New Face of Terror Crimes: 'Lone
        Wolf' Weaned on Hate
 

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        By JO THOMAS

            After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,
            law-enforcement officials began struggling with a
        big unanswered question: Were domestic terrorist
        attacks by white supremacists, both actual and
        thwarted, isolated events or the work of a cohesive
        underground movement?

        Federal and state investigators, including undercover
        agents, have painstakingly searched the evidence in a
        growing list of bombings, shootings and robberies. But
        they maintain there is no evidence of an organized
        effort among the disparate assortment of violent
        right-wing groups and individuals scattered across the
        United States.

        Instead, top-level law-enforcement officials and
        experts on terrorism say, what has emerged is a new
        style of "leaderless resistance" -- long urged by white
        supremacist leaders -- of very small cells, pairs or
        individuals, called lone wolves, acting independently.
        Hate groups, often using the Internet, provide the
        philosophical framework. Individuals with few or no
        tangible connections to these groups do the killing.

        Buford O. Furrow Jr., the angry, unemployed white
        supremacist who the police say scouted several Jewish
        institutions before shooting five people in a Los
        Angeles Jewish community center last week, may be
        the latest example.

        The police are not yet saying whether Furrow fancied
        himself a lone wolf, part of something larger, or
        whether, as some suggest, he was just a deeply
        disturbed loner susceptible to the influences of the
        violent right. But the actions he has admitted to have
        focused attention on what law-enforcement officials say
        is a new and particularly dangerous tactic of
        supremacists.

        "We've moved into the era of the solo act," said Mike
        Reynolds, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law
        Center, a private nonprofit group based in Montgomery,
        Ala., that tracks the activities of hate groups around the
        country.

        The notion being preached in pamphlets, on telephone
        lines and on white supremacist Web sites is that of the
        romantic, heroic loner who fights his own private war,
        committing violent acts against the government, Jews
        and racial minorities. A warrior working alone,
        supremacist leaders say, cannot be betrayed or
        infiltrated by the FBI, a fate that has befallen some hate
        groups.

        "Good hunting, lone wolves," said a telephone message
        put out on Aug. 3 by Tom Metzger, the leader of White
        Aryan Resistance, or WAR, a white supremacist group
        based in California.

        Metzger was deploring the demise of Proposition 187,
        a California referendum barring illegal immigrants
        from receiving government services. A federal court
        found much of the proposition unconstitutional, and last
        month Gov. Gray Davis agreed to drop an appeal of
        that ruling.

        Metzger, in his phone message, said: "Today,
        California ceased to exist as an Aryan-dominated state.
        WAR releases all associates from any constraints, real
        or imagined, in confronting the problem in any way you
        see fit." He then called for a second civil war.

        Reynolds, of the law center, was among the first to take
        note when three white supremacists who had bombed a
        bank, a newspaper and an abortion clinic in Spokane,
        Wash., in 1996 called themselves Phineas Priests.

        The idea that men who feel they are called by God
        should commit independent acts of terrorism, in the
        manner of Phineas, an Old Testament priest who slew
        an interreligious couple, was put forward by Richard
        Kelly Hoskins, a former member of the American Nazi
        Party, in a 1990 book, "Vigilantes of Christendom." But
        Hoskins broached the idea in an earlier book, "War
        Cycles/Peace Cycles," an anti-Semitic treatise found in
        the van abandoned in Los Angeles by Furrow.

        When Furrow was arrested, he told the FBI he wanted
        the shootings at the community center to be "a wake-up
        call to America to kill Jews," officials said.

        Terrorism experts point out that advances in
        technology, in particular the Internet, have fueled the
        activities of loners, making it easy for them to
        communicate and giving them access to extremist
        philosophers.

        "It puts them all in the loop," said Rabbi Marvin Hier,
        dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
        which monitors 2,100 hate sites on the Web. "They feel
        linked up. They're not alone. It makes them part of a
        greater thing. It's their ticket to the world."

        Brian Jenkins, an adviser on issues of crime and
        terrorism to the president of Rand Corp., a nonpartisan
        think tank, said an important consequence of the new
        technology was the disappearance of hierarchy.

        Instead of groups modeled after the military, like the
        Red Brigades, the ultra-left-wing organization
        responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks in the 1970s
        and '80s, including the assassination of former Prime
        Minister Aldo Moro of Italy, "we've moved into a
        realm where we are obliged to speak of universes of
        like-minded fanatics," Jenkins said, "from which
        emerge small galaxies of conspirators, or in some
        cases, simply individuals who mentally incorporate the
        belief systems, whether it's racism or anti-Semitism or
        religious fanaticism, of the broader universe, but are
        not receiving orders in any formal sense of the term."

        The danger has increased, Jenkins said, "because they
        are virtually impossible to identify in advance."

        The worst terrorist act on American soil, the bombing
        of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed
        168 people, was committed by two people, according
        to the FBI.

        Found among the belongings of Terry Nichols, who
        was convicted in that bombing along with Timothy
        McVeigh, was a well-thumbed copy of "Hunter," a
        novel by William Pierce, the head of the neo-Nazi
        National Alliance, who also wrote "The Turner
        Diaries," which prosecutors said was a virtual
        blueprint for the bombing.

        "Hunter" dramatized the idea of the solitary white
        warrior and was dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, a
        serial killer who shot interracial couples and also shot
        and wounded the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and
        the publisher of "Hustler" magazine, Larry Flynt.
        Franklin, who has admitted to or is suspected in 17
        murders, is on death row. His first known attack was
        the bombing of a synagogue in 1977.

        The danger of terrorists operating alone or in pairs
        became a major concern to law enforcement after the
        bombing in Oklahoma City, particularly in cases in
        which the attackers had ready access to weapons or
        explosives and could operate far outside the
        mainstream, without jobs, home addresses, telephone
        numbers or credit cards.

        Historically, the FBI and other law-enforcement
        officials geared to identifying and thwarting criminal
        organizations, like the Mafia, have had far less ability
        to investigate political groups or their leaders, whose
        speeches and writings, while inflammatory, are
        constitutionally protected.

        "There is no way to track these people without a
        massive invasion of privacy," said Paul Bresson, an
        FBI spokesman in Washington. He added, "Neither the
        American public nor the FBI wants that."

        Federal guidelines adopted in the aftermath of abuses
        committed in the civil rights and antiwar era bar the
        FBI from spying on hate groups or infiltrating them
        unless they have grounds to suspect that a group plans
        to commit a crime.

        Within these guidelines, federal agencies have used
        undercover agents to thwart a number of attacks
        planned since the Oklahoma bombing, offering
        evidence of how much easier it is to investigate a
        group, as opposed to keeping track of individuals.

        Arrests have been made in groups of from three to 12
        members on charges of planning to blow up government
        and other buildings. Undercover work stopped a plot to
        bomb the FBI's national fingerprint records center in
        West Virginia and another plan, in 1997, to attack an
        open house at Fort Hood on the Fourth of July.

        But recent hate crimes and acts of terror, the experts
        say, demonstrate the difficulty of intercepting a lone
        terrorist and the devastation that can be wreaked by one
        or two people.

        Benjamin Matthew Williams, 31, and his brother James
        Tyler Williams, 29, arrested in connection with the July
        1 shotgun killings of a gay couple near Redding, Calif.,
        are also suspects, the police say, in fires that caused
        nearly $1 million in damage to three synagogues in
        Sacramento on June 18.

        Another supremacist, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21,
        who went on a shooting attack against blacks, Asians
        and Jews in Illinois and Indiana over the Fourth of July
        weekend, killed two people and injured nine before
        killing himself.

        Another loner, Eric Robert Rudolph, a fugitive who
        disappeared into the Carolina woods, is charged with
        four bombings that left two people dead, including a
        police officer, and 124 injured. These attacks included
        the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in
        1996, the bombings of an Atlanta abortion clinic and of
        a nightclub with a gay clientele in 1997, and the
        bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., last
        year.

        Extensive files from the Internet about Rudolph were
        found among the possessions of David Copeland, an
        engineer who was charged with three nail-bomb attacks
        on ethnic minorities and homosexuals in London in
        April. Three people were killed and more than 100
        were injured.

        Chip Berlet, the president of Political Research
        Associates, a company based in Somerville, Mass., that
        tracks extremist groups, said the approaching
        millennium has focused "a confluence of demonization,
        scapegoating and conspiracy theories. For people with
        an ideology that is apocalyptic, the struggle between
        good and evil is approaching."

        Hate groups in the United States, Berlet said, are
        grounded in a narrative in which "hardy white male
        middle-class people are being squeezed by secret elites
        above who manipulate their lives, while down below
        are lazy, shiftless parasites that are picking their
        pockets. They feel squeezed from above and below."

        Furrow was for a time associated with the Church of
        Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations. The group
        espouses the Christian Identity theology, which teaches
        that people of color were created before Adam and are,
        therefore, like beasts of the field, and that Jews are the
        product of a union between Eve and Satan.

        The language of Christian Identity "not only demeans
        minorities and Jews," said Gail Gans, director of the
        Civil Rights Information Center of the Anti-Defamation
        League, "it sets them up as targets. When you've erased
        someone's humanity, it makes them easier to shoot."