Ten minutes later, the receptionist ushered him down a hallway, past several dark and vacant offices, to a modest-sized room. The door was slightly ajar, as if the room’s occupant was expecting him. The woman pushed it open, stepped back, and cleared the way for Uzi to enter. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee, juice, water…?”
“Coffee would be great. Black, two sugars, if you don’t mind.”
The woman nodded and moved off.
“Agent Uziel.” The voice came from the man behind the desk.
Uzi stepped in and extended a hand. “Call me Uzi. Sorry to drop in on you like this.”
“Uzi,” repeated the man. “I’m Karl Ruckhauser. Karl, if you don’t mind. And it’s not a problem. It gives me a break from the daily grind.”
“Even on a Sunday?”
“‘Hate’ doesn’t take weekends off.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Uzi took the seat to his right and gave the office a quick once-over. Like Garza’s office, there was a storm of paperwork, journals and books — but Ruckhauser’s desk was organized as if it sat in a model home of a new tract of houses. Uzi wondered if the comparison between the two men’s offices bore any significance to the extent of their knowledge base.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m here about American Revolution Militia. I’m in the middle of a sensitive investigation, so I can’t go into details. But I have reason to believe they may be… involved.”
“Involved in what?”
Uzi squirmed a bit in his chair. “I can’t say.”
Ruckhauser nodded. “But it doesn’t take a genius to put the recent assassination attempt together with your question about a large, well-armed domestic militia, now, does it?”
“Guess not.”
Ruckhauser took a seat behind his desk. “So you want some background information. Who they are, who’s in charge, who they’re in bed with, what they’re capable of, what they’ve been up to lately. Right?”
A small smile tickled the corners of Uzi’s lips. “Exactly.”
“Kind of like a newspaper article: who, what, when, where, how, and so on.” Ruckhauser waved a hand in the air. “I was a journalism major. They stamp it in your brain.”
“Got tired of writing stories?”
“I saw the demise of the newspaper business a mile away. Decided to jump ship before others got the same idea. But what I do here is pretty much the same thing when you get down to it. I dig for information, do my investigative stuff, and use it to help people like you keep tabs on people like ARM.”
The door opened and the receptionist entered with two steaming, jacketed paper cups. She set one down on the desk beside Ruckhauser, the other in front of Uzi; they thanked her and she left.
“Why don’t we start with some basic background on domestic extremism? That’ll help you put it all into perspective.” Uzi nodded for him to continue. “How much do you know about it?”
“With all that’s gone down the past several years, foreign threats have taken all my time. But after Fort Hood, we’ve scrambled to beef up a separate group within my task force dedicated to homebred terrorists. But their focus has been on Americans who’ve got ties to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia… wherever training camps spring up. My own knowledge base is limited to what we get in our threat assessments.
“But all of us have studied Oklahoma City. And obviously I’ve been fully briefed on the more recent stuff, like Nidal Hasan at Hood, the Hutaree in Michigan, Faisal Shahzad in Times Square, the Northwest Airlines underwear bomber, and a bunch of other attempts we cut off at the balls and were able to keep out of the media. That good enough?”
“Not really,” Ruckhauser said, “but let’s start with Oklahoma, because it opened our eyes to well-armed, obsessively antigovernment fanatics and neo-Nazis. Basically, we’re looking at disaffected loners who frequent the gun-show circuit and camouflaged paramilitary ‘officers’ who dress in fatigues and go out into the backwoods of the South and Midwest. They used to get together to play soldier, but now they go on extended maneuvers and train hard for combat like a serious militia, with high-tech gear and high-powered weapons. And they’re angrier and more volatile than they used to be. They see themselves as revolutionaries, plotting to attack America in order to save it — no matter how many innocent people they take with them.”
Ruckhauser sipped his coffee before continuing. “But let’s back up a bit, because there’s a deeper history here. People know Oklahoma City because of the sheer magnitude of the carnage. But if you’re asking if a militia is capable of doing what you’re asking, my answer is definitely.”
“Let’s hear the deeper history.”
“History can be boring, so I’ll hit the high points. You’ll catch the pattern. Blue Ridge Hunt Club, which was really a militia, recruited a gun dealer into its ranks so they could get their hands on all sorts of untraceable firearms. The dealer, a sympathizer, would merely ‘lose’ the paperwork. When ATF raided their compound, they found illegal machine guns, suppressors, grenades, and explosives. Not to mention elaborate plans on a computer for raiding a National Guard Armory, blowing up bridges, airports, and a radio station.”
Ruckhauser swirled his coffee cup and leaned back in his chair. “Then there was the Tri-State Militia in South Dakota. It was going to bomb several buildings that belonged to civil rights groups, including an ADL office in Houston, abortion clinics, and welfare offices. Luckily, the Bureau got a tip from an informant. Sure enough, when arrests were made, the plans — and explosives — were found. The White Patriot Party. Ever hear of them?”
“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”
“You’re not the only one. They were led by an ex-Green Beret. They stockpiled thousands of dollars of stolen military hardware and got active-duty military personnel to train its members to use antitank weapons, explosives, and land mines. The leaders were arrested and got short prison terms. But that only pissed them off. When they got out, they planned to rob a restaurant to fund the purchase of stolen military rockets so they could blow up the office and kill the attorney who prosecuted them. When that plan fell apart, they tried to blow up a hydroelectric power dam. Dumb luck led police to a dozen of their explosives stockpiles.” Ruckhauser sipped his coffee.
“Another group,” Ruckhauser continued, “had plans — and explosives — to detonate bombs at the Olympics. During the raid, your colleagues also found a hit list containing the names of a dozen prominent citizens they had a beef against. You get the point?”
“Loud and clear.”
“None of that is common knowledge. It gets a small blurb in the morning paper, but because no one was killed, because there were no gruesome images on TV playing over and over for weeks at a time, everyone forgets about it. But when McVeigh hit…”
“It caught everyone’s attention.”
“Even the FBI seemed to have a short memory. It treated McVeigh like an anomaly, as if the threat of homegrown radicals who would act on their fantasies to take down government institutions was either never going to happen again, or a distant reality.”
Uzi was under no illusions that the Bureau was perfect. Mistakes were inevitable. The key was doing your best to prevent them, and learning from those you did make so they weren’t repeated many years later when institutional memory faded. “There must’ve been a reason why we thought that.”
“After 9/11, Islamic radicals and the war on terror became the big deal — along with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear program, the hunt for bin Laden, unmanned drones, and so on. But there were factors that seemed to support the FBI’s theory about domestic groups posing a lesser threat. The economy was going strong, people were prospering, the militias were suffering from infighting, and there wasn’t much of an increase in their influence after Oklahoma City. Certainly nothing like what happened after Ruby Ridge. If McVeigh meant it as a call to arms, it fell on deaf ears. For the most part.”