In the following weeks, additional agents were sent into the field to find other members of The Order.Īs the FBI started making arrests, some suspects would offer valuable information that led to the capture of other members. Mathews had died in the burning house, and six other members of The Order were arrested at the scene, Manis said. “At daylight I walked up to the cabin and I found Bob’s body lying in the rubble,” Manis said. The fire was from a flare that was in the bottom of the house,” Manis said. “While all this was going on, the house caught fire. When the FBI moved in, Mathews began shooting, and the FBI returned gunfire. “We did everything we could to get him out of there,” Manis said. “Through some informants … we were able to locate the whereabouts of Bob Mathews and six members of The Order at his hideout on Whidbey Island on the Puget Sound in Washington,” Manis said.Īgents closed in on the hideout in December of 1984. In the novel, a resistance movement sparked by white nationalists gains control of the government and furthers their mission to attack and disenfranchise non-whites.Įquipped with the plot Mathews was following, agents tracked his movements more closely. “It’s a scary thought because the principal character in ‘The Turner Diaries’ blew up FBI headquarters.” “They were following ‘Turner Diaries’ like a map,” ex-FBI agent McDaniel recalled. Mathews, a follower of Pierce, took the name of his group from the book and used it to guide his decisions as the group leader. The story depicts the violent overthrow of the US government and the extermination of all non-white enemies. Manis and his team successfully placed an informant inside The Order who led them to Mathews and “The Turner Diaries,” a work of fiction by neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. White supremacist leader escapes FBI raid For agents like Manis, this meant most days were spent gathering intelligence to prove that threat. He knew how to deal with radical idealism, and was familiar with their methods to organize into larger ranks.īut before Manis and his FBI colleagues could launch a full federal investigation in Idaho, agents had to demonstrate to the US attorney general the presence of a real threat to the United States and its interests. He’d been working undercover for the Bureau since 1967, and had gained experience investigating hate groups like the New Left in Chicago and the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. To infiltrate this world, the FBI tapped Special Agent Wayne Manis. It was home to the racist religious group The Aryan Nations.The Northwest Pacific region was also home to a group called The Order, which at the time was a lesser known religious and political terrorist organization. To build a case, the FBI sent a single agent to a small city in northern Idaho called Coeur D’Alene. It was the early 1980s, and white supremacist leaders were beginning to lure followers from multiple extremist groups with the intention of recruiting them to stage revolts against the US government, which they believed to be under heavy Jewish influence.Įx-FBI agents explain the white supremacist agenda In new interviews with CNN’s series “Declassified,” the agents involved describe what it took to see The Order fall. In order to dismantle it, the FBI had to rely on a skilled undercover agent to methodically gather intel against the group. In fact, one of the Bureau’s most remarkable investigations revolves around a white supremacist group that existed more than 30 years ago. “White supremacist”: It’s a label that’s come to dominate our conversations in the wake of deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, but it’s also one that has a deeply rooted history in the United States.Īs the FBI would tell you, the effort to disrupt violent hate groups and combat the threat of homegrown terrorism has been going on for decades.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |