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The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord[1]
Published in Jonathan Tucker, ed., Toxic Terror (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
Jessica Eve Stern
In the mid-1980s, a little known survivalist group called The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) acquired a large drum of cyanide with the intention of poisoning water supplies in major U.S. cities. The group’s objective was to hasten the return of the Messiah by “carrying out God’s judgments” against unrepentant sinners.[2] CSA also participated in a plot to overthrow the U.S. government, which group members believed to be controlled by descendants of Satan committed to the “establishment of a world order based on humanism, materialism, socialism and communism.”[3]
CSA was unusual among terrorist groups in that its sole objective was large-scale murder rather than influencing government policies. Although CSA failed to achieve its objective, it might eventually have succeeded if law-enforcement authorities had not intervened. The danger would be particularly great if the group were operating today, when terrorists are so much more aware of the potential of poison weapons for inflicting mass casualties.[4]
Religiously motivated groups like CSA are becoming increasingly common and increasingly violent. Of 11 international terrorist groups identified by RAND in 1968, none were classified as religiously motivated. By 1995, however, religious groups accounted for 25 percent of international terrorist incidents and 58 percent of the total number of fatalities.[5] Terrorists are also showing greater interest in weapons of mass destruction. Prior to the Aum Shinrikiyo attack and the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI typically encountered about a dozen incidents a year involving threats, boasts, or actual attempts to acquire or use weapons of mass destruction. Now the FBI is handling around a hundred such cases per year.[6]
This ominous trend makes it especially important to study groups like CSA that intended to use chemical agents to carry out mass-casualty attacks. What did CSA hope to accomplish? Why did it fail? And what does the CSA case suggest about future terrorist attempts to use chemical or biological agents?
The Origins of CSA
In 1971, James Ellison, a fundamentalist preacher from San Antonio, Texas, realized that the United States was heading in the wrong direction.[7] God directed him to go to Arkansas, he claims, “to establish a refuge and take people in.”[8] In 1976, he bought a 224-acre lot of remote timberland near Bull Shoal Lake in Arkansas, which he called Zarephath-Horeb. The community also named itself the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA).[9] Ellison invited seekers, drug addicts, and ex-convicts to join him at his camp, which had its own water supply and generated its own electricity.[10]
Ellison described the group’s objective as “simply be free to exercise our rights the way we want to.”[11] But it soon became apparent that Ellison and his followers had unusual—and sometimes anti-social—interests. Residents built several factories for manufacturing grenades, silencers, and other firearm accessories, which they sold at gun shows held under the auspices of the National Rifle Association.[12] They published a series of books, including Witchcraft and the Illuminati, Christian Army Basic Training Manual, The Jews: 100 Facts, and Prepare War! The CSA journal provided instructions for “spiritual and physical survival,” including how to use guns or double-edged knives to kill one’s enemies. The group also sold racist and survivalist literature as part of its official book list, which included The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The Negro and the World Crisis, Who’s Who in the Zionist Conspiracy, The Talmud Unmasked, and A Straight Look at the Third Reich.[13]
Covenant members erected a sophisticated shooting range called “Silhouette City,” which was modeled after the FBI’s shooting range in Quantico, Virginia. Whereas the FBI’s version has mockups of armed criminals surrounded by women and children, the Covenant’s version had mockups of prominent Jews and federal agents.[14] One wooden cutout of a state trooper wore a Star of David in place of a badge.[15] The Covenant used Silhouette City for target practice for their Endtime Overcomer Survival Training School, which was established to provide training in “Christian martial arts.” Outsiders paid $500 or more to go through the training course.[16]
In late 1978, Ellison had a vision that convinced him that a collapse of the American economic system was imminent. Cities would soon be in turmoil, the government would collapse, and people would be unable to defend themselves.[17] The compound began stockpiling food, weapons, ammunition, supplies, and explosives to prepare for the Apocalypse.[18] When Pastor Robert Millar, a leading Identity Christian cleric, visited the CSA compound in the early 1980s, he was “shocked” to see Ellison wearing camouflage gear and carrying a gun. But Millar soon realized that Ellison was “a man with tremendous gifts and ability.”[19] Millar later consecrated Ellison “King James of the Ozarks” at a service on the CSA grounds.
The Covenant’s “military” preparations were inspired by the group’s “obedience to the Lord concerning watching and being prepared” for the Apocalypse.[20] The CSA Journal detailed the “basic layout” of what would occur during the coming Armageddon:
There will be an economic collapse, riots in the cities, famine, and war. People will kill each other for food, weapons, shelter, clothing, anything. It will get so bad that parents will eat their children. Death in the major cities will cause rampant diseases and plagues. Maggot-infested bodies will lie everywhere. Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and other natural disasters will grow to gigantic proportions. Russia and possibly China and Japan will attack America, probably with some limited nuclear warfare. Communists will kill white Christians and mutilate them; witches and satanic Jews will offer people up as sacrifices to their gods, openly and proudly; blacks will rape and kill white women, and will torture and kill white men; homosexuals will sodomize whoever they can. Prisoners from Federal and State prisons will be set free to terrorize, while Cuban refugees will do the same…. Our new government will be a part of the one-world Zionist Communism government. All but the elect will have the mark of the Beast.[21]
CSA members pledged not to surrender to these forces of evil:
In the event of the collapse of this Great Republic or the consideration of surrender of our sovereignty by our duly elected governmental officials to an internal or external power, we the undersigned, acting in the spirit of our Forefathers and these great documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of these United States—refuse any and all such treaty pact, or declaration of surrender. We acknowledge that there can exist no compromise between the principal of Freedom under God and the establishment of a world order based on humanism, materialism, socialism and communism. We accept the principal that it is better to stand, and if need be fall for the cause of Christ and Country than to submit to the coming attempt of satanic and socialistic world order….[22]
To prepare to meet the Apocalypse, members began “plundering the Egyptians” by stealing from department stores and committing arson for profit.[23] They also began to think about “war.”[24] Kerry Noble, who was then Ellison’s principal “God-anointed Elder,”[25] explains: “We thought there were signs of Armageddon, and we believed that once those signs were there it was time for us to act, to make judgments against those who were doing wrong or who refused to repent…. The original timetable was up to God, but God could use us in creating Armageddon. That if we stepped out things might be hurried along. You get tired of waiting for what you think God is planning.”[26]
At a July 1983 meeting of the Aryan Nations Congress, James Ellison, Richard Butler (leader of the Aryan Nations and pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, an Identity Christian church in Hayden Lake, Idaho), Robert Miles (former grand dragon of the Michigan Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and leader of the Mountain Church in Cohoctah, Michigan), Louis Beam (ambassador-at-large for the Aryan Nations), and others developed an elaborate plan to overthrow what they called the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG) and create a separate Aryan nation within the United States.[27] The conspirators planned to establish a nationwide computer system for right-wing organizations, including CSA.[28] They would assassinate federal officials, politicians, and Jews; sabotage gas pipelines and electric power grids; and bomb federal office buildings, including the Alfred E. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.[29] And they would poison municipal water supplies with cyanide. These terrorist activities were to serve as catalysts of a revolution that would ultimately result in a whites-only state.
The most violent members of the participating organizations were recruited to form a new group called The Order, named after a fictional terrorist cell in William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. At least five members were recruited from CSA.[30] The Order was in charge of raising money to finance the revolution, which it did through counterfeiting and a series of robberies. Over an eight-month period from December 1983 to July 1984, the Order committed a series of lucrative robberies that netted more than $4 million.[31] CSA was to serve as a depot for weapons and equipment, not only for their own terrorist operations but also for other “Aryan warriors” participating in the revolution.[32] Some of CSA’s equipment was stolen from a military base by a member who had been discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps.[33]
Soon after the Aryan Nations Congress, CSA increased its level of violence. In November 1983, CSA members detonated an explosive device along a pipeline that supplied natural gas to much of the midwestern United States, ending in Chicago. Their goal was to disrupt activities in midwestern cities. The pipeline was damaged but natural gas deliveries were not interrupted.[34] Ellison’s deputy, Kerry Noble, was asked why the group targeted that pipeline. “It was winter,” he explained. “We thought people would freeze, that they might start riots.”[35] Later that month, CSA members detonated an explosive device on an electrical transmission line at Fort Smith, [Arkansas].[36] CSA published a manifesto explaining its doctrine called ATTACK, an acronym for Aryan Tactical Treaty for the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom.
Effective immediately, every action of the enemy shall be met with equal and opposite reaction! CSA is not content with being a ‘nation within a nation.’ We want the outer nation to fall and give way to a Kingdom ruled by Jesus Christ! … We will lay out the ATTACK plan to our people at various Aryan gatherings. The time has come for the Spirit of Slumber to be lifted off our people! Arise, O Israel, and Shine, for the Light is come, and the glory of our Father is risen upon thee! We shall Attack and Advance into enemy territory within the next two years. Be prepared![37]
The FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) began intensifying their investigation of CSA. One of their informants was Randall Rader, who had served as Ellison’s deputy prior to joining The Order.[38] The informants told the FBI that James Rolston, a CSA member, had murdered a woman with a 12-inch knife and left her body on a highway. Police had found the woman’s body in March 1985 but apparently had not yet identified a suspect. The informants also said that CSA members had kidnapped children (although none remained on the compound at the time) and that the group was stockpiling hand grenades, automatic weapons, anti-tank weapons, and plastic explosives; fabricating silencers and grenades; converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic ones; conducting paramilitary training; and burying landmines around the perimeter of the compound. CSA residents had been assigned sniper positions in the event of an FBI raid. CSA members stole cars whenever Ellison felt they were “needed in furtherance of the Lord’s work,” and then altered or disguised them.[39] The informants also said that Ellison had taken two wives.[40]
During this period, Robert Miles, the Michigan Klansman and pastor of the Mountain Church, wrote a letter to James Ellison sympathizing with him about the difficulty of being investigated by federal officials.
We know what you are all going through. We heard of the subpoenas and the interrogations. We know what federal heat is like. Yet it doesn’t deter; it purifies and strengthens. It removes doubt. It removes sympathy. It removes compromise…. The federal heat only removes the bridges which we each have crossed. There is no turning back. There is no road but the one on which each of us, in his own way, has set his feet.[41]
That road, Miles later explained, is “to a racial nation, to peace.”[42]
On April 15, 1985, a Missouri state trooper patrolling a stretch of highway near the Arkansas state line stopped a brown van driven by David Tate. Unbeknownst to the state trooper, Tate was a member of The Order. The trooper was making routine traffic checks as part of a campaign to crack down on drunk driving, unregistered vehicles, and traffic violations. He radioed in the false name on Tate’s license and discovered that the driver was a neo-Nazi wanted on federal firearms charges. When the trooper approached Tate’s van, Tate rolled out of his van, fatally shot the policeman with a submachine gun, and then fled the scene.
Missouri and Arkansas state police and FBI SWAT teams carried out a massive manhunt for Tate, employing Cobra gun-ship helicopters, bloodhounds, and an FBI spy plane equipped with infrared sensors. In the course of the six-day manhunt, law-enforcement officials discovered that Tate had been en route to the CSA compound. They also found that other members of The Order had been seeking refuge there, and that some residents of the compound had also lived in Elohim City, Pastor Millar’s armed compound in eastern Oklahoma.[43] Soon afterwards, the FBI was issued a warrant to search the CSA compound for fugitives, stolen cars, illegal firearms, and equipment for converting semiautomatic weapons to automatic ones and for manufacturing firearms paraphernalia. An arrest warrant was also issued for Ellison on firearms charges.[44]
The six-day manhunt attracted the attention of reporters, who requested interviews with CSA members. Kerry Noble, then second-in-command to James Ellison, is reported to have appeared for interviews wearing jungle fatigues and carrying a .223-caliber Ruger “Mini 14” rifle, a knife, and a pistol. He pledged that CSA members would resist violently if federal authorities raided the camp. Ellison also briefly appeared during the interview, wearing fatigues and a beret with a gas mask strapped to his leg. He was carrying a rifle with a banana clip.[45]
On April 20, 1985, federal authorities raided the CSA compound. After a three-day standoff between hundreds of law-enforcement officers and the Covenant “Home Guard,” the residents of the camp surrendered. When law-enforcement officers searched the compound, which had been booby-trapped with homemade mines, they found a large stockpile of illegal weapons and ammunition, including 15 automatic rifles, silencers, 23 grenades, and an Army light antitank weapon.[46] An armored car was under construction. The officers also found 30 gallons of cyanide, which Ellison initially said was for poisoning pests.[47] “I’m not into a Jim Jones thing…. All I ever used it for was poisoning coyotes,” Ellison is reported to have said.[48] Later, Ellison claimed that Miles had given him the cyanide, and that Beam, Butler, and Miles had discussed using it to poison water supplies in New York, Chicago, and Washington.[49] Miles denies having given Ellison the cyanide, however, or having discussed using it to poison city water supplies.[50]
When Noble was asked why the group was stockpiling cyanide, he replied, “We wanted to poison water systems, but we had no particular city in mind.” Noble was also asked whether he thought CSA members might not have felt moral scruples about using such an indiscriminate weapon, which would killed Aryans as well as “mud people” (non-whites) and Jews, whom Identity Christians consider Satan’s children. “We felt that God would take care of this,” he explained, “that those who were meant to die would be poisoned.” I pointed out to Noble that reservoirs tend to be large, and that 30 gallons of cyanide would have not have killed anyone. Noble replied that the group believed God would also take care of the dilution problem. “God would… make sure the poison got to the town.”[51]