Wary of another Waco, this time the FBI clearly knows its quarry. The agency wants to persuade as many of the Freemen as possible to surrender; a woman and child came out Friday night, leaving fewer than 20 people holed up on adjoining ranches outside Jordan, Mont. The most strident voices among the holdouts, federal sources say, are Jacobi and Skurdal, who moved to the compound last September from a fortified log cabin in Roundup, 150 miles away, where agents had tapped the phone and fax. At the same time, agency plants also attended Justus Township seminars, allegedly on how to forge checks and money orders. Even before the Oklahoma City bombing last April 19 drew attention to the radical right, the FBI was tracking the Freemen through informants inside the operation. The agency wasn’t saying whether any assets remain in Justus Township, but it is clear authorities have amassed a huge dossier on the Freemen. “Eventually it all will come out,” said one agent. “The residents there had no idea that we were inside.”
The Feds hope to end the standoff by driving a wedge between local Freemen and the more radical outsiders who joined the camp from Roundup. Local officials, including a state legislator with family ties to some of the holdouts, twice met members of the group outside their farmhouse headquarters. The pitch was that if the Freemen surrendered, their neighbors would ensure that the authorities treat them fairly. This amounted to a classic good cop, bad cop routine: the Freemen recognize state government, but reject U.S. authority.
Still, FBI sources feared that extremists in the camp might prevail and prevent others from leaving–and might even observe next week’s Oklahoma City anniversary by turning violent. Skurdal, they say, has been increasingly erratic ever since he suffered a skull fracture in a 1983 oilfield accident. In Roundup, he and Leroy Schweitzer, one of two Freemen leaders who were arrested on the first day of the current siege, bombarded local officials with threatening legal documents and used fraudulent liens placed against the assets of public officials as collateral to write millions of dollars’ worth of bogus checks and money orders. Skurdal’s “edicts” became increasingly bizarre. In the last screed, he called for a hunting season on legislators, judges, police officers and ministers.
So why weren’t the leaders rolled up earlier? The FBI is not saying. Perhaps the agency feared for the safety of its informants if police had moved on the cross-state convoy last fall. Thou Montana lawmen have accused the Feds of timidity, the agency is clearly following a careful post-Waco, post Ruby Ridge strategy of monitoring the most dangerous extremists and not moving until it is certain it can win with a minimum of bloodshed. In one such case in 1995, the Feds quietly watched–then busted–a Texas truck salesman plotting to blow up an IRS office in Austin; last week he was convicted.
But scoring convictions means arresting suspects. In Jordan, the FBI is prepared to wait. Other militia groups so far haven’t complicated the wait by rushing to the aid of the Freemen. A far-right demonstration fizzled last week when more reporters turned up than protesters. “There is no way anyone could storm the place without a lot of bloodshed on both sides,” said one federal source. “The government doesn’t want to make a martyr out of any of these people, and the FBI doesn’t want any of its agents wounded or killed. There is no hurry.” In this case, time may be the FBI’s best weapon.
