Millennium’s Nearing Stirs Home-Grown Terror Fears

With fewer than 500 days left before the year 2000, law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned that widespread paranoia about the millennium could touch off a clash between the government and domestic terrorists.

“I worry that every day something could happen somewhere,” said Robert M. Blitzer, section chief of the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit.

Recent attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa have raised concerns about foreign terrorism, but the potential for violence from within the United States has also increased.

At any given time, Blitzer said, his agents are working nearly 1,000 cases of potential domestic terrorist activity, a workload that has grown as the end of the century nears.

To gauge the potential threat represented by these predictions, Blitzer said, the FBI early next year will launch an ambitious nationwide assessment to determine what to expect on, before and after Jan. 1, 2000.

The cases, spread around the country, range from a single threatening letter mailed to Washington to the unsolved theft this summer of 25 tons of ammonium nitrate from a West Virginia farm supply business. The amount of stolen fertilizer is more than 12 times the quantity used in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995.

Federal officials have begun working with local police agencies, including those in Los Angeles, to investigate terrorist activity.

“As we get closer to 2000, we’ll probably see more people coming out of the woodwork,” Blitzer said in an interview in Washington. “Some of these groups have an apocalyptic vision, and they may go violent.”

Many have already come out of the shadows. At a recent “Preparedness Expo” here, conventioneers sold books and pamphlets, hawked camping equipment and survivalist gear and offered up ammo cans, hunting knives and the newest rage: blowguns that fire poisoned darts.

All of it, they say, represents the basic necessities for outlasting the millennium, when many who were here believe that the government will attack American citizens. Others predicted that 2000 will see the takeover of the United States by a “new world order” of foreign despots.

Still others claimed that the projected Y2K, or Year 2000, computer meltdown is government hokum to enslave the people.

All of them--militias opposed to the government, hate groups, white supremacists, right-wing Christian zealots--warned that it is time for a second revolution to take back America.

“Who is the Antichrist? It’s Uncle Sam hiding behind the American flag, and all we can see are his eyes,” said Tom Halverson, who drove 1,600 miles from Guthrie, Minn., to sell airtight canisters that he said can keep perishable food safe even in the event of the end of the world. “I believe that we are coming into a time of worldwide martyrism.”

For authorities, the threat comes in two forms, and both are difficult to track.

The first lies behind closed doors, most likely from within some religious compounds like those that have arisen in areas around the Ozarks, the desert Southwest and the Pacific Northwest. There, members practice guerrilla war tactics, are often heavily armed and study under the spell of self-styled prophets who warn of a coming fury with the federal government.

These fortresses are often impregnable to law enforcement undercover agents. And the militancy of the rhetoric of such extremists becomes clear only when they choose to expose themselves to the outside world.

For instance, a Georgia pastor named Robert McCurry reportedly told a gathering of white supremacist leaders in his state last spring that America is at a flash point, according to a report from Klanwatch, a nonprofit organization that monitors hate groups.

“These are awesome days,” McCurry is said to have preached. “We’ve never walked this way before. We’ve never been in a state of emergency or in the state of crisis that we are at this particular moment.”

David A. Koresh spoke with equal Messianic fervor during the federal siege of his Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993, when he preached to the outside world via radio hookups that the U.S. government was Satan loosed upon the land.

Exactly two years after Koresh and scores of his followers died fiery deaths in a confrontation with federal agents, Richard Snell, a white supremacist, was executed in Arkansas for the murder of a police officer. Walking to the death chamber, he warned: “Look over your shoulder. Justice is coming!”

That same day, April 19, 1995, the federal building in Oklahoma City was destroyed in the worst terrorist attack on American soil. It was the work of Timothy J. McVeigh, who has become the model for the second form of threat the FBI fears, that of the solitary malcontent, or the small terrorist cell of two or three members unknown to federal officials. Before Oklahoma City, no one had heard of McVeigh or his accomplice, Terry L. Nichols.

“I worry most about the lone nut coming out and doing something,” said Blitzer. “And right after that there are these really key groups that are planning and engaging and they are very hard to penetrate.”

At the Preparedness Expo, which drew several thousand from around the country, many spoke of the religious reckoning that they are sure will come. They draw their fears from the last book of the Bible, which describes how John the Apostle was exiled to a remote island off Greece after coming under attack from a repressive Roman Empire.

According to John’s writings in what became the book of Revelations, God warned of the coming Antichrist and Armageddon and of serpents, sinners and evildoers cast alive into a great lake of fire.

The convention, similar to others staged periodically around the country, provides a steady means of financial support for those who carry on the campaign against the U.S. government.

John Trochmann, head of the Militia of Montana and one of the nation’s most vocal antigovernment crusaders, even puts out his own catalog offering must-have items for surviving the holocaust.

In an interview, he warned that it is federal agents who are the real terrorists and he sees no letup in the kind of issues that upset him and his followers, like gun control.

“There will be a uniting of the police forces and the Army,” he said. “And they will bring in foreign equipment and computer chips that we can’t dip into. There will be foreign troops and a lack of food.

“And when the computers go dark, when else is the best time for an invasion? All of the U.S. military bases will be turned into prisoner-of-war camps.

“But a war? I don’t think it will be a war. I think it will be a slaughter. Welcome to the new world order.”

Former Green Beret Col. James “Bo” Gritz, hawking his book, “Called to Serve,” said the next terrorist strike will be the work of government operatives themselves. “So maybe it’s another Oklahoma City. Just find another federal building to blow up.

“They can always find somebody who will do it. Some in the U.S. military will kill their own--whatever the government says. Those are the rogue elements you should worry about.”

Many are already planning their getaways into the hinterlands. Randy Weaver, whose wife and son were killed in a 1992 standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, is stockpiling wood and drilling for well water. He believes that he already has enough food put away.

To Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Mississippi-based hate group monitor, “the signs are troubling.”

“Terror from the radical right is up and every indication is that this trend will continue,” he said.

Blitzer hopes the nation will be ready. “The odds are that something will happen,” he said.