EIGHT

GAUNT AND TIRED, Randy Weaver walked up to the passenger door of Kenneth Fadeley’s red Nissan Sentra, which was parked in the usual meeting place, along the grassy strip behind Connies Motor Inn in downtown Sandpoint. It was just before 9:00 a.m. on November 30, 1989—another slate-colored winter day in the Panhandle. Fadeley and Randy were supposed to drive across the Montana state line to a little town called Noxon, where they were going to meet Chuck Howarth and the Trochmann family. This time the informant was not alone. ATF agents were everywhere, four of them parked in two cars a few blocks away in Sandpoint, one waiting to pick up the tail in Noxon, and a pilot on standby in Spokane. This was to be the major attempt at getting inside the Montana movement and the beginning of a new phase of Kenneth Fadeley’s undercover mission. It was the opportunity for ATF to get inside a group that even the FBI had failed so far to infiltrate. And once they got to Noxon and Fadeley got inside, this portion of his investigation would be over and Randy Weaver would’ve served his purpose.

“This is a fancy car,” Randy said as he slipped into the passenger seat.

“Well, actually, it was a hell of a good deal,” Fadeley said. “This thing got wrecked.”

“I can’t go to Montana,” Randy blurted out almost immediately. “How come?”

“Oh, I’m busy. I got somethin’ goin’.”

“Can’t even run over there for a short time or nothin’?”

Randy shook his head. “I really better not, Gus.”

Fadeley worked him for a while, saying Randy had promised and that it would just take an hour, that he’d driven all that way. But Randy wanted to talk business. He wanted to sell more guns. He and his family had moved back up onto the mountain and Randy was broke and getting desperate. He wanted to sell four more single shots and a double-barrel. Then, maybe after the deal, Randy would have time to go to Montana. Or at least he’d think about it. Randy got out of the car and into his flatbed pickup, and Fadeley followed him to a mall at the other end of town, where they parked next to each other. Fadeley got out and they stood between the two vehicles, their breath steaming as they dickered over the price of the guns.

“Let’s sit in the car and talk about it,” Fadeley said. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

Inside the clean new Nissan, Randy went over the math again: four single shots at $150 each, that’s $600. A double-barrel at $300 and the $150 still owed on the first transaction. Randy wanted $1,050.

Fadeley wasn’t going to give a grand to a guy they didn’t need anymore. He said he didn’t have the money and blamed it on his “contact,” the guy who was eventually getting the guns. “He only sent me a hundred dollars to give ya on that last deal,” Fadeley said.

The informant counted out four twenty dollar bills and two tens—most of the money still owed from the last deal—and put them in Randy’s hand. Randy put the money in his billfold, slid it back in his pocket, and lit up a cigarette.

“I’ll tell you what, Gus,” he said, drawing out the smoke. Then he started in again about family, wondering why the biker had never introduced Weaver to his wife and kids. Randy talked about this all the time,

Fadeley realized, as if showing your family was some kind of lie detector.

“If we could meet your family, that would make things a lot cooler, you know?”

“We can set that up,” Fadeley lied. He was not about to drag his family into this, have his wife and kids pose as the family of a racist biker and gun dealer. Fadeley ran the conversation back around to Montana. “Would it hurt if we just met this guy and had a cup of coffee?”

Randy said he wasn’t comfortable.

“I don’t want you having any kinky feelings about me,” Fadeley said. He reminded Randy that this was a business they were involved in. “We’re both in this to make money.” Fadeley made it clear that Randy initiated the gun deal. “That’s pretty much how you’ve approached it with me, and you said, ‘Gus, I wanna go to work for you,’ that’s what I figured you wanted to do. I think I was right on that, wasn’t I?”

“I’ll be honest with you” Randy said. “I’d like to feed the family, but it’s more than that with me.” He said that’s why he had to meet Fadeley’s family, to see if the biker was clean.

The informant backpedaled. “Let me do this, let me get with the wife, and let’s see what we can come up with.”

Randy took a breath. “I had a guy in Spokane tell me that you are bad.”

Fadeley went numb. “Who told you that?”

“I’m not gonna give you this guy’s name, but I talked to the wife about it, Gus, and let me tell you something. That’s all I care about is my family, and if I go to prison, or anything, I’m gonna be pissed off. That’s all I gotta say.” And then Randy said that Fadeley initiated the gun buy. “You approached me and offered me a deal.”

Fadeley realized he could be losing three years of work here, and he scrambled. “I would like to know who the fuck told you that. He’s lying through his teeth ‘cause I’m not a badge, and if I was a badge, then I suppose I’d be wired, and you’re welcome to check me for a wire.” After the close call with Kumnick two years before, the ATF wasn’t wiring Fadeley anymore. Instead, the tape was fixed to the underside of the dashboard, and it continued to run as the informant tried to convince Randy he was okay.

“Whoever told you that was a fucking liar,” the ruddy-faced informant continued ranting. “Why, go back to Frank. Frank did some business with me. You see Frank walkin’ the fuckin’ street.

“If you want to believe someone else that is walking around paranoid that I’m a … fuckin’ pig, it’s been nice doin’ business with you,” Fadeley said. “Have a nice life. In the long run, it all pays the same, and you figure how many conferences I’ve been to. I’ve been to your house! Stupid Frank sittin’ there in your Jeep or whatever the hell that was, with a goddamn stud finder and a gun on my head…. I mean, let’s get real. Dismiss those ideas right there.”

Fadeley’s tirade seemed to work, and Randy muttered that maybe he was wrong. “You know, I didn’t really believe this guy, but I don’t want to take chances, you know. When somebody says something like that, it makes you think.”

Randy tried to make Fadeley feel better by admitting he’d been mistaken for a cop before, too. “Didn’t it bother you, knowin’ that I ran for sheriff?” he asked.

“You lost, didn’t ya?” Fadeley asked.

They both laughed.

“You only got twenty-five votes, didn’t ya?”

“I got more than that.”

Fadeley put an end to the subject. “Will you do me a favor? You get ahold of whoever this clown is in Spokane, and you tell him to shove it up his ass, and tell him it’ll be a good idea for him to do it. Because if I find out who he is, I’m gonna shove it up his ass for him.”

They talked again about whether this meeting had been set up for the Montana trip or as a way to exchange more guns.

“I wish you had brought some money,” Randy said. “I came down here to make a living…. And I’m sorry, you know, I couldn’t go to Montana. I gotta get home. I got somethin’ goin’ on up there and, uh, the next time that I tell you I’ll go with ya, you know, I’ll make sure I’ll go with you. No bullshit about it.”

And then Randy got out of the car.

“All right,” Fadeley said.

“Thanks,” said Randy.

Fadeley watched him climb into his pickup and drive off. As he turned his car around and headed off to meet Herb Byerly, he wondered just how much Randy Weaver really knew.

ONCE AGAIN, Randy and Vicki had new best friends. Bill Grider was a six-foot-three-inch ironworker, parcel-service driver, and softball player from Detroit who, a few years earlier, had followed his wife, Judy, and adolescent son, Eric, to Moscow, Idaho, a town at the edge of the state’s flat farmland, 120 miles south of Sandpoint. “I was running for my life when I left Detroit, physically and spiritually,” said Judy Grider, whose vibrato speech was a thick soup of Bible references. In Moscow, the Griders opened a cleaning-and-maintenance business for apartment buildings, but Bill hated Moscow, which was also home to the University of Idaho and people who were too liberal, pretentious, and artsy.

So, in June of 1989, Bill and Eric went north, looking for a place to fish and—eventually—to live. They were fishing the Kootenai River, a cold, rock-bottomed ribbon of clear water, when they met Randy and Sam, who were fishing the same stretch of river. When he heard Randy’s views of the Bible, Bill couldn’t wait to tell his wife. Like he figured, when Judy met Vicki Weaver and heard her views about the Identity religion, something clicked into place, and Judy Grider realized the Father—whose name she was learning was Yahweh—was stirring her to action.

“We’ve always been into the Scriptures, always searched for truth,” Judy said later. “I didn’t know Identity. I didn’t know there was such a thing until I got to Idaho. I was excited when I heard about it. It made more sense. It just all sort of fit together.”

Bill had been raised a Presbyterian, Judy an Episcopalian. But when they moved to Naples in late 1989, they became Identity followers and the Weavers’ closest friends.

That fall, Randy and Vicki and the kids moved back up to their cabin in a caravan of loaded pickup trucks that ground up the dusty road past Wayne and Ruth Rau’s place. Close friends of Steve Tanner, the Raus had heard about the dispute over $30,000 with Randy. They ignored the Weavers when Randy and Vicki drove past and waved. And the Rau children—who had always been good friends with Sammy and Sara—ignored the Weaver kids when they waved from the cabs of the overloaded pickup trucks.

While they were living down the hill, the Weavers had allowed the Raus to run a pipe from their spring down to the meadow, but there wasn’t enough water for two families, and so when the Weavers got home, the Raus lost the use of the spring. Randy said the Raus tried to make a claim on the spring. The Raus said the Weavers just cut their pipe with no explanation. When the Raus’ dog disappeared, they blamed Randy, and when it showed up two days later, they never apologized. The antagonism seemed to have its own momentum, and soon the two families were at war.

But the Weavers had an ally. The Griders had moved up to the meadow and squatted in an old house on Arthur Briggs’s land, near the trailer where the Weavers had first lived. Briggs didn’t live there anymore, and the land had been repossessed by the IRS, which had virtually no use for it. The Griders spent much of their time up the hill at the Weavers’ cabin, studying the Bible, yelling at the Raus, and target shooting with the family at cans and at a “Weaver for Sheriff’ sign.

The Weavers who retreated back up to Ruby Ridge were more militant and frightened than the family that had moved down the hill eighteen months before. Randy’s yearly trips to Aryan congresses had deepened his racism and had made the family some severe friends—like Aryan Nations member Proctor James Baker and his wife, Katy—whose stories and experiences confirmed everything the Weavers had been saying about the government conspiracy. And, strangely, the family began to swear more often. Pagan words like Christian were the true profanities, the Weavers believed. Words like fuck, shit, and goddamn were simply the rough-hewn language of pioneers.

Along with the Griders, the Weaver family’s Christian Identity beliefs became even more militant. Impressed by the skinheads’ commitment at the Aryan Nations Congress and moved by a Bible passage in Jeremiah in which warriors shaved their heads in mourning for Israel, Randy and Samuel Weaver and Bill and Eric Grider shaved their own heads.

Sammy and Sara, along with Eric Grider and another boy from Naples, wore swastikas and marched with their guns in front of the Rau place, calling the Rau kids niggers and chanting, “What do we want? White power! When do we want it? Right now!” Whenever the Raus saw Randy, he was wearing a holstered pistol. The Weavers and Griders fired guns at night and dumped garbage on the road in front of the Raus’ house. The Raus told the sheriff, but when he questioned Weaver, Randy claimed the Raus were harassing him and had let the air out of his tires. It was another bottomless feud.

For more than a year, the three families yelled back and forth and always seemed on the verge of a fight. The Raus accused the Weavers of stealing the pipes for their water supply, and later federal agents found the equipment at the Weaver house. But the constant gunfire was the worst for the Raus. They were afraid the Weavers were finally going to snap and kill them.

Once, during a yelling match near the Rau property, Ruth found herself standing near Vicki, whom she always admired for being such a hard worker, whom she always suspected of being smarter and gentler than Randy.

“What did we ever do to you?” Ruth asked suddenly.

The acrimony disappeared from Vicki’s face, and Ruth found herself looking at a woman with—more than anything—deep fear and bruised feelings. “You wouldn’t let your kids play with our kids.”

KENNETH FADELEY WASN’T GOING TO STOP working Aryan cases just because Randy Weaver was suspicious. A few months after his last meeting with Randy, he met with two Aryan Nations members—a Montana Ku Klux Klansman and the group’s most colorful member—a 300-pound, former professional wrestler named Rico Valentino. An engaging mix of bravado and flamboyance, Rico had shown up suddenly in 1987 and had become an occasional bodyguard for Richard Butler and one of the biggest financial supporters of Aryan Nations. He wore dark sunglasses and a pound of jewelry, overtipped every waitress he met, and made a beef stew so tasty, it was said to be the chosen food of Aryan warriors. Fadeley had tagged Valentino as one of the more dangerous members of the Hayden Lake church, certainly a guy to watch. When he wasn’t flying around the country, promoting professional wrestling matches, Valentino was hanging around the Aryan Nations compound, flashing wads of bills and teaching martial arts and wrestling holds. So, that night in early 1990, Fadeley met Rico and the other man at a restaurant in the Spokane Valley and listened to see what kind of things they might be planning. After the meeting, as Valentino drove away, Fadeley wrote down his license plate number. But when he ran the plate, he found it odd that it was registered under a different name.

In March, Fadeley returned to the Aryan Nations compound and told its leaders he had been gone because he’d had a heart attack. The Aryans welcomed “Gus” back, and he quickly got involved in the preparations for a local skinhead conference. His assignment was to write an article for a brochure that would go out to the young men. His topic was commitment.

Toward the end of March 1990, as Fadeley sat at a picnic table on Butler’s pastoral church grounds, the Aryan security chief, Steve Nelson, began walking toward him with a man named Proctor James Baker and another man. Baker held a video camera, and when they reached Fadeley, Nelson told him to say hi to everybody.

They set the camera down, and Nelson sat facing Fadeley, Baker moved in behind him. These were two of the men ATF agents had suggested he watch—the severe, thirty-five-year-old Nelson and the fifty-seven-year-old Baker, guys Fadeley had identified as two of the most radical members of the group.

“Gus,” Nelson said, “the license plate on your car doesn’t match your vehicle. How could that be?” Apparently, he wasn’t the only one writing down license numbers.

“I’ve been driving a car that belongs to my dad,” Fadeley said. “I’ll have to ask.”

“Gus, do you know who Kenneth Fadeley is?”

Oh boy. They were all alone on the grounds of the Aryan Nations, and these guys were jamming him. With his peripheral vision, Fadeley tried to see what Baker was doing, but the older man had moved in behind him and so Fadeley stared straight into Nelson’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “I know him.”

“Well, is he a close relative or something like that.”

“Something like that.”

Nelson said they had two addresses for “Gus.” And then he read off Fadeley’s address and his dad’s address. The informant had never given either address out. Did they have a source in law enforcement? Had they been following him?

“Are you a member of any law enforcement agency?” Baker asked.

“No.”

“Is your father in law enforcement?”

“No.”

“Are you a member of the Jewish Defense League?”

“No.”

“Why don’t we have an address for you?”

“You do. A post office box.”

“No. I mean a residential address.”

Fadeley, trying to stay calm, said he was staying with friends and that he didn’t need a bunch of Aryan Nations members ruining his friendships.

“I need to be able to trust you, Gus,” Nelson said. “Right now, there are too many circumstances here for me to be able to do that. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Given their other options, Fadeley didn’t think it was such a bad offer. As he walked off the compound toward his car, the informant figured that, as far as the Aryan Nations was concerned, Gus Magisono was officially dead. At the ATF, Byerly looked at the two cases that had come from the Fadeley operation—Kumnick and Weaver. They were beginning to realize Kumnick was all talk and wasn’t connected. But Weaver …

IN MAY, just two months after kicking Fadeley out of the Aryan Nations compound, Steve Nelson, Proctor James Baker, and another man, twenty-nine-year-old Robert Winslow, were arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiring to blow up a gay disco in Seattle. Nelson and Winslow were on their way to Seattle when they were popped. Baker was at his house in Hayden Lake, with his wife, Katy, when FBI agents showed up and searched the house. An FBI informant had taped one hundred hours of conversations with the men, in which they talked about the plan and even set off a practice bomb, packing it into a coffee can filled with gravel and nails. After it detonated, spraying a field with fragments and embedding nails into trees, Baker said, “Think what that would do to a roomful of people.”

At first, Richard Butler refused to believe that his close associate and bodyguard, the former wrestler Rico Valentino, was an FBI informant. He said Valentino had gone with Nelson and Winslow to Seattle to record an English version of “The Panzer March,” one of Hitler’s favorite songs. When the others were arrested and Valentino didn’t come back, Butler had to acknowledge that he had been duped again.

Valentino claimed to be a born-again Christian who went undercover to fight evil. He was paid $100,000 by the FBI for the three years he worked undercover and flashed the money around, tithing more than any other member and buying a 550-gallon water tank for use during the Aryan Nations World Congress. He paid to roof and floor a bunkhouse for visiting skinheads and bought two guitars for church services. He even paid $3,300 for the large metal “Aryan Nations” sign that covered the gate of the compound. He taught martial arts to skinheads and got to know every member of Butler’s groups.

Defense attorneys for the bombers said Valentino had set up their clients, encouraging them to act out a macho, right-wing fantasy that they would never have tried if the informant hadn’t been coaxing them into it and tossing around his substantial cash. They argued that the informant had spent three years inside the Aryan Nations without finding anything, and so he was eager to set up someone. Baker’s attorney, Everett Hofmeister, wondered how his client could have been involved when he didn’t even drive to Seattle with the other men. The key physical evidence tying him to the bombing, a pipe bomb, was given to him by Valentino, Baker said. And a piece of pipe found in his house was going to be used to vent a fuel line in his new home, not for a bomb. Why, Baker had even allowed the FBI to search his house.

But the prosecutor in the October 1990 case was Ron Howen, the assistant U.S. attorney from Order I, Order II, and the Bud Cutler trials—a guy who was making a career out of Aryan prosecutions. He brought expert witnesses who testified that one section of pipe in Baker’s house was capped on two ends, with a small hole drilled in it—perfect for making a bomb. Howen presented a detailed, steady case—thirty-eight witnesses over seven days—that focused on the men’s racist beliefs and on how those beliefs translated into criminal acts. On October 19, 1990, all three were convicted of possessing explosives and plotting to use another bomb in what they called a “kill zone” around the gay bar. The key witness was Rico Valentino.

After running his phony license plate, Fadeley had figured Valentino for an informant. And he guessed Valentino had made him for an undercover operative as well. Their covers were mirror images of each other, Fadeley realized—big, flashy, tough-talking guys who had the money for the wild plans these guys talked about. Fadeley’s only question now was who had burned him. His money was on Valentino, either to prove his own value to the group or to keep ATF from the embarrassment of having an undercover informant involved in the bombing plot. But there was another person who could’ve blown his cover: Randy Weaver.

ON RUBY RIDGE, the disco bombing case scared and angered Randy. All the other Aryans who had ended up in prison were just names to him, guys who might have been set up, but also really might have been criminals. But Randy knew Proctor James Baker. PJ was one of the guys from the summer conferences, an old auto mechanic, not a terrorist. They were at the Bakers’ house just before it was searched. The arrest especially hardened Vicki, who later wrote that it taught her a lesson.

“Remember my friend whose husband was ‘framed’? … He spent two years in prison. He got home last December half a man. He physically doesn’t look well and half his memory is gone. ‘They’ gave him a drug to destroy his mind and told him it was heart medication. He called my friend, his wife, three times in one day and couldn’t remember talking to her. She asked him if he was taking any medication and if so the name of it. He gave her the name and she went to a druggist and asked what it was used for. It destroys the mind (memory) and what’s gone will never come back!!” Vicki said she would not let that happen to her husband.

In the meantime, things had gotten so bad between the Weavers and the Raus that Wayne and Ruth were looking for some way to split the Griders and Weavers up. So when they saw that the IRS was selling the repossessed house that the Griders had been living in—rent free—they quickly bought it. They instructed their attorney to find someone to evict the Griders, and so he hired the county bailiff, a man named Ron Sukenik, who had spent fifteen of the previous sixteen years working in a restaurant.

On June 7, 1990, about 6:00 p.m., Sukenik drove his four-wheel-drive Dodge Raider across the Ruby Creek Bridge, followed closely by two Boundary County sheriff’s cars with their lights on. They drove to the Griders’ house and stopped in the driveway. Sukenik stepped out and stared at a flag that he recognized as the Aryan Nations banner—a Z on its side with a sword through it. A red truck sat near the house with a plywood sign—”Yahweh is white power!”—leaning against it.

“That’s far enough.” Ten feet away, Sukenik would later testify, Randy Weaver appeared with a Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. Bill Grider stepped out from behind a berm with a long pistol holstered on his hip and then Vicki Weaver came out, her own revolver sheathed on her waist.

They were fanned out in front of him, Sukenik testified. In his short career as a bailiff and court security officer, Ron Sukenik had never been on this end of a gun before and he tried to stay calm. He spoke to Randy, who lowered the gun to the ground.

“I’m not here to see you,” Sukenik said. “I’m here to see Bill.”

Randy began preaching about the IRS being an illegal entity, a tool of the federal government and the Jews. As Randy spoke, Sukenik allowed himself a deep breath. From the sheriff’s car, one of the deputies engaged Weaver in conversation about his beliefs, and he turned his attention away from Sukenik long enough for the bailiff to explain to Vicki what he was doing up there and to pass the papers along.

Vicki walked over, took the papers, and gave them to Bill. “They’re throwing you out of your house,” she said simply.

“I gotta go,” Sukenik said. He and the deputies backed away slowly and left. A few days later, Sheriff Whittaker saw Grider in Bonners Ferry and told him if he didn’t move out, Whittaker was going to move him out. So Bill and Judy moved down the hill and once again the Weavers were alone.

AGREEN FOREST SERVICE PICKUP TRUCK bounced and rattled along Randy Weaver’s driveway and stopped in a cloud of dust below his house. The first thing the two men saw as they approached the house was a Confederate flag, stirring in the light breeze above the cabin. It was a clear, sunny afternoon, June 12, 1990—just five days after Ron Sukenik’s eviction of the Griders.

Sara, who was thirteen, came running out first, her black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her long skirt clean and neat. She looked like any teenage girl except for the World War II gun belt slung around her waist and the semiautomatic pistol sticking out of the covered holster. “What do you want?” She was polite but businesslike.

Ten-year-old Sammy came out next, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a hunting knife holstered to his hip and a short, butch haircut.

Herb Byerly leaned out to talk to the kids. Even after twenty-two years with the ATF, it was unnerving to see children walking around with guns. Byerly could see Randy Weaver’s truck wasn’t there, and so he and the other agent, Steve Gunderson, figured Randy wasn’t home. “Hi,” Byerly said. He asked what road they were on. “We’re from the Forest Service. Have you seen another crew up here?”

“No,” Sara said, “I haven’t.”

Byerly and Gunderson took another look around, then backed up, drove down the ridge and onto the old highway, where they spotted Randy’s red flatbed truck outside one of the rooms at the Deep Creek Inn. Byerly recognized it from the meetings with Fadeley in Sandpoint, and so the ATF agents parked across the street and waited for Randy to come out.

Since Fadeley’s cover had been blown, the ATF needed someone else who could tell them what was happening with the Aryan Nations, and especially the separatists in Montana who were under investigation. Randy seemed like a perfect candidate. He was ex-military and had run for sheriff in Boundary County, so they figured he might, at least, have some respect for law enforcement. He had the trust of the Aryan Nations without any ties to them and, clearly, he didn’t agree completely with their views.

Byerly and Gunderson waited until they saw a woman come out of the motel to smoke a cigarette. Then they drove through the gravel parking lot and across the street, rolled down their windows, and asked the woman if Randy Weaver was inside. Byerly said they wanted to talk to him privately. The woman figured them for local Forest Service employees and went back inside.

Randy came out in a black leather jacket decorated with two Nazi SS lightning bolts, a dress shirt, jeans, and an Aryan belt buckle that caught Byerly’s attention. Randy walked up to the truck, smiling, and stood near the open window. Vicki stood well behind him on the porch, watching, just out of earshot.

The agents introduced themselves, and Randy stepped back. “Don’t say anything,” Byerly said. “Let me finish what I have to say.” He told Randy they had evidence that he’d manufactured and sold sawed-off shotguns. He offered to play a cassette tape of the gun buy and showed Randy Polaroid photographs of the guns. He said they’d presented the case to the U.S. attorney’s office and—while they didn’t have a warrant yet—there was a good chance it would go to a grand jury and Randy would be indicted on federal weapons violations. But there was something he could do.

Gunderson, a former sheriff’s deputy in Montana, was good at these kinds of pitches to blue-collar and country folk and so he took over for his partner, trying, in a friendly but foreboding way, to lay out the different ways this case could go. He called it telling someone what their future held: “Number one, Herb has got a case here, and he thinks it’s prosecutable, and he thinks you can be found guilty. But here are all your options: You could cooperate. You could wait until you get arrested. You could go to a jury in North Idaho and you might be able to beat the case and you would never go to jail. But you’d have to go through the process of being initially arrested, getting initial appearance, getting bonded, and all that. That’s a big hassle. Or you could decide to work with us on it. Doesn’t mean you’d have to actually get somebody arrested for us. It just means you go out of your way to cooperate with us, and then you can evade all this other stuff that could occur.”

“You can assist yourself,” Byerly finished, by providing information on other Aryan Nations members, particularly the group in Noxon. They wanted him to be a spy. Byerly wrote the ATF address and phone number, and “Herb” on a piece of paper and handed it to Randy. “Come alone, tomorrow, to the federal courthouse in Spokane at 11:00 a.m.”

Randy had listened quietly, but when the agents were done, he said he wouldn’t be a snitch. “You can go to hell,” Randy said. He turned and began walking back to the motel. “Vicki, Vicki! Come on out here!” The agents drove away.

At the time, Gunderson thought they’d played it just right. It was a reasonable offer, and even if Randy didn’t take it, he wasn’t going to fare that badly on a simple gun charge, not with a jury likely made up of gun-owning, antigovernment Idaho citizens. It’d be probation or a minimum security work release facility at the very most. It wasn’t until later that Gunderson realized Randy didn’t see it that way and that Gunderson was making a mistake treating Weaver the way he treated the normal criminals he dealt with. He’d never seen Randy’s expression on any of the gunrunners and drug dealers he usually busted. Those guys understood just how easy it would be to get out of this. Randy didn’t seem to get it. “Usually, I’m dealing with someone who knows, deep down inside, that he’s committed a crime,” Gunderson said. “But with Randy’s beliefs, I don’t think he felt he’d done anything wrong in the first place. He just looked at us with these vacant eyes…. It was going right over his head.” It would not be the last time federal agents would misjudge Randy Weaver.

RANDY AND VICKI COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. It was just like Proctor James Baker, like Randy’s supposed threats to President Reagan! Why couldn’t they leave the Weaver family alone? He was being set up! Gus had come to him, had shown him where to cut the guns. They decided Frank Kumnick must be a snitch, too. Well, Randy would rather go to jail than be a snitch! The Weavers raced up to the cabin, gathered the children, and explained what had happened. Vicki cried, and they prayed that the Creator show them what to do in the face of such oppression and deceit. And then Yahweh guided them. About 10 p.m., Randy and Vicki assumed the familiar roles, Randy raging, Vicki writing. She addressed the letter to “Aryan Nations & all our brethren of the Anglo Saxon Race.” In it, Vicki explained how the ATF agents had approached Randy and had tried to make him a snitch and how she and Randy and the children were ready to stand for truth and freedom. She challenged “the Edomites” to bring on war. When they were done, Bill Grider took the letter to the Aryan Nations compound.

If we are not free to obey the laws of Yahweh, we may as well be dead!

… We have decided to stay on this mountain, you could not drag our children away from us with chains. They are hard core and love the truth. Randy’s first thought was to let them arrest him to protect his children—but he is well aware that once they have him the Feds will send agents to search and destroy our home, looking for “evidence.” He knows his children—they won’t let that happen to their mother.

Let Yah-Yashua’s perfect will be done. If it is our time, we’ll go home. If it is not, we will praise his Separated Name! Halleluyah!

The conspiracy theories flew like snow in a November storm. The government was trying to separate the family and indoctrinate the children! The Raus and Tanners were trying to steal their land, just as Kinnison had tried! It was a plot to kill all the Green Berets! Frank Kumnick had been a plant, a government agent whose mission was to introduce Randy to the informant! The Jews, working through the Masons and the government, were finally making their move on those who knew Yah’s truth!

Two, three, four at a time, the Weavers’ friends trekked up the driveway and witnessed the family’s ever-deepening fear and their resolution not to be bullied.

“If we are up here when they come, we will stick by you,” said Judy Grider, who had taken on Vicki’s prophetic tone, her stern, matriarchal leadership, and even her denim-skirt wardrobe. “They’ll encounter two families with the strength of Yahweh.”

But there was another problem in the Weaver cabin. The money from Iowa was long gone and—whatever had happened with Tanner—that money was gone, too. The family was broke. Randy had made a few hundred bucks on the shotguns he bought and sold, but that business didn’t last long. They cut cords of wood for elderly people but, despite all that time in the woods, never came across a deer, and so Vicki worried that they wouldn’t have enough protein that winter. They sold off some of their possessions and picked up an occasional eighty-dollar check from their settlement with Terry Kinnison. But the family was worse off than it had ever been. And so, when they stopped paying their property taxes, it was partly because of politics, partly because they just couldn’t afford it anymore.

The tax bill was piling up, Randy was under investigation for gun charges, and the family was out of money; they were backed as far as they could go. And they responded the way they always did when they felt the pressure of the world against them. They became even more radical. Now it was time to make a stand, time to reject the lawlessness of Babylon.

Angry summer faded into fall and winter, and ATF agents contacted Wayne and Ruth Rau and asked for their help. In December, an indictment was handed down for Randy Weaver’s arrest on the gun charge, and a letter went out to the Weavers’ attorney. The Raus agreed to take a radio and contact the agents whenever they saw Randy and Vicki Weaver drive down the hill.

On the ridge top, Randy was torn. “Maybe I should turn myself in, so nothing happens to the kids.” But Vicki was convinced that as soon as Randy left, the government would confiscate their land, send the children to AIDs-infested mental hospitals or foster homes, and—when the Great Tribulation began—the Weavers would be spread throughout the Beast’s institutions and prisons. They took a vote; none of the kids would allow their father to turn himself in. Sammy, especially, was unbendable. He would not have his mother subjected to the horror of losing their land.

But by winter nothing had happened, and Randy and Vicki were still low on money. They set to work cutting firewood and selling it in town, rushing while they still had decent weather because the December storm clouds were moving in and each load could be their last.