Pondering the case later, Louis Beam, a violent Klansman and movement theoretician, republished an influential essay on “leaderless resistance” he’d written in 1983. In it, he advocated the end of large groups with a pyramid leadership structure, arguing that such organizations were too easy to infiltrate and destroy. In their place, he called for lone wolf action or leaderless resistance, by which he meant cells of no more than six men. The idea was these cells and individuals would act on their own, with no direction or contact with other radicals. In that way, he reasoned, even the destruction of a single cell would have little effect on the larger movement.
“As honest men who have banded together into groups or associations of a political or religious nature are falsely labeled ‘domestic terrorists’ or ‘cultists’ and suppressed,” he wrote, “it will become necessary to consider other methods of organization — or as the case may very call for: non-organization.”
Tom Metzger, a prominent neo-Nazi who long operated from California but now lives in Indiana, took up the leaderless banner after Beam, tirelessly promoting his ideas with such publications as his “Laws for the Lone Wolf,” carried on his Resist.com website. Metzger advised fellow racists to avoid membership in groups, keep cash on hand for emergencies, and “never truly admit to anything.”
“Never keep any records of your activities that can connect you to the activity,” he wrote as part of a raft of suggestions. “Keep in mind that repeated activity in one area will lead to increased attention to the area and possibly to you. The more you change your tactics, the more effective you will become.”
Whether because of the admonitions of Beam, Metzger and others, or simply because the tactic makes obvious operational sense, there is little question that the vast majority of recent terror attacks in the United States have been by lone wolves or very small leaderless cells. There’s also little question that the political violence is continuing apace and that little seems to have been effective in stopping it. It may not have had to be this bad.
DHS Weighs In, Then Out
On April 7, 2009, the team of Department of Homeland Security analysts who study non-Islamic domestic terrorism issued a confidential report to law enforcement agencies entitled “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The report, which noted the effect the economy and the election of the nation’s first black president was having on the radical right, was almost immediately leaked to the right-wing media.
There, it was pilloried, with right-wing pundits and groups like the American Legion falsely claiming that it attacked military veterans, conservatives and others on the political right. That was clearly not true — in fact, the report was remarkably accurate in its analysis and warnings (which included the assertion that the threat of lone wolves and small cells was growing) — but enough of a political firestorm was created that then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano renounced its findings. The team that wrote it and lead analyst Daryl Johnson were falsely accused of failing to follow DHS’ procedures and were criticized by Napolitano and others in public.
But then undeniable reality began to kick in.
Even before the DHS report’s publication — three days earlier, to be exact — the evidence was mounting. On April 4, 2009, Richard Poplowski, an extremist who believed the government was about to unleash troops against American citizens, ambushed and killed three Pittsburgh police officers responding to Poplowski’s mother’s call reporting a domestic disturbance at her home. Poplowski, who also had racist and anti-Semitic views, was eventually sentenced to death in the killings.
Three weeks later, a Florida National Guardsman named Joshua Cartwright, who had earlier expressed interest in joining a militia group and also was “severely disturbed” about Obama’s election, shot two Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputies to death as they attempted to arrest Cartwright on domestic violence charges.
About a month after that, on May 31 — after Napolitano had withdrawn the April DHS report and apologized for its contents — an anti-abortion activist who had also been involved in the antigovernment “freemen” movement of the 1990s shot and killed Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Tiller’s church. A few days later, on June 10, an elderly neo-Nazi named James von Brunn opened fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and killed a guard. He clearly intended to get into the museum and kill many more, but was himself shot and later died.
From there, the roster of human carnage continued without pause. A nativist extremist murdered a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter; a long-time white supremacist was indicted and later convicted of sending a mail bomb that injured a diversity officer in Arizona; an angry tax protester flew an airplane into an Austin IRS building, killing himself and an IRS manager and injuring 13 others.
The Federal Response
But by then, almost the entire DHS team led by Daryl Johnson had left, discouraged by their treatment and DHS’ new reluctance to issue any reports because of the fear that they might become controversial. They were exhausted and perplexed by the criticisms of Napolitano, who accused them of violating vetting procedures. And Napolitano was not the only political figure that criticized Johnson and his colleagues. Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), for instance, described the DHS report as “offensive and unacceptable” and charged, without any basis, that DHS had abandoned the word “terrorist” to describe Al Qaeda and instead was using “the same term to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”
In the years since then, the DHS has held up or canceled a number of planned reports on domestic terrorism of various types. Even some law enforcement briefings were cancelled. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks, the Justice Department’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee was allowed to go fallow for more than a decade. But in the aftermath of the April 2014 murder of three people at two Kansas Jewish institutions, allegedly by a well-known neo-Nazi, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he was bringing the committee back to life. It had held no meetings, however, as of press time.
Johnson’s DHS unit was not a law enforcement agency, but it did play a key role in providing law enforcement with intelligence assessments. While it certainly could not prevent most terrorist attacks, the information it once produced was of high interest and importance to many police agencies. Former West Memphis, Ark., Police Chief Bob Paudert, whose police officer son was murdered by a father-and-son team of antigovernment extremists in 2010, has denounced the government for failing to brief police on such things as the “sovereign citizens” movement. His son’s killers were sovereigns, who reject the laws of the federal government, and Paudert believes that if his son had been briefed on them he might have lived.
The FBI has taken up some of the slack left by DHS with occasional reports on extremism. And more than 70 fusion centers — regional centers where federal, state and local law enforcement agencies share information about threats — put out occasional papers and warnings to possible targets. But those who study terrorism are still deeply worried by the virtual dissolution of the DHS team. “It was a big mistake to take those people off the radar,” said Mark Hamm, a criminologist at Indiana State University. “As soon as Barack Obama was elected, we could almost see it in the wind that there was going to be a revival of the radical right.”
Still, there does seem to be some new activity on the part of the federal government, including the planned reactivation of the Domestic Terrrorism Executive Committee. The government is funding a number of studies on radicalization and other matters related to domestic terrorism. But it still remains to be seen if these initiatives and others really deal effectively with the threat.
For his part, Daryl Johnson, who warned in 2009 of the increasing move toward lone wolf and leaderless terrorism — criminal acts that are almost impossible to stop in advance because so few people are involved in their planning — worries that the government still concentrates too much on foreign Muslim extremists, and that the recent Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris could add to that bias. He says that another extreme-right attack on the order of Oklahoma City, which was facilitated by the fact that only four people knew of the plot in advance, is entirely likely.
“We’re long overdue for a much greater attack from the far right,” Johnson said as he weighed the prospects for violence by terrorists like Larry McQuilliams, who clearly intended to kill as many people as possible. “We are long overdue.”