many, the siege is a sign that the government is widening authoritarian control and planning warfare against citizens.

***

The Idaho siege

* When: Aug. 21-Sept. 1, 1992

* Where: Ruby Ridge, Ida.

* Background: Survivalist and avowed racist Randy Weaver, facing gun charges, holded up in his remote cabin. The confrontation claimed the lives of Weaver’s wife and teen-age son. Weaver surrendered after a 10-day standoff.

* Extremists’ view: The incident is cited for many of the same reasons as the Waco showdown, as a sign of government warfare on citizens.

Sources: Center for Democratic Renewal (militia states), Anti-Defamation League (hate-crime laws)