Arrest Stops Man’s Alleged Plans for War on Abortion : Investigation: FBI says extremist staged a daring robbery, then sought allies for assaults on clinics, doctors.

When Robert E. Cook was first questioned by police in January about threatening statements he had made outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Fla., he appeared to be one more extremist in a city that already had suffered through the murders of two abortion doctors.

Cook’s reputed warnings to neighboring store owners around the clinic--”You’d better get bulletproof glass” and, “Soon it’s going to look like the 4th of July around here”--had attracted the attention of police in a city that has become something of a Mecca for anti-abortion extremists.

But a background check led the FBI to suspect that Cook might be something different--a relatively sophisticated criminal carefully plotting an assault on abortion providers.

Months of undercover surveillance of Cook’s activities convinced the FBI that the 33-year-old man was planning to use money allegedly obtained from a daring and previously unsolved $260,000 robbery of an armored car in Kenosha, Wis., to finance what he told others would be a war against abortion doctors and clinics.

A former employee of the armored car company, Cook allegedly shifted the money to an offshore bank account in the Cayman Islands, amassed an arsenal of weapons and ammunition kept in an Illinois storage locker and apparently tried unsuccessfully to recruit others to join him in targeting abortion providers as well as government offices.

The FBI arrested Cook on Aug. 16 for the 1994 armored car robbery after he made a specific threat to begin his anti-abortion attacks on Tuesday, Aug. 22. U.S. Atty. Thomas Schneider, handling the case in Milwaukee, said that he believes Cook’s arrest has averted the potential for yet more bloodshed in America’s abortion violence, in which five people have been killed since 1993.

“Good police work is able to take a terrible crime and solve it,” said Schneider. “Great police work is able to prevent a crime and a terrible tragedy.”

Cook’s arrest has sent new tremors along the front lines of the abortion battle, where anti-abortion leaders are under increasing pressure from federal authorities who have been investigating the possibility that there is a conspiracy behind the recent wave of anti-abortion violence.

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Federal law enforcement officials have not charged anyone else in the case, and said that they know of no one else who was working with Cook. Cook, who grew up in Fountain Valley and was graduated from Cal State Fullerton, was being held without bond on charges stemming from the armored car robbery after an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee on Thursday.

Cook has no attorney yet and was unavailable for comment on the charges and allegations against him.

Anti-abortion activists said that they had had little significant contact with Cook. In fact, some leaders of the movement were said to be so worried that Cook might be dangerous that they told law enforcement officials about their brief contacts with him.

“There is a real concern and fear among some leaders that just talking to someone who might be involved in violence brings you into this [federal government’s] conspiracy investigation,” said Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition and a former national spokesman for Operation Rescue.

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The anti-abortion movement’s leaders depicted Cook as a loner who traveled around the country to hot spots in the abortion battle in a vain attempt to offer leading activists vague ideas on how to “end abortion within a year.”

While Cook was said to have been open in his anti-abortion threats, what makes him seem different from other anti-abortion extremists who have been involved in violence was his alleged planning of a major robbery to finance his campaign. While on vacation from his job at an armored car company in Kenosha, Wis., Cook allegedly robbed a vehicle in September, 1994, while it was on a route he had previously worked. The vehicle was stolen while left locked but unattended. It was recovered six minutes later three blocks from the Kenosha bank where it had been parked.

The lengthy federal investigation shows how difficult it can be to pursue cases of anti-abortion violence even when only one person is involved. Arrested in Illinois in the neighborhood where he kept a storage locker full of weapons and ammunition, he was found with $11,000 on him, several changes of clothes, a cooler of fresh food and water, and an AR-15 assault rifle in his vehicle. Federal officials said that he appeared to be prepared to live out of his vehicle.

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During Thursday’s court hearing, prosecutors said that the FBI obtained audiotapes in which Cook allegedly planned for anti-abortion assaults. “The impulse to just do it is there for me,” Cook is quoted as saying on the tape. An FBI affidavit filed in the case also says that Cook told one source not long before his arrest that he was planning to go see his children to “say goodby” because he knew he was “going to die within 10-15 days and will not be taken alive.”

Despite the sophisticated approach used in the armored car robbery with which he is charged, anti-abortion leaders said that Cook was clumsy and obvious in his attempts to get involved with their organizations.

In fact, anti-abortion leaders said that Cook was so aggressive in his efforts to contact them that some nervous leaders initially suspected he might be a government informer working in some sort of sting operation. “He called a friend of mine, trying to get in touch with us eight or nine months ago and after talking to him my friend said: ‘I don’t know much about this guy, but he sounds like a Fed to me,’ ” recalled Paul deParrie, editor-in-chief of Life Advocate Magazine, and one of the leaders of Advocates for Life Ministries, an anti-abortion group based in Portland, Ore.

“In this case, what [Cook] did to the [anti-abortion] movement was that he validated that there is no conspiracy,” Mahoney argued. “He tried to contact people, wrote letters saying that people need to do more. But abortion rights activist leaders dismissed him and some even contacted law enforcement officials.

“This man wrote pro-life activist leaders all across the country. This man was aggressive in trying to build relationships with people. He was not shy about trying to elicit support. But the leaders I know who were contacted by him either went to law enforcement or thought he was a federal plant because of his aggression, or viewed him as a weird fanatic.”

Yet abortion-rights activists questioned whether Cook had more significant links to the movement’s leaders. They pointed to Cook’s attendance earlier this month at a conference of an anti-abortion organization in St. Louis and to the publication of an article he wrote in a newsletter put out by an Alabama extremist this summer. Abortion-rights activists have called on federal officials to investigate his ties to the movement.

“Any such links must be investigated to the fullest extent to ensure that violence against abortion providers is stopped,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, in a statement issued Thursday.

In fact, the intelligence division of the St. Louis Police Department followed Cook earlier this month while he was in town for the conference staged by the American Coalition of Life Activists, a controversial anti-abortion group, and arrested him on minor traffic violations. At the time of his arrest, he stated his occupation as “revolutionary,” and told police that he could not go to abortion clinics because he could not control his actions.

Capt. Harry Hegger, commander of the intelligence division, confirmed that Cook did attend some evening meetings during the St. Louis conference.

“Whether this is a conspiracy or not, this guy was out there for a long time, making it clear he was going to kill providers and wasn’t shy about it,” added Nancy Koshin-Kintigh, field director of the national clinic access project for the Feminist Majority. “There are a lot of unanswered questions.”