I was alone with my aches and somber thoughts for only a few minutes before my second interrogation session began. This time two FBI agents came into my cell, followed by a physician and three other men, two of the last three being large, muscular-looking Negroes. The third man was a stooped, white-haired figure of about 70. A nasty little smile flickered around the corners of his coarse-looking mouth, which occasionally split into a leering grin, revealing the gold caps on his tobacco-stained teeth.
After the physician had quickly checked me over, pronounced me reasonably fit, and left, the two FBI agents jerked me to my feet and then took up positions near the door. The session was turned over to the sinister-looking fellow with the gold teeth.
Speaking with a thick Hebrew accent and a disarmingly mild, professorial manner, he introduced himself to me as Colonel Saul Rubin, of Israeli Military Intelligence. Before I could even wonder what business a representative of a foreign government had questioning me, Rubin explained:
"Since your racist activities are in violation of the International Genocide Convention, Mr. Turner, you will be tried by an international tribunal, with representatives from both your country and mine. But first we need some information from you, so that we can also bring your fellow criminals to justice at the same time.
"I understand that you were not very cooperative last night. Let me warn you that it will go very hard for you if you fail to answer my questions. I have had a great deal of experience over the last 45 years in extracting information from people who did not wish to cooperate with me. In the end they all told me everything I wanted to know, both the Arabs and the Germans, but it was a very unpleasant experience for those who were stubborn."
Then, after a brief pause: "Ah yes, some of those Germans, back in 194S and 1946-particularly the ones from the SS- were quite stubborn."
The apparently satisfying recollection brought another hideous grin to Rubin's face, and I could not suppress a shudder. I remembered the horrible photographs one of our members who was a former Army intelligence officer had shown me years ago of German prisoners who had had their eyes gouged out, their teeth pulled, their fingers cut off, and their testicles smashed by sadistic interrogators, many wearing U.S. Army uniforms, prior to their conviction and execution by military courts as "war criminals. "
I wanted nothing so much as to be able to smash the leering Jewish face before me with my fists, but my handcuffs would not permit me that luxury. I settled for spitting into Rubin's face and simultaneously aiming a kick at his crotch. Unfortunately, my stiff, aching muscles ruined my aim, and my kick only caught Rubin's thigh, sending him staggering back a couple of paces.
Then the two Negro orderlies seized me. Under Rubin's instructions, they proceeded to give me a vicious, thorough, and scientific beating. When they finished my whole body was a throbbing, searing mass of pain, and I was writhing on the floor, whimpering.
The subsequent interrogation sessions were worse-much worse. Because a public "show trial" was planned for me, presumably in the Adolf Eichmann manner, Rubin avoided the eye-gouging and finger-cutting, which would have disfigured me, but the things he did were fully as painful. (Note to the reader: Adolf Eichmann was a middle-level German official during World War II. Fifteen years after the war, in 39 BNE, he was kidnapped in South America by Jews, flown to Israel, and made the central figure in an elaborately staged, two-year propaganda campaign to evoke sympathy from the non-Jewish world for Israel, the only haven for "persecuted" Jews. After fiendish torture, Eichmann was displayed in a soundproof glass cage during a four-month show trial in which he was condemned to death for "crimes against the Jewish people.")
For days at a time I was completely out of my mind, and, as Rubin had predicted, I eventually told him everything he wanted to know. No human being could have done otherwise.
During the torture sessions the two FBI agents who were always present as spectators sometimes turned a bit pale-and when Rubin had his two Black assistants thrust a long, blunt rod up into my rectum, so that I was screaming and wriggling like a skewered pig, one looked as if he were going to be sick-but they never raised an objection. I guess it was much the same after World War II, when American officers of German descent calmly watched Jewish torturers work over their racial brothers who had been in the German army and likewise saw nothing amiss when Negro G.I.'s raped and brutalized German girls. Is it that they have been so brainwashed by the Jews that they hate their own race, or is it that they are just insensitive bastards who will do whatever they're told as long as they keep drawing their salaries?
Despite Rubin's exquisitely painful expertise, I am now thoroughly convinced that the Organization's interrogation techniques are much more effective than the System's. We are scientific, whereas the System is merely brutal. Although Rubin broke my resistance and got answers to his questions, fortunately he failed to ask many of the right questions.
When he had finally finished with me, after nearly a month-long nightmare, I had told him the names of most of the members of the Organization that I knew, the locations of their hideouts, and who had been involved in various operations against the System. I had described in detail the preparation for the bombing of the FBI building and my role in the mortar assault on the Capitol. And, of course, I explained exactly how the other members of my unit had escaped capture.
All these disclosures certainly caused problems for the Organization. But since they were able to anticipate exactly what the political police would learn from me, they were able to nullify any potential damage. Mainly it meant hastily abandoning several perfectly good hideouts and establishing new ones.
But Rubin's interrogation technique elicited only information in the form of answers to direct questions. He asked me nothing about our communications system, and so he found out nothing about it. (As I learned later, our legals inside the FBI kept the Organization informed as to just what information my interrogation was yielding, so we retained confidence in the security of our radio communications.)
He also found out nothing about the Order or about our philosophy or long-range goals, which knowledge might have helped the System understand our strategy. As it was, everything Rubin got from me was of a tactical nature only. I believe the reason for this to be the System's arrogant assumption that the task of liquidating the Organization would be a matter of only weeks. We were regarded as a major problem but not as a mortal danger.
After my period of interrogation was over, I was kept in the FBI building for another three weeks, apparently in anticipation of having me handy to identify various Organization members who might be arrested on the basis of the information I had furnished. None were arrested during this time, however, and I was eventually transferred to the special prison compound at Fort Belvoir where nearly 200 other Organization members and about the same number of our legals were being held.
The government was afraid to put us into ordinary prisons because of the danger that the Organization might free us-and also, I suspect, because they were afraid we might indoctrinate other White prisoners. So all captured Organization members were taken to Fort Belvoir from all over the country and kept in solitary-confinement cells in buildings surrounded by barbed wire, tanks, guard towers with machine guns, and two companies of MP's-all in the center of an Army base. And there I spent the next 14 months. What happened to the plans for my trial I cannot say.
Many people consider solitary confinement to be especially harsh treatment, but it was a blessing for me. I was still in such a depressed and abnormal frame of mind-partly the result of Rubin's torture, partly from a sense of guilt at having yielded to that torture, and partly just from being locked up and unable to participate in the struggle-that I needed some time alone to straighten myself out again. And, of course, it was nice not to have to worry about Blacks, which would have been a real curse in any ordinary prison.
No one who has not been subjected to the terror and agony to which I was can understand the profound and lasting effect of
such an experience. My body has healed completely now, and I have recovered from the peculiar combination of depression and nervous jitters with which my interrogation left me, but I am not the same man I was. I am more impatient now, more serious-minded (even somber, perhaps), more determined than ever to get on with our task.
And I have lost all fear of death. I have not become more reckless-less so, if anything-but nothing holds any terror for me now. I can be much harder on myself than before and also harder on others, when necessary. Woe betide any whining conservative, "responsible" or otherwise, who gets in the way of our revolution when I am around! I will listen to no more excuses from these self-serving collaborators but will simply reach for my pistol.
All the time I and-the others were at Fort Belvoir we were supposed to be incommunicado and were allowed no reading material, newspapers or otherwise. Nevertheless, we soon learned how to communicate to a limited extent with one another, and we established an oral news pipeline from the outside through our guards, who were not an altogether unsympathetic lot.
The news we all wanted to hear, of course, was of the war between the Organization and the System. We were especially cheered up whenever there was news of a successful action against the System-an "atrocity," in the jargon of the news media- and we became depressed if the period between news of major actions stretched to more than a few days.
As time passed, news of actions did become considerably less frequent, and the media began predicting with greater and greater confidence the imminent liquidation of the remnants of the Organization and the return of the country to "normalcy. " That worried us, but our worry was tempered by the observation that fewer and fewer new prisoners were joining us at Fort Belvoir. An average of one a day was being brought in when I first went there, but that number had declined to less than one a week by August of last year.
Then came the great Houston bombings of September 11 and 12, 1992. In two earthshaking days there were 14 major bombings, which left more than 4,000 persons dead and much of Houston's industrial and shipping facilities smoldering wreckage.
The action began when a fully loaded munitions ship, carrying aerial bombs to Israel, detonated in the crowded Houston ship channel in the pre-dawn hours of September 11. That ship took four others to the bottom of the channel with her, thoroughly blocking it, and also set fire to an enormous refinery nearby. Within an hour eight other massive explosions had occurred along the ship channel, putting the nation's second-busiest port out of business for more than four months.
Five later explosions closed the Houston airport, destroyed the city's main power-generating station, and collapsed two strategically located overpasses and a bridge, making two of the most heavily traveled freeways in the area impassable. Houston became an instant disaster area, and the Federal government rushed in thousands of troops-as much to keep an angry and panic-stricken public under control as to counter the Organization.
The Houston action won us no friends, but neither did it help the government's case. And it thoroughly dispelled the growing notion that our revolution had been stifled.
And, after Houston, there was Wilmington, then Providence, then Racine. Actions were fewer than before, but they were much, much bigger. It became apparent to us last fall that the revolution had entered a new and more decisive phase. But more of that later.
Last night was the most important action of all for those of us at Fort Belvoir. Just before midnight, as usual, two olive-drab buses pulled up in front of the gate to our prison compound. Ordinarily they bring in about 60 MP's for the midnight guard shift and take away the evening shift. This time it was different.
My first inkling that a breakout was in progress came when I was wakened by the sound of a machine gun being fired from one of the guard towers. It was quickly silenced by a direct hit from the 105-mm gun on one of the four tanks in our compound. After that there was intermittent small-arms fire and a lot of shouting and the sound of running feet. Finally, the wooden door of my cell burst inward under the blow of a sledgehammer, and I was free.
I was one of the lucky 150 or so who squeezed into the two MP buses and rode out in them. Several dozen others clung to the outside of the four captured tanks, whose inattentive crews had been the first targets of our rescuers. The rest had to go on foot, slogging through a downpour which providentially kept the Army's helicopters grounded.
Altogether we lost 18 prisoners and four rescuers killed and 61 prisoners recaptured. But 442 of us-according to the news report on the radio-made it to the waiting trucks outside the base, while the tanks kept our pursuers at bay.
That wasn't the end of the excitement, but let it suffice to say that by four o'clock this morning we had successfully dispersed to 0 more than two dozen pre-selected "safe houses" in the Washington area. After a few hours rest, I slipped into a set of civilian work clothes, took the set of false identification cards that had been carefully and masterfully prepared for me, and, carrying a newspaper and a lunch pail, made my way among the morning job-goers to the rendezvous point I was assigned.
Within two minutes a pickup truck carrying a man and a woman pulled up to the curb beside me. The door opened and I squeezed in. As Bill drove off into the rush-hour traffic, I held my beloved Katherine in my arms once again.
Chapter XIV
March 24, 1993. Today I was tried on the charge of Oathbreaking-the most serious offense with which a member of the Order can be charged. It was a harrowing experience, but I knew it was coming, and I am enormously relieved to have it behind me, despite the outcome.
All during the months in my prison cell, I agonized over the question: Did I, by failing to kill myself before I was captured, break my Oath to the Order? I must have reviewed in my mind a hundred times the circumstances of my capture and the subsequent events, trying to convince myself that my behavior had been blameless, that I had fallen alive into the hands of my captors through no fault of my own. Today I related the whole sequence of events to a jury of my peers.
The summons came this morning, via radio, and I knew immediately what it was for, although I was surprised at the address to which I was ordered to report: one of the newest and largest office buildings in downtown Washington. As an attractive receptionist ushered me into a conference room in a large suite of law offices, my apprehension was mixed with gratitude for the three-day period of recuperation I had been allowed since the breakout.
I had just slipped into the robe which I found waiting for me on a coat-rack, when another door opened and eight other robed and hooded figures walked into the room and silently took seats around a large table. The last of the eight had his hood pushed back, and I recognized the familiar features of Major Williams.
The proceedings were brisk and bathed in an air of formality. After a little more than an hour of questioning, I was told to wait in a smaller, adjoining room. I waited there for nearly three hours.
When the others had finally finished discussing my case and had reached a decision, I was summoned back into the conference room. While I stood at one end of the table, Major Williams, seated at the other end, announced the verdict. His words, to the extent I can remember them, were as follows:
"Earl Turner, we have weighed your performance as a member of this Order on two grounds, and we have found you wanting on both.
"First, in your conduct immediately prior to the police raid in which you were seized and imprisoned, you gave evidence of a shocking lack of maturity and sound judgment. Your indiscretion in visiting the girl in Georgetown-an act which, although not specifically forbidden, was not within the realm of your assigned duties-led directly to a situation in which you and the members of your unit were placed in extreme jeopardy, and a valuable facility was lost to the Organization.
"Because of this failure of judgment on your part, your period as a probationary member of the Order is being extended for six months. Furthermore, your time as a prisoner will not count as a part of your probation. Therefore, you will not be permitte
d the rite of Union before March of next year, at the earliest.
"We find, however, that your conduct prior to the police raid does not constitute a violation of your Oath."
I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief upon hearing this last statement. But then Williams continued, with a grimmer note in his voice:
"The fact that you were taken alive by the political police and remained alive during nearly a month of interrogation is a far more serious matter.
"In swearing your Oath, you consecrated your life to the service of the Order. You undertook to place your duty to the Order ahead of all other things, including the preservation of your life, at all times. You accepted this obligation willingly and with the knowledge that, for the duration of our struggle, it entails a very substantial possibility of your actually having to give up your life in order to avoid breaking your Oath.
"And you were specifically warned against falling alive into the hands of the political police and were given the means to avoid this. Yet you did fall into their hands and remained alive. The information they extracted from you seriously hampered the work of the Organization in this area and placed many of your comrades in very grave danger.
"We understand, of course, that you did not make a conscious decision to violate your Oath. We have carefully looked into the circumstances of your capture, and we are aware of the interrogation techniques the political police now use against our people. If you were merely a soldier in any other army in the world, you would be held blameless.
"But the Order is not like any other army. We have claimed for ourselves the right to decide the fate of all our people and, eventually, to rule the world in accord with our principles. If we are to be worthy of this right, then we must be willing to accept the responsibility which goes with it.
The Turner Diaries: A Novel Page 13