Last Stand of an Aging Aryan

It was called the “Ten Percent Solution.” Set aside a tenth of the country--say, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana, maybe Wyoming too--leave that for the whites. And let the rest of the country go to hell.

Richard Butler drew the boundaries of a white homeland in his mind from his desk at the Lockheed Corp. in Palmdale, where he coordinated the final assembly of L-1011 jetliners. On vacations, he’d load a fishing pole in the back of his four-seat Cessna and stake out the turf--so white back in the early 1970s that the only black he remembers between Boise and the Canadian border was a housekeeper in Coeur d’Alene. He settled on 20 acres of trees and a farmhouse in northern Idaho, in the shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains.

In the end, the mythical homeland of the white race was never more than these 20 acres. Butler erected a guard shack and a watchtower, a church, a bunkhouse for visitors and a couple of trailers for staff. His wife, Betty, put in a strawberry garden. They got a couple of German shepherds, Hans and Fritz. And at the gate, they posted a small, hand-lettered sign: “Whites Only.”

Behind a barbed-wire fence on the fringe of the Idaho wilderness, Butler’s Aryan Nations compound remains the temple of modern American racism. Nowhere has right-wing extremism found so safe a retreat or set forth so virulent a message--or, according to its critics, so twisted the meaning of biblical scripture.

Even as Butler slips into a misanthropic old age--at 80 he is widely referred to as “the elder statesman of American hate”--the movement he founded is gaining momentum with a forceful new presence on the Internet and an infusion of thousands, potentially millions, of dollars. Anti-hate activists fear that the Silicon Valley money backing the Aryan Nations and other northern Idaho separatist groups could bring a powerful, and dangerous, cohesion to their isolated rage.

The remote hills and clear lakes of the Idaho Panhandle long have cradled the kind of folks who probe the outer boundaries of the far right: white separatist Randy Weaver held his infamous standoff with the FBI from his cabin only a few miles northwest of Hayden Lake; prominent Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman hails from Coeur d’Alene; the well-known Christian Identity church, America’s Promise Ministries, abides in Sandpoint; the Militia of Montana is a short drive away through the mountains.

Among them, the Aryan Nations stands apart.

Even those who promote white supremacy are discomfited by the outrageousness of its message: that Jews are descended from Satan, that blacks are soulless descendants of “mud people,” that white women who marry outside their race should die.

“The John Birch Society wasn’t far enough to the right for me, so I joined the Ku Klux Klan. The klan wasn’t far enough to the right for me, and it wasn’t white enough for me. That’s when I met Pastor Butler. I quit the klan and joined up with him,” explained Gerald Gruidl, a fellow cleric in Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian.

Klanwatch, which monitors hate groups, in a recent profile called Butler “the hub of the wheel of racist revolution, the eye of the white supremacist storm.” The future of the movement he founded, the profile said, “may shape the future of the extremist right.”

The Aryan Nations has chapters in at least a dozen states and contacts with neo-Nazis worldwide. From Hayden Lake, it operates one of the most active distribution networks in the country for racist and fascist literature, and oversees campaigns to organize both convicts and guards at prisons throughout the country.

Yet little is known of the fenced compound here, which has become something of a fearsome fixture in Hayden Lake with its tattooed young men, towering crosses afire and--during summer youth congresses--thrashing skinhead punk music. Berkeley lawyer Larry Hildes, who has frequently challenged the Aryan Nations over the years and who led a protest against the group here last month, admitted he was “scared to death” to approach the gate. “This is where the evil starts from,” he said. “This is where the hate is developed, aged and processed, like an evil wine.”

In a rare departure from his usual unease with the press, Butler agreed to two days of interviews at the compound and the surrounding locale, providing an unusual glimpse inside ground zero of their longed-for race revolution and the heart of the old man who wakes up each day waiting for it to begin.

“A few people listen. But I think I’m probably a voice in the wilderness mostly,” Butler said wistfully. “But it’s a great war. I think it was John Adams that said there’s nothing more exhilarating than the contest for freedom.”

Wife’s Pictures Sit Next to Hitler’s

Butler has lived alone in the compound’s simple, two-story farmhouse since the death a few years ago of his wife--the woman he calls “my queen” and whose pictures adorn the end tables in his living room, next to photos of Adolf Hitler. He still leads Sunday prayers for a dozen or so faithful with the open-handed Nazi salute, still posts impassioned commentary on the Aryan Nations Web site, still lurches about town in his rattletrap brown diesel van to lunch at the local cafe or to sit as a menacing backdrop, flanked by tough-faced young Aryan soldiers, at local human-rights meetings.

Last July, he emerged from years of relative obscurity to preside over a parade in downtown Coeur d’Alene--drawing about 100 racists from across the country, who waved flags from what they consider the “white” nations of the Earth.

A Moscow, Idaho, woman arrested for protesting the parade recently awoke in the dead of night to find her front porch afire and a cross burning on her lawn. There was a note in her mailbox calling her “a disgrace to your race” and warning: “We are watching you . . . your days are numbered.” No group took responsibility, and Butler has accused her of torching the cross herself. She has laid the blame on the Aryan Nations.

The big difference between Butler-the-forgotten-old-Nazi and Butler-the-player in the American hate movement showed up last spring in the form of two wealthy Northern California businessmen. Committed to the racist Christian Identity movement, they are eager to share their riches with the groups that sprouted in Idaho after Butler planted the seeds.

Carl E. Story and R. Vincent Bertollini, veterans of the Silicon Valley computer industry, funded Butler’s first mass-mailing videotape and a glossy color poster that traces the path of “Adam’s pure blood seed-line.”

The two men and their 11th Hour Remnant Messenger organization are the Aryan Nations’ first important source of legal funding and, according to human rights activists, create the first possibility of uniting what has been a fragmented and quarrelsome community of racists, anti-government activists and Christian Identity theologians into a powerful political force.

“That’s what scares them,” said Michael Teague, the Aryan Nations staff leader and spokesman. “Before, we were just the Nazis who were poor up on the hill.”

Butler chuckles at the idea. “We’ve been operating on a shoestring for so long that it was nice to get to do something the other side gets to do all the time. Don’t forget, the Jews control the newspapers, they control the radio, they control the TV. Did you know they won’t even take our ads?”

Inside the Compound

It is a snowy afternoon, but inside the cluttered Aryan Nations office, it’s stiflingly warm. Teague has gone off to work his day job in town. His wife, Christian--the compound’s office manager--has just picked up their 5-year-old daughter from school. The child goo goos at the 2-month-old asleep in a stroller at her mother’s side.

Charles Towry, a 26-year-old Redondo Beach man now living at the compound, slumps casually next to Butler’s desk, a framed portrait of Hitler behind him. “The school called earlier. The answering machine picked it up,” he says casually.

Teague looks stricken. “Oh, no,” she says. “They heard the message? Oh, no. I didn’t want them to know.”

“I’m not sure they heard all the message,” Towry says.

“But it starts, ‘Greetings, kindred.’ I’m sure they heard that part”

She has tried to keep the other schoolchildren from finding out where her little girl lives, hoping to spare her the taunts of a community that has declared war on its racist neighbors. Even so, the Teagues say they believe Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian is a better place for child-rearing than Phoenix, which they left two years ago.

For Michael Teague, his conversion to white separatism started when he began listening to tapes sermonizing on Christian Identity, the movement that holds that white men are the descendants of God through Adam and that people of color descended without souls from a prior race of “mud people.” Butler’s brand of theology goes a step further, holding that Jews descended from Eve’s coupling with Satan.

“I have a plan and I have a mission,” Teague says. “The mission now is to awaken our kindred . . . to the lies they’re being told on TV and in our school system--that we’re all the same race, all the same blood . . . all that kind of garbage. We’re not the same, and the Bible tells us so.”

Standing in the empty church--where the stained glass cross-and-crown symbol of the Aryan Nations hangs across from the huge red drape of a Third Reich swastika flag--Teague wears a crisp blue uniform. His hair is shaved close at the sides, cropped a little longer at the top, a blond approximation of the style favored by Hitler, whom the compound’s residents revere.

“Personally I don’t have any problem with blacks, as long as they’re in Africa,” Teague continues. “But I want to tell you, Coeur d’Alene is 90% white, and there’s almost no crime rate.

“The Bible, you have to understand, is a book of separation,” he says. “It’s a book of war, it’s a book of hate. It’s hate the evil and love the good.”

Across the compound, Butler spends evenings in his cramped living room. Most available surfaces are covered with piles of newspapers, magazines and political tracts. On the dining room table, a computer keeps constant count of hits on the Aryan Nations web site, now averaging about 500 a day. German martial music plays quietly in the background, while Fritz snoozes at Butler’s feet.

(Hans, the other dog, was found mutilated near the compound fence in March, shot twice, his heart pulled out of his rib cage and his body washed completely of blood.)

When asked to tell the story of his conversion to white supremacy, Butler goes back to World War II, when he worked in India for a private contractor.

“I had a bearer who kept my uniforms pressed and shoes shined. He was a good little Indian boy. He had been to Oxford.” The youth told him a story that Aryans had conquered India about 3,000 years before, and that he, a Brahmin, had some Aryan blood.

Butler took note of the Indian caste system. “I noticed all the maharajahs were much whiter than the average Indian. As you went up the hierarchy, the lighter they got. It all got me to thinking, and when I came home from overseas, I had a feeling that we, the white race, were losing the war.”

Butler spent most of his World War II military duty with the Army Air Corps, battling the Japanese on the Pacific front, but he had come to revere Hitler. “I admired him because it seemed like he was the only one who stood up . . . who led a nation, a division of our race, to fight for the life of our race.”

Settling in Montebello, Butler says, his outrage over the war festered--especially when he thought about the large numbers of “white Christians” (Russian soldiers) who had died in the Soviet Union under the regime of Josef Stalin. In his mind, Jews were embarking on a worldwide conspiracy under the guise of communism. He became one of the leaders of an unsuccessful 1961 ballot initiative to ban communists from teaching in the California public schools.

Butler’s disgruntlement grew, he says, when a federal loan to Lockheed to help keep the L-1011 on track required the hiring of more minorities at the Palmdale assembly plant.

“It just kind of made me sick,” he says. “It got to the point where the quality went down, production went down. . . . I turned in my resignation.”

Butler says he had quit his Presbyterian church in similar fashion when the new pastor announced plans to invite minorities in. In the meantime, he had begun listening to the sermons of Dr. Wesley Swift in his church at the corner of Hollywood and Vine.

“That was the most marvelous experience of my life, that first meeting,” Butler remembers. “He started going through scripture and combining it with world events, and the lights started turning on, bang-bang-bang.

“He identified the white race as the tribes of Israel, and that this war had been going on for over 6,000 years between the sons of Cain and the sons of God. . . . This started opening up who we were, where we came from, and why we were there. The greatest thrill I’ve ever had in my life was knowing that. And from then on, I knew what my mission was.”

Series of Holdups, Bombings in ‘80s

Except for the annual Aryan World Congress that Butler hosted on his land, few had heard of the compound until the mid-1980s, when white supremacists were arrested in a series of armored-car holdups, counterfeiting efforts and bombings that culminated with the 1984 murder of Denver talk show host Alan Berg.

Several members of the groups known as “The Order” and “The Order 2” spent time at the Aryan Nations compound in the years leading up to the crime sprees; some were former members of Butler’s staff, and one--Thomas Martinez--agreed to testify against the others. Butler’s chief of security, Eldon Cutler, was convicted of hiring an undercover FBI agent to decapitate Martinez.

Authorities across the country have tried to link Butler to a variety of crimes committed by his followers, without success. Indeed, in the only major criminal case filed against him, a jury in Arkansas acquitted Butler and 10 others of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government by way of a series of robberies, counterfeiting efforts and attempted murder of federal officials.

“Butler got part of the [tainted] money, no question about it. They all did,” Martinez, who is now living under a new identity, said in a recent interview.

Butler says he has never committed nor advocated violence, other than the apocalyptic race revolution that he preaches is at hand.

Periodically, the Aryan Nations fires a volley from its fax machine in Hayden Lake. For example, the group once invited supporters to a “summer conference and nigger shoot” at the compound. “Civil rights come out of the barrel of a gun, and we mean to give [them] all the civil rights they can handle. . . . Our security team will see that no live targets escape from the range. Any who refuse to run or can’t for any reason will be fed to the dogs. The dogs appreciate a good feed as much as we do.”

Butler seems almost amused by the rhetoric, pleased still to be able to shock. “O.J. Simpson was a national hero,” he declared at one point, clearly hoping for a laugh but happy enough with a pair of raised eyebrows. “He got a Jew and a race traitor at the same time.”

Butler’s power, and his potential danger, is in his ability to inspire others to the wars he only dreams of, say many who have watched him over the years.

“The danger is . . . that his whole mystique and his status really continues to inspire people,” said Lori Linzer, fact-finder for the Anti-Defamation League in New York.

“There’s no way to tie him directly to any of these crimes,” added James Aho, an Idaho State University professor who has written extensively about Idaho separatist groups. “But as everyone knows, although words and actions are distinguishable, they are not separable. Violent words lead to violent acts, and he bears a good deal of responsibility morally, if not legally, for the violence that has been done to various kinds of minorities.”

Floyd Cochran, an Aryan Nations staff member in the early 1980s, said that revolutionary rhetoric, violent talk in a general sense, was encouraged at the compound, but “we were instructed that if somebody came and openly talked about blowing up a place or shooting up something, to immediately report it to” Butler.

Cochran, who has lectured against hate organizations since he left the group, said he was drawn to the flags, the pressed uniforms, the parades. As national spokesman for the Aryan Nations, he reveled in the idea of walking into a meeting in his pressed blue uniform and stopping conversation.

After he had been living at the compound for a while, Cochran learned that his young son back in New York was going to have an operation to correct his cleft palate. He mentioned to another staff member that, after the Hitler Youth Festival, he hoped to go back to New York to be with his boy for the surgery.

The man, he recalled, was almost offhand in his response. “ ‘You know, when we come to power,’ he said, ‘your son’s going to have to be euthanized because he has a genetic defect.’ ”

Before long, Cochran found himself growing disillusioned. “Bible verses started looking different. And I started seeing other things. You know: Why is it on Sunday afternoon Richard Butler goes out to dinner, and the rest of us are just sitting here eating sandwiches?”

Still, Butler maintains his ability to draw in the disaffected--a handful at a time who mostly stay for a few months or a couple of years.

Towry says he left the Redondo Beach neighborhood he grew up in because he couldn’t drive in any direction without running into a minority community. A few months ago, with his marriage in trouble because his wife had black friends, he ended up in Idaho.

“California, it’s gone down the tubes. Even the beach cities that were predominantly middle class, now it’s dangerous to walk on the beach at night.”

His parents, he admitted, “are very upset” that he joined the racist group.

“The same kind of thing with my family,” Teague interjected. “My parents [are] . . . bleeding-heart liberals, they’re tree-huggers, they’re owl-savers. They’re for human rights, and I’m not.

“I have a half-brother, he married a Taiwanese girl, and they had a kid. And I basically haven’t talked to him since,” Teague said. “I used to sing him songs in his cradle to get him to sleep. I love him dearly. But the Bible tells me I can’t keep the company of strangers.”

Paternal Feelings for Men at Compound

Butler expresses a paternalistic affection for the half-dozen young men who live at the compound, although he’s verbally harsh when their dress doesn’t meet standards or when they’re late washing the van or mowing the grass.

One recent afternoon, he dressed them up in their best uniforms and fired up the old brown van. The Kootenai County Human Rights Task Force was holding a meeting at North Idaho College to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations declaration on human rights. The keynote speaker was Bill Wassmuth--Butler’s old nemesis.

Wassmuth was a Roman Catholic priest in Coeur d’Alene, active in fighting northern Idaho hate groups, when his house was bombed in 1986. One of those charged with the attack, a former Aryan Nations member, said the original plan was to blow up the house with Wassmuth in it, but at the last minute the bomb was planted just outside the back door.

Wassmuth left the priesthood and moved to Seattle, forming one of the most active anti-hate groups in the country, the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. That group and other community organizations in Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene have been credited with one of the most effective campaigns to combat supremacist groups in the region.

But Wassmuth says Butler, for all his age and declining health, remains a viable adversary.

“Some are saying, ‘Isn’t he some gentlemanly old grandfather who’s got some crazy notions?’ He took out his best crew for the parade, and it’s 95 motley-looking folks. But in terms of the criminal activity, it continues and it grows,” Wassmuth said. “He impacts literally millions of people by his presence and his rhetoric coming out of Hayden Lake.”

Wassmuth and others fear the infusion of money from the Silicon Valley businessmen carries the real possibility of uniting the groups around a common sponsor--and rendering their message more influential.

“Bertollini and Story say they’ve spent about a million, and they have $50 million to spend. That’s a concern, because people can overlook some of their differences in the face of substantial sums of money,” Wassmuth said.

In anticipation of potential threats posed by right-wing groups in the region, the FBI is forming a special task force to track anti-government and white supremacy groups, involving at least three dozen federal, state and local officers in Idaho, Washington and Montana.

With Butler’s own health in decline, he is preparing to pass his legacy on, perhaps to Southern California. The man Butler has designated as his heir apparent, Christian Identity leader Neumann Britton, hails from Escondido. Britton has not said whether he will move to Idaho when he takes power.

Butler and his men look impassive as they stride into the human rights meeting, greeted with cold, unfriendly stares. They take a seat in the middle of the audience, and two of them pick up video cameras, filming all those who stand up to speak. It is a clear exercise in intimidation.

When Butler raises his hand to speak, the meeting is quickly gaveled to a close, and people begin filing out.

At a nearby cafe, Butler explains that, for all those who didn’t get the message yet, they’re about to find out, in a big way.

“Eve was seduced; now our whole race is seduced. But we have a nation to broadcast the truth to our people. Two-thirds of our race will die, according to the Bible--because of the antichrist, famine, disease, warfare, whatever. Bad times are coming.”

The rest he leaves to the imagination, and a second cup of coffee. Then he starts up the van and chugs toward the Aryan homeland. When he steps down into the yard in the gathering darkness, Fritz is waiting under a tree. But everyone else has gone home.