by Gary Noesner
We agreed to help facilitate the legislative forum agreed to by the Montana state legislators to address their perceived rights and legal position.
We hoped that by stipulating these commitments so explicitly, we would lend form and substance to the idea that this was the best deal they were going to get from the government. Unfortunately, the same three holdouts continued to obstruct any forward movement that the others might have accepted. Freemen Rodney Skurdal and Dale Jacobi clung to their common-law convictions and remained unwilling to consider any compromise. Russ Landers continued to object to any settlement that would end up putting him in legal jeopardy.
As he continued his own shuttle diplomacy, Karl Ohs was usually accompanied by Butch Anderson, Val Stanton’s birth father. We had targeted Val as someone we might persuade to leave the property. We felt that if we could convince those who did not face charges, or serious charges, to come out, we would begin to erode the group’s solidarity. Butch managed to find times to speak with Val away from the influence of the hard-core Freemen. While Karl distracted the true believers on larger issues, Butch was working on Val to come out.
On the twelfth day of the siege, those efforts paid off. Val Stanton decided to take her young daughter, Mariah, and walk out, the first major blow to the Freemen since the arrest of Schweitzer and Peterson. While we never felt Val or Mariah was in great danger, we were nonetheless relieved when they reached our side of the fence line.
Karl Ohs also focused his attention on Edwin Clark, who in his view was far and away the most reasonable individual among the Freemen. With this in mind, we had Ohs push the reluctant Edwin to assume a leadership role. He had the unique status of being the de facto leader of the Clark family, with special authority over the land and those living on it.
At one point, Edwin Clark relented and told Ohs that he was willing to meet with us. But then the other Freemen got Clark to change his mind. Edwin was a friendly and likeable individual, but he placed too high a value on consensus. Karl Ohs was extremely disappointed, and he told me he was losing heart.
“I don’t know if these boys are ever going to come to their senses,” he told me.
But then we got a break. Tom Spillum, owner of one of the two small motels in Jordan where FBI personnel stayed, was the stepson of diehard Freeman William Stanton, who had been arrested long before the siege and was serving time in jail. Several of our negotiators had gotten to know Tom pretty well. We knew that he was in touch with his mother, Agnes, wife of the jailed Freeman, and according to Tom, she was torn about what she should do.
With encouragement from us, Tom began a series of telephone calls and visits aimed at convincing Agnes and her son, Ebert Stanton, to come out. It was Ebert’s wife, Val, who had already departed Justus Township with her daughter.
On the eighteenth day of the siege, Tom at last prevailed, and Agnes and Ebert both decided to leave. In response to this second major blow to the Freemen’s solidarity, the hard core of the group delivered an ultimatum: there would be no more unsupervised phone calls or other contacts with anyone outside.
For the next two weeks the siege continued unchanged. We had learned that leaving agents to work long hours in remote locations with no relief in sight could allow frustration to build up, so we rotated all FBI personnel, including negotiators, in and out of Jordan. My deputy, Steve Romano, came in to relieve me as negotiation team leader. Steve knew as much about the Freemen as anyone, and he and I shared a common philosophy and approach to the negotiation process. For the remainder of the siege we would alternate two-week stints in Jordan, trying to make the negotiation operations as seamless as possible.
This siege was shaping up to be one of a kind. Not only did we have a perimeter that was loosely defined, but there were no longer any telephone negotiations. All of our contact was undertaken through the various intermediaries, who were now carefully scrutinized by the Freemen. For safety reasons the intermediaries were allowed to travel in and out only during daylight hours, so other than an overnight skeleton crew, negotiation operations essentially shut down at the end of the business day. In at least this one respect, this was a very civilized operation.
Each morning we would leave our rather modest motel accommodations in town and drive out to the command post at the fairgrounds, where the government had set up a big communal kitchen to take care of us. We had three meals a day dished up by Forest Service cook crews. The menu, designed for wilderness firefighters, was varied and good but also extremely high in calories. No one lost weight during this operation.
These crews, like most everyone else in Jordan, were friendly and welcoming to the entire FBI team. They told us that they appreciated us moving against the Freemen, who’d been giving them problems for years. Around Easter the children from the local school delivered handmade drawings thanking the FBI for being there.
In addition to the fairgrounds, we had a second, albeit informal, center of operations at the Hell Creek Bar, where the negotiation team and other FBI elements would gravitate most every evening after dinner. The owner, Joe Herbold, who had only recently purchased the place, was a real people person, the kind of guy who might have been a successful negotiator. The bar had a bona fide Wild West swinging saloon door and a huge carved bar that must have been installed in the 1880s. On a normal Saturday night Joe might have a dozen customers come into his establishment, some of them fairly wild and woolly. (One night I sat and talked to a guy whose job was as a government coyote hunter.) Joe looked more like a guy who might work in a cubicle in Chicago or Seattle, but here he was, maintaining this frontier outpost. With the siege and all the new customers it brought in, his bar looked not only Wild West but gold rush boomtown as well.
Initially, there were three groups of patrons, each maintaining a respectful separation from the others: the regular local citizens, the deployed FBI agents, and members of the news media. After a few weeks, these groups began to mingle a bit and get to know one another. Joe maintained a strict policy of no shop talk, which helped maintain peace and civility. (As I said, with a little training he might have become an excellent member of our negotiation team.)
The Hell Creek was a great place to blow off steam. One evening I joined an impromptu concert with a local rancher playing the bass, a news media reporter on piano, and me playing guitar. It was surreal, to say the least.
As if to rescue the audience, a cowboy burst in the front door and loudly announced: “Two-headed calf.” That was all it took. A couple of dozen bar patrons emptied out onto the dirt road where, in the back of his pickup truck, the proud cowboy displayed a stillborn calf with two distinct and separate heads. We all stood around the bed of his truck and looked on in amazement. A multitude of jokes about being “two-faced” quickly followed.
The people of Jordan were hardworking, law-abiding folks, and they were embarrassed by the unwanted attention the Freemen had brought to their town. During the siege, Montana had come under further scrutiny when the FBI located the source of a series of mail bombs that had killed three people and injured twenty-three. The man they arrested, Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a mathematician who’d soured on technology and had taken to living in a primitive cabin in a remote area between Missoula and Helena. The citizens of Jordan had extra incentive to show the world that not everyone in Montana was alienated, armed, and dangerous. Local citizens started to appear on the streets wearing FBI T-shirts and hats they had bartered for with various agents. One cowboy who frequented the bar got one of my FBI negotiator’s shirts in exchange for some pronghorn antlers. I’d say I negotiated the better end of the deal on that one. Then, on day thirty-four of the siege, after a long stretch of little progress, two uninvited people showed up at the fairgrounds and asked the state troopers guarding the perimeter if they could speak with the FBI. One of these was Bo Gritz, who had assisted in resolving the Ruby Ridge incident; the other was Randy Weaver himself. Gritz had already made a name as a spokesman for disaffected mil
itia groups and as a liaison between them and the government. In militia circles, Weaver, of course, was a cause célèbre. We invited them in and sat them down to hear what they had to say. It turned out that these two thought they could get through to the Freemen where we could not.
I had not been at Ruby Ridge, so I did not know them personally, and I wasn’t at all sure of their intentions. With his bushy mustache and weight lifter’s build, Gritz came across as the former Green Beret that he was—bold, brash, confident, and self-assured. I also wasn’t sure that he would be able to accomplish anything with the Freemen. On the other hand, I didn’t see any particular downside to his intervention, assuming we could keep his ego under control and properly channel his enthusiasm. I was also concerned that our refusal to allow him to make the effort would be misinterpreted by the right wing as a sign that we weren’t really committed to ending the siege in a peaceful way.
Weaver, on the other hand, was a soft-spoken man who seemed for the most part content to let Gritz do the talking. I asked him directly how he thought he could help.
He looked at me with sad eyes and said, “Maybe I can convince them not to make the same stupid mistakes I made. You can’t get into a shooting war with the U.S. government and win. If I had it to do over again, I’d surrender. Then maybe my wife and son would be alive today.”
His words hung in the air for a moment, and though I was surprised by his candor, I had no doubt he was sincere. I wondered if he was motivated in part by trying to bring meaning to the loss he had suffered. For sure, few other individuals could make as strong an argument for surrender as Randy Weaver himself.
After meeting Gritz and Weaver, I went to the FBI command team to discuss whether we should avail ourselves of their offer. Everyone agreed that we should use Gritz, but Weaver was a different matter. I tried to convince them that he, better than anyone else, would be able to explain what they had to lose. But my colleagues were adamant; they were concerned that involving him would subject the FBI to criticism. Perhaps even more than that, they believed it inappropriate to use him. They truly held Weaver in contempt for what he had done.
As a group, we called Director Freeh. He agreed with my recommendation to use Gritz but sided with the others in opposing the use of Weaver.
We had Karl Ohs contact the Freemen and ask if they would be willing to meet with Bo Gritz, telling them that Gritz had come on his own and wanted to speak with them. The Freemen said they were not interested, but Gritz—who some say was the real-life model for the movie character Rambo—would not take no for an answer.
We allowed him to go forward to the Freemen property line, and he was there only a short time before the Freemen came out to talk with him, then brought him inside.
Over a four-day period, Gritz met with the Freemen at the schoolhouse. Afterward, we learned that they never warmed up to him as they had with Karl Ohs—to the Freemen’s taste, he was just too pushy.
When we debriefed him, Gritz admitted that he had made only limited progress in getting through to the men in Justus Township. He told us that he had taken it upon himself to scare some sense into them, and scare them he did. He said that if they continued to resist, the government would come in to get them in the dead of night. He told them there would be loud explosions and flashes of bright light that would disorient them. Then they would be dragged out in handcuffs through the mud and humiliated in public.
While I never would have endorsed this approach, I think it may have had a positive effect, at least in planting the idea that the FBI’s patience was not endless and that a tactical assault was still a very real possibility.
After failing to barter the truce he was seeking, a frustrated Gritz appeared before the news media, where he harshly criticized the Freemen and questioned their motives. This exercise in pique undid whatever good Gritz had done, and the Freemen refused any further meetings with him. He and Randy Weaver left town in a rush and were not seen around those parts again.
After the Gritz initiative, we heard that there was going to be a rally in support of the Freemen in Jordan, but only eight individuals showed up. There were more reporters covering the story than there were participants. Gritz’s diatribe may well have killed off whatever outside support the Freemen had once enjoyed. The news media—particularly the print media in Montana—were extremely critical of the Freemen and their ideology, and cartoons poking fun at the group began to appear in the state papers.
Family members were also unsympathetic. When we asked one to pen a letter to his brother, who was inside with his two sons, he wrote the following:
I can see why you would want to kill yourself. … If you must end your life, at least be clear about why, it’s not about taxes or bad government or anything else. It is about the rottenness inside yourself. So go ahead and end it.
As you might imagine, we chose not to send in this letter.
On day fifty-three, the Freemen requested and were allowed to meet with Charlie Duke, a right-wing member of the Colorado state senate well known in militia circles. Steve Romano and Dwayne Fuselier orchestrated and managed the encounter while I was back in Virginia. They met with Duke to brief him, after which the senator went into Justus Township. He emerged with the Freemen’s authorization for him to act as their intermediary with the FBI. He even convinced them to meet face-to-face with us for the first time.
Once again, our agents set up a table and chairs at the same cattle guard where the Montana legislators had met with the Freemen.
Our objective was to listen to what the Freemen had to say and to schedule another meeting, and that was it. Some on-scene leaders were expecting more, though I felt that we should simply show our respect for them and indicate our genuine desire to help them out of this situation. But it was also essential to establish the prospects for a dialogue.
Steve and Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier represented the FBI at the table. If the Freemen who came had expected to find demanding and authoritative feds, what they got instead were two very reasonable agents who showed openness and concern. Over the course of the next six days the two groups continued to meet twice a day. The problem was, we simply didn’t speak the same language or, you might say, even live in the same universe. For all our cordiality, anytime they got down to real discussion of the issues they would hit a roadblock. They would say the Freeman had to come out and face charges; the Freeman would counter that the FBI had no authority to demand anything of them.
The Freemen would not give up their insistence that they be tried by their peers in a common-law court. Steve and Dwayne suggested that the best course of action was for the Freemen to come out and tell their side of the story in an authorized court, but the Freemen weren’t buying it. When I came back from Virginia, the management team was frustrated and met to discuss how to move things along. We decided that our best option was to create an illusion of impatience and mounting anger.
I have argued against showing a bellicose face when it contradicts and undermines the negotiations. But this was a case in which negotiation alone was not moving us forward. The best approach is always a carefully modulated combination of earnest talk backed up by the option of tactical intervention. Now we needed to reinforce that option.
Until this point, we had allowed reporters and television crews to cluster on a hill where they could observe and film Justus Township from a safe distance, but in full view of the Freemen. We now decided to move the media away, hoping to plant the thought that something was about to happen that we wanted hidden from the media.
We then brought several armored personnel carriers to the command post, spurring the media to report on their sudden arrival. The FBI actually borrowed two of these vehicles from local law enforcement, painted them black, and stenciled FBI in white letters on the sides. One of these trucks was in fact inoperable, but we were the only ones who knew that.
Then a team of agents went forward and constructed a new gate in a stretch of fence where there was not even a road—a
fairly clear suggestion that something was up. Would the Freemen assume that we were planning to bring in more large equipment, maybe even assault vehicles? We hoped that was what they would fear. Also for the first time, we allowed an FBI helicopter to fly close enough to be seen and heard by those at Justus Township. We were careful not to fly over the property itself, but came just close enough to get their attention.
The next step was to cut off power to the ranch. Some local officials had publicly criticized the FBI for not doing this sooner, but what they didn’t know was that we needed the power on, especially the power going into the schoolhouse, where one of the hidden microphones had been planted prior to the siege. We had picked up useful information by listening in, but at this point we were willing to sacrifice this access in order to gain the psychological effect of the power blackout.
Finally, and perhaps most important, I met with Janet Clark, the nurse who was still coming and going to her job each day, and explained that the situation had dragged on far too long. I told her that despite our past patience, we were not getting the cooperation we needed from her husband and the others. I told her that authorities in Washington now wanted us to resolve this matter with all deliberate speed. I never said we were going to launch an assault; I simply implied that something was going to happen soon. I was confident that Janet would pass this information on to Edwin, the husband she loved, who was inside with their son, Casey.
We did all this between days sixty-six and seventy-one of the siege. The news media unwittingly did their part, repeatedly issuing reports that the FBI seemed ready to move. At this time we also began to get word through various means that many of those on the ranch were growing as weary of the siege as we were.
As a result of these initiatives, on day seventy-five Edwin Clark for the first time mustered the courage to come out alone and meet with us. Through Karl Ohs, we had been pressuring him relentlessly to assume a leadership role in order to take control and preclude violence. Edwin sat down with Dwayne Fuselier and me in a motor home we’d deployed near the property. He was cordial and polite, but we could also see that he had a lot of responsibility on his broad shoulders, and he was fatigued. He voiced concern about his son, Casey, his father, Ralph, and his uncle Emmett. His father, especially, needed medical attention.