DAVE HUNT DROVE BACK to Naples in October 1991, hoping to finally end this thing before it gathered any more momentum. He and the marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, had mailed a letter to Weaver in August, urging him to give up. In late September, seven SOG deputies had returned to North Idaho to talk about a direct approach on the cabin. But Hunt hadn’t given up negotiating and, despite the pressure from Evans and others, wasn’t ready to go tactical yet, so he sent the SOG team home. Still, the persistent enforcement deputy was becoming discouraged. Jack Cluff and Ron Evans had driven up the mountain, pretending they were looking for land. Weaver’s kids had come out first, and when Randy finally came out, he stood back, shielded by his armed kids, and told Cluff and Evans to move along. It made the marshals sick. Hunt had this awful feeling Randy was taunting him, sending down these ridiculous letters that left no room for negotiation and that pointed them ever closer to a confrontation.
In October, Hunt and Mays found out someone else was picking up the Weavers’ mail, a thirty-seven-year-old family friend named Alan Jeppesen. The marshals drove to Jeppesen’s house in Naples and talked to him in his driveway. They listened to his constitutionalist rhetoric for a while, and then Hunt asked the same question he’d asked Grider.
“Can’t I just walk right up the mountain and arrest him?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Jeppesen. But he promised to tell Randy that Hunt wanted to meet with him face-to-face, talk about his beliefs, and see what it might take to end the stalemate peacefully.
The next day, Hunt and Mays met with Jeppesen again, and he gave the marshals a letter written by Vicki and Randy on a single sheet torn from a notebook. The rantings were starting to get predictable: “The U.S. Government lied to me—why should I believe anything its servants have to say…. Your lawless One World Beast courts are doomed. We will stay here separated from you….”
So Hunt tried the Griders once more.
“Bill,” he said, “can you help me figure out how to do this without anyone getting hurt?” He offered Grider $5,000 to bring Randy down.
“Keep your money,” Grider said. Randy had accused him of being a snitch, and the short-fused Grider said he’d just kill Weaver. “I’ll call you and tell you where the body is.”
It just got stranger and stranger. Hunt knew he had to get past this circular, religious language and macho survivalist paranoia to find out what was really bugging Randy. He wrote a letter promising that the government wouldn’t interfere with Vicki’s custody of the children; that Randy’s friend Alan Jeppesen would be able to stay with him while he was arrested; and that the government wouldn’t take Randy’s property in place of the $10,000 bond.
He knew he couldn’t send the letter without running it past his boss, Evans, and the assistant U.S. attorney, Ron Howen. So he faxed them the letter, along with five other negotiating points he thought might end the logjam, points like the following: that Randy be given his choice of jails while he waited for trial, and that his family be given liberal visitation rights.
“Dear Mr. Weaver,” Hunt’s letter began. “I was hoping that you would be willing to discuss with me how we might come to some reasonable solution to this matter.”
While Hunt waited for permission to mail the letter, Jeppesen brought down another letter written by Vicki Weaver, this time addressed to Hunt and Mays. It listed six questions:
Hunt hadn’t heard back from Howen about the negotiating points in his own letter, so he wrote another letter, answered the six questions as best he could (“I can’t answer number three because I don’t know of any concerted effort to set up for prison or murder all Green Berets”) and assured Randy that if he surrendered, he’d be treated fairly.
On October 17, he saw Jeppesen one last time.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore,” Alan said. He gave Hunt another letter from Vicki: “My husband was set up for a fall because of his religious and political beliefs. There is nothing to discuss. He doesn’t have to prove he is innocent nor refute your slander. Mrs. Vicki Weaver.”
“Can’t I still meet Randy face-to-face?” Hunt asked.
“No,” Jeppesen said. “He won’t meet with you.”
So the marshals drove back to Boise. This case was really starting to unnerve Dave Hunt. He’d never encountered someone so unreasonable. Then, the day he got back to Boise, he got Howen’s official response to his proposed letter. They weren’t allowed to negotiate with someone who had an attorney and—even though Randy wouldn’t meet with his—a lawyer had been appointed. “I cannot authorize further negotiations or discussions along this line with the defendant or his agent,” Howen wrote.
The U.S. attorney’s office had scuttled the marshals’ one best chance to negotiate an end to the case.
Okay, neither side wanted to negotiate. That’s it, Hunt told Evans. “Let’s let him sit up there another winter.” Maybe the Weavers would tire of their primitive existence. The weather was turning, and Vicki was about to have a baby. They couldn’t stay up there forever.
THERE WAS NO WAY Vicki Weaver was going to have her twins in a hospital. There was too much risk of catching AIDS, even at a small hospital like the one in Sandpoint. Besides, Randy’s army training included delivering babies, and Vicki was in touch with a midwife who had studied to be an emergency medical technician and who was going to try to be there when the babies were born.
Alan Jeppesen was doing a fine job with the groceries. The Weavers had always paid the Griders for that job, but Alan only asked that Vicki knit him wool socks. It took Vicki forty-two hours curled up with yarn and needles under the kerosene lamp just to knit three pairs, but Alan told her that when he showed them to an elderly woman he knew, she mistook the socks for machine-made. Once a week, Jeppesen brought milk, eggs, butter, bread, cereal, bananas, and a package of hamburger. He delivered mail and often bought a half-gallon of ice cream for the kids.
Kevin Harris came up quite often during the summer and fall of 1991, helped Randy cut tamarack trees for the winter firewood supply, and helped Vicki can vegetables and fruit. She was working hard through the late months of pregnancy and writing a running letter to her parents that she mailed whenever Kevin or Alan went down the hill. David and Jeane were planning to visit, hoping to catch the birth of Vicki’s twins. Each summer, Vicki sent them a winter list of things the family needed, and that year she included cracked corn, canned goods, a food grinder, toothpaste, men’s underwear, and shoes for the whole family.
David and Jeane left for Idaho in early October, intent on bringing Vicki down the mountain temporarily, so she could at least be close to a hospital. On the way, they met with ATF agent Steve Gunderson in the Kmart parking lot in Coeur d’ Alene. They told Gunderson the same thing they’d told Hunt, the sheriff, and everyone else. Gunderson—one of the agents who had offered Randy the chance to be an informant—felt bad for Vicki’s parents, who were clearly caught between forces they couldn’t control: their family and the laws of the U.S. government.
“We’ll pass along what you say,” Jeane Jordison said, “but they don’t listen to us on religious and legal matters. And when all is said and done, that is our daughter and our son-in-law, and we love them and we’re going to support them.”
David and Jeane brought a truckful of supplies and helped out with the canning and work on the cabin, but by the time they had to leave, Vicki still hadn’t had the baby. They had no luck convincing her to leave Randy. Jeane tried once more to talk sense with Vicki and asked if the family wasn’t causing some of its own trouble.
“You know why I have trouble and other folks don’t?” Vicki wrote her mom. “I understand these things—most people never study or read and have their heads ruled by the ‘electronic toilet.’ They aren’t dangerous to the tyranny in place. We are—we speak out against it. If we had ‘free speech’ protected by the Constitution—then why wouldn’t we be left alone? Why do you suppose I live where I do? Certainly not to bother anyone else with what I understand. That should be obvious to anyone.”
David and Jeane left Idaho the second week of October. On the twenty-third, Vicki went into labor, and the next morning Randy delivered a healthy baby girl in the birthing shed. She had soft, reddish-blond hair and deep blue eyes, and by the time the midwife showed up, the baby was quiet and alert. There was no twin, just a blood clot that Vicki had mistaken for another baby. The midwife, Carolyn Trochmann—married to one of the men from Noxon, Montana, whom Randy was supposed to spy on—said Vicki and the baby looked fine. It was a morning as peaceful as any she’d ever seen.
Choosing the right name was crucial to Randy and Vicki. Since 1978, they’d talked about living on a mountain top with biblically named children. The last two both had “el” in their names, which Vicki had discovered was a more proper name for God. Samuel meant “lamb of El” and Rachel meant “gift of El.” Rachel’s middle name had been Marie, until Vicki discovered that was a Catholic derivation and therefore pagan. Vicki changed it to Miriam. For the new baby, Vicki and Randy chose a name that translated to “El is my savior.” There was no birth certificate, only Vicki’s careful entry in her Bible:
Elisheba Anne Weaver, Born Oct. 24, 1991, Roman, 11:15 A.M., 7th month, 15 day Hebrew, Feast of Tabernacles. On a mountain, Ruby Creek Canyon, Naples, Idaho.
BY THE SPRING OF 1992, Bill Morlin couldn’t wait to pitch this story: A white separatist gun dealer holed up on a mountain for a year with his wife and kids, stymieing federal agents, who flew over with airplanes and tried to figure out how to get him down. Morlin was the tireless federal courts reporter for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, an investigative specialist who, for twenty years, had broken many of the biggest stories in the Northwest and who had spent much of the last decade writing about Aryan cross burnings, pipe bombs, and bank robberies. He’d written a couple of small stories about Randy Weaver’s arrest and had filed Weaver away as one of the white separatists he needed to keep track of. That spring, he asked the district marshal what was happening with the Weaver case. He was given little information except a coy smile, the kind of look that was often the first tip Morlin got in a really good story. Remembering that the case had been an ATF bust, Morlin tried their office next and was given a little information and the same smile. He ping-ponged back and forth between the offices and played their competitiveness against each other. Finally, Morlin got enough for a story and went to his editors, but they weren’t sold on it. Morlin sulked briefly and then figured out how to convince them: It was the picture. He asked one of his federal sources for a copy of the aerial photos they had, then busted into the photo editor’s office, plopped down the picture, and said, “Look.” There was the cabin, its metal roof glinting in the sun, just a spot in the middle of a deeply forested ridge. You never saw such solitude. It was the perfect symbol of this guy’s separatism and the marshals’ dilemma. Days later, Morlin was in Naples, interviewing Weaver’s friends and trying to get up the mountain himself. The Weavers should talk to him, Morlin told Alan Jeppesen, because he was going to write a story anyway, and this would be a chance to get their side out.
Alan “has come up claiming the reporters want to talk with us,” Vicki wrote to her mother. “They won’t say what prompted their interest. We said we wouldn’t want to talk with them and they said well—they’d make up a story anyway!”
On March 8, Bill Morlin’s story ran on the front page of the Spokesman-Review, under the headline “Feds Have Fugitive ‘Under Our Nose.’”
Morlin’s lead read: “For more than a year, Randy Weaver and his family have been holed up on a North Idaho mountaintop, waiting for the federal government he despises to make the next move.”
In the story, Mike Johnson described Weaver’s cabin as “the closest thing to having a castle with a moat.” He said they hadn’t gone in because of Weaver’s kids. Some Naples residents were glad the marshals were taking their time and said in the story that Weaver wasn’t hurting anyone, that “his home is his jail.”
A Chicago Tribune reporter followed Morlin to North Idaho and his story was picked up by newspapers across the country. In Iowa, Randy’s niece cried when she saw the wire story. Suddenly, the Weavers were hot. Star magazine wanted to come up. The Los Angeles Times wanted to come up. Geraldo Rivera’s new television show, Now It Can Be Told, wanted to come up. The Weavers said no to all of them. So Star rented a helicopter and buzzed the cabin. Geraldo’s crew rented a chopper, too, and it hovered around the house like a persistent wasp while Randy flashed his middle finger at them. The next day, the Weavers were listening to their radio when they heard a report that they’d fired guns at Rivera’s helicopter.
“The only thing I shot them was the bird.” Randy laughed. The crew later admitted they were probably mistaken.
“I guess they’ve decided to ‘try’ us with public opinion,” Vicki wrote. She said “Jewraldo” and his crew’s false report of gunfire were attempts by the government to make the Weavers look violent. “They may still do a hatchet job on us: white robes, burning crosses, swastikas, and skinhead street fights. What’s that got to do with ‘failure to appear for a frame-up’?” To Vicki, all the attention was just more proof that even if there were some good men in law enforcement, they were being forced to do the Beast’s bidding by the Zionist-Illuminati-One-World infiltrators.
“Well, you wanted to know if all the publicity is good or bad?” she wrote her mother. “It’s to put pressure on us & the feds who don’t think the ‘charge’ merits force…. I’ve always told you—they will start it—well they have and they’ll never give up.”
ON MARCH 27, 1992, fifteen people met in the narrow director’s conference room on the twelfth floor of the marshals’ headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, overlooking the Pentagon and Washington, D.C. The top officials in the U.S. Marshals Service sat down at the conference table, along with a public relations specialist who was there to answer questions about the sudden bad publicity this case was generating. One writer had even suggested that all criminals move to Idaho, where authorities were afraid to arrest them.
Also at the meeting were electronics, surveillance, and tactical experts, all there to figure out a plan finally to end this thing.
At the end of the table sat the marshals service’s acting director, Henry Hudson, who had been on the job only a couple of weeks and had already been blindsided, not only by a sticky case, but by the accompanying lousy publicity. A tough former prosecutor, Hudson listened as his top deputies explained how an Idaho woodsman could hide behind his kids for fourteen months and evade deputy marshals who knew exactly where he was.
The U.S. marshal for Idaho, Mike Johnson, spoke first. A thirty-eight-year-old former coroner and county commissioner, Johnson was a gun collector and savvy local politician in Boise, Idaho. The boyish, stocky Republican appointee wasn’t liked by some of the lifers who worked under him, the career marshals who did the day-to-day work. But he was in his element in Washington, D.C, especially with Hudson, who was in the same general position he was—an ambitious, young politician in charge of lifetime civil servants. Johnson and Hudson had known each other for ten years, since the two men served together on a highway safety committee. Now, Mike Johnson went over each painstaking step that his deputies had taken to negotiate and investigate this case. They’d followed all the rules and had even called SOG teams out twice. And now, Johnson said, his chief deputies were requesting help from headquarters.
After Johnson finished, the leader of the Special Operations Group told Henry Hudson how his members had gone out to Naples in June of 1991 and again that fall. He gave the SOG assessment and solution—several tactical assault plans that involved getting Weaver or other members of his family to respond to some noise, separating the family, and moving in to arrest Weaver. But this case was tricky, he acknowledged, and the tactical approach carried a high risk for Weaver’s family and the deputies. Still, the tactical option was the cheapest and quickest and SOG members specialized in pulling off such missions safely.
Finally, Arthur Roderick spoke. Roderick was a former SOG member who had specialized in fugitive investigations and then had returned to the enforcement division to become one of its stars. Mediterranean handsome, he had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, three years as an army MP, three years as a cop, and a reputation as one of the best young deputy marshals in the service. The last thing Roderick wanted to do was go into the woods after a fugitive hiding behind his armed children, but he knew the case was coming his way, so he had studied the problem.
Roderick outlined his three-part plan. First, he and a hand-picked team of deputies would fly to Idaho and be briefed by Dave Hunt and the other deputies already working the case. They would see the area for themselves, do some preliminary interviews, perhaps take one more shot at negotiating through Weaver’s friend. Second, they would spend a few weeks on intensive surveillance, with deputies and with hidden, long-range cameras. That would fill the gaps in the case, like whether or not Weaver ever left his cabin. And third, after they knew when Weaver left the cabin or what kind of ruse he might fall for, they’d make the arrest.
There was one other option. Hudson and Mike Johnson excused themselves and went into Hudson’s office. They called Maurice Ellsworth, the U.S. attorney for Idaho and asked him to publicly drop the charges against Weaver and, after the fugitive relaxed, convene a grand jury to secretly indict him. Ellsworth said no. It would be unethical.
Back in the meeting, they spent a few minutes going over some of the tactical plans. One of them involved surrounding the Weaver cabin with thirty-three deputy marshals while Sara slept in the menstruation shed, then grabbing the family members one at a time as they came out to visit her. Another plan involved splitting the family into two groups by getting some of them to respond to a noise in the woods. In both cases, the marshals would use nonlethal weapons—beanbag guns, rubber bullets, stinger grenades—to subdue Weaver and, if necessary, his family.
It took Hudson only a few minutes to dismiss the tactical ideas. The risk to Weaver’s family and to the deputies was too great. And so Roderick’s plan was approved, and he was told to begin immediately. He code-named it Operation Northern Exposure, after a popular television show filmed in the Northwest, featuring a mud-ugly town surrounded by beautiful wilderness and filled with strange people.
At the end of the meeting, Hudson said that when a plan was ready, perhaps it should be shown to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, to see if they had any suggestions. Some of the career marshals fought back scowls. In his first month as director of the marshals service, Hudson was underestimating the competition between the marshals and the FBI.
The meeting ended, the men stood up, shook hands, small-talked, and made their way out of the conference room. One by one, they filed past a painting of a grizzled Old West marshal wearing a badge, bringing in one bad guy handcuffed to his wrist and another draped over his shoulder. If only it were that easy.
DAVE HUNT WASN’T SLEEPING. He stayed up too late at night, pacing and sucking down cigarettes, rehashing Vicki Weaver’s cryptic letters in his mind, and second-guessing whether he’d been right to proceed so cautiously. He talked with his wife and played with his two children in their rambling, modern house in the highlands of Boise, Idaho. Their house was perched almost as steeply as Randy Weaver’s, but it was in a neighborhood filled—not with pine trees, boulders, and mountain grasses—but with other nice homes, minivans, and tricycles. Again and again, Hunt read the case file and pored over Revelation, Deuteronomy, and other Bible books, looking for explanations to Weaver’s behavior, for clues about what he might do next, and for passages that might convince him to surrender. And although he was grateful for the help from headquarters, it ate at him to have one of his cases—one of his fugitives!—get so out of control.
The day after meeting with the director in Washington, D.C., Mike Johnson made the marshals service’s final attempt at negotiating the case. The U.S. attorneys Howen and Ellsworth had made it clear they couldn’t negotiate the points Hunt had spelled out in his October letters. But Hudson told Johnson to try once more to negotiate and settle the thing. Johnson called Alan Jeppesen and passed the message along: they wanted to know what it would take to bring Randy in. A few days later, Johnson got his answer.
“He said to stay off his mountain,” Randy’s friend said.
On the last day of March, Arthur Roderick flew to Boise. If Hunt was concerned that he was losing control of the case, Roderick quickly put him at ease, deferring to his knowledge of the situation and the area and involving him in each step of the new plans. Roderick spent a couple of days going through Weaver’s case files and talking to Hunt, Mays, and Evans. Then he drove north and began gathering his team: Hunt and the other two local marshals and three guys from out of town, two of whom were electronics specialists and the third an emergency medical technician.
The marshals looked for a place to set up a command post and finally settled on a town house-style condominium at the base of Schweitzer Basin, a fashionable ski resort finishing up its last week of the season. They moved twenty-five crates of equipment in—cameras, tapes, high-beam spotlights, night-vision goggles, and guns. Their chalet headquarters was perfectly situated, fifteen minutes from Sandpoint and forty minutes from Randy Weaver’s cabin. The deputies were struck by how beautiful the view was from their balcony, where they watched a black bear come by regularly to sun himself in the parking lot.
They set up the advance command post in a vacant cabin on Wayne and Ruth Rau’s meadow and filled it with antennae, two closed-circuit televisions, taping equipment, radio equipment, and two generators. The technicians got the cameras ready to place in the woods and the out-of-town marshals did their best to stay low, so Weaver’s friends wouldn’t spot them. If they were discovered, they decided to pass themselves off as telephone workers or newspaper reporters. At night, using military illumination charts that let them know when the moon and stars would be the brightest, Roderick and his team hiked into the woods around the cabin and scouted for the best places to put the cameras. When they were ready, Roderick sent one of his deputies back to Washington with a message: Phase I of Operation Northern Exposure was complete.
AFTER A PEACEFUL, MILD WINTER, the Weavers sensed the government was getting ready for something big. They were hyperalert and even began suspecting Alan Jeppesen of being an informant (“We think Alan is cooperating with the agents of the One World Beast Government”), and although Alan denied it, Vicki had Kevin Harris start picking up the mail. The $5,000 that Bill Grider was offered had inflated to $20,000 by the time the Weavers heard the story. After living for years on a few bucks from firewood, rug sales, and the charity of friends, Randy and Vicki wondered who could resist money like that? Guns always at their sides, the Weavers approached everyone who rattled up their driveway as a possible federal informant.
After refusing to talk to Star, Geraldo Rivera, and the Los Angeles Times, the Weavers agreed to talk to Mike Weland, an unassuming, down-to-earth reporter for a tiny weekly in Bonners Ferry. Mutual friends brought Weland up, and the family talked with him for several hours. Sara and Rachel played and worked in the garden. Kevin, Randy, and Sammy wore sidearms and were nervous at first—especially the shaven Sammy Weaver, who glared at Weland early on. By the end of the interview, Sam was quoting Scripture and tickling Elisheba, who cooed with laughter on the couch in the bright, tidy living room.
“Our situation isn’t about shotguns,” Randy was quoted as saying in Weland’s story. “It’s about our beliefs. They want to shut our mouths.”
“We’re not Aryans; we’re not Nazis,” Vicki said. “The reason we are here is to do our best to keep Yahweh’s laws. The people who came to this country came to escape religious persecution, but there’s nowhere left to escape our lawless rulers.”
Randy said he didn’t stand a chance in court against paid informants, and Vicki said that even though Randy wanted to turn himself in to protect the family, she and the kids wouldn’t let him. Then he offered a sort of terms of surrender, saying the only way the situation would end would be for the ATF to return his .22 pistol and admit they’d set him up, and for the sheriff to apologize for calling him paranoid.
“Right now, the only thing they can take away from us is our life,” Randy said in Weland’s story. “Even if we die, we win. We’ll die believing in Yahweh.”
That spring, Vicki’s letters home were filled with stories of “agents Provocateur,” government informants, and at least one plot to steal her baby. “Needless to say,” Vicki wrote, “the April exploits of the feds all failed and I’ve got rid of or discovered 4 snitches because of it.”
The media attention brought fan mail, too, seven letters in all, Vicki noted, “from as far away as New York City telling us not to give up, that lots of people know who controls our corrupt government.” When someone sent her a news clipping that quoted authorities saying that letters were flooding in from all over the country, Vicki figured the feds were holding more mail back. Even though they wanted to be separated from the world, Vicki and Randy were pleased when a news crew trying to get an interview told their friends that Randy was becoming a Wild West hero, like his boyhood hero, Jesse James. “The original publicity was to force the feds to get rid of us,” Vicki said. “I guess it backfired.”
The Weavers trusted fewer and fewer of their friends and so Kevin, who had always been the solid, quiet big brother of the family, spent much of the spring and early summer on Ruby Ridge, riding his motorcycle down to fetch the mail and groceries. He was everything for the family: Randy’s friend, Sam’s buddy, older brother to Sara, Rachel, and Elisheba. He even baked bread and canned vegetables alongside Vicki.
Even with all the intrigue, it was a nice spring for the Weavers. Sara had a suitor, the fifteen-year-old patriot son of Vicki’s midwife, whose family visited when they could. The rest of the time, Sara was busy with her gardens and the rugs she wove alongside Vicki. Kevin was building a log cabin in a forested gully below the Weavers’ house, and Sam was helping, both young men working from sunup to sundown and then falling in bed, exhausted. Sam was also playing with Striker, his big yellow Labrador mix, who had grown from a nervous puppy into a great watchdog, with a bark so deep it kept a lot of people from getting out of their cars. Just a year before, with Vicki’s aging father struggling to get up a hill, Sam had put a harness on Striker, gave the other end to David, and had the dog pull Sam’s grandfather up the hill. “His bark is bigger than his bite,” Sara wrote, “and he is really just a BIG lovable puppy.” Randy watched fourteen-year-old Sam proudly. Not even five feet tall—smaller than his dog—he was a little man, braver and stronger than many of the adults Randy knew.
In a letter decorated with pictures of wrapped presents and people in party hats, Rachel wrote that she had baked Sara a birthday cake. She told her grandparents that she was taking care of the chickens. “I pick grass every other day for the chickens. Sara found the first flower of the year on the mountain.”
Elisheba was sitting and scooting but not yet crawling. She was cutting some teeth and learning to say “Mom.” As always, Vicki was working, taking care of everyone and keeping them strong in their obedience to Yahweh’s law and their war against the lying One World Government.
“Are you starting to get the picture yet? Do you begin to see the reasons for the course we have chosen?” Vicki wrote to her mother. “They hate having their deeds brought to light and want to destroy anyone who exposes them. That includes me and my children.
“The quality of our lives is just as important—more important than the length of our lives. The past 14 months we have been a family; rich in love and experiences, stolen from the desires and intentions of our people. They want my family separated and destroyed. Not with my help!! Tomorrow is promised to no man.
“We aren’t stupid, nor paranoid,” Vicki wrote. “Nobody has to worry about being shot or in danger unless they shoot at us or are aggressive at us.”
THE RIDGE JUST WEST of Randy Weaver’s cabin was code-named “the lumberyard,” so that anyone listening to the marshals’ radio transmissions on Ruby Ridge would mistake the traffic for loggers. Phase II of Northern Exposure began in mid-April, when the first camera went up in “the lumberyard,” three-quarters of a mile from Randy Weaver’s cabin. For a week, Roderick’s team went out at night, wearing full camouflage and lugging hundreds of pounds of equipment—microwave transmitters, photo lenses, tripods, transmitting control boxes, batteries, and cable—into the woods and hills around Randy’s cabin. When the camera was in place, they covered its tripod with a camouflage tarp and, by April 20, it was beaming pictures of the Weavers—toting rifles, gardening, and urinating in the woods—back to the screens in the cabin on Homicide Meadow.
Placing a camera on the north ridge—code-named “the sawmill”—was easier, and between April 20 and May 11, the deputy U.S. marshals taped 118 hours on sixty-seven separate videocassettes, some showing an empty mountaintop, others showing the Weaver family’s daily routine of chores, playing, and walking around with guns. Inside the little cabin on the Raus’ property, deputy marshals watched the tapes and took notes.
Amazingly, it seemed Randy, Vicki, and the kids never left the knoll. Occasionally, Samuel would ride his bicycle down around the bottom of the driveway, but for the most part, the family—especially Randy—never went past the springhouse below their cabin, where the driveway intersected the old switchback road.
There were visitors occasionally, people looking for land they’d bought, a local newspaper reporter trying to get an interview, some friends of the Weavers. By April 25, Kevin Harris was back at the cabin, rumbling up the driveway on a motorcycle, wearing a hat that looked like it belonged to a Greek fisherman, a pair of goggles, and a backpack containing the mail and groceries.
The marshals tabulated how often the various family members carried weapons on the videotapes: Randy 72 percent of the time, Vicki 52 percent, Sara 38 percent, Rachel 31 percent, Kevin 66 percent. Samuel carried guns a shocking 84 percent of the time and was almost always carrying a sidearm at least. They seemed to have a pattern of patrolling the compound, and in the mornings, Rachel carried long rifles and ammunition out to some of the rock outcroppings, which apparently served as bunkers.
Thirty times during those twenty-one days, marshals witnessed what they called “a response” from the family. The noise from a car would echo up to the ridge top, and the Weavers would run to a rock outcropping, hold their weapons, and watch the bottom of the driveway to see if someone was coming up. Vicki or Kevin and one of the kids would go to the driveway to see who it was while someone else covered them from above.
In many ways, the tapes only confirmed what the deputy marshals feared. This was not going to be easy.
The cameras worked well until May 2, when the west ridge camera picked up Kevin Harris and Sammy Weaver staring across to the camera on the north ridge, where deputy marshals were spiking anchoring pins into place for a solar battery charger. That night, after it had stopped beaming pictures, the north ridge camera was stolen. Later, deputies would find the camera burned and buried on the Weavers’ land.
While the $110,000 remote-controlled video system was still being put in place, Roderick took about two dozen trips up the mountain, to make sure it was safe for his deputies to continue working. Once, Kevin Harris almost saw him, and when Roderick returned to his pickup truck, he found the air had been let out of the tires. Another time, April 23, he got within a few hundred yards of the Weaver cabin and found himself in the deep brush near the base of the Weavers’ driveway. Already that morning, Roderick had seen rain, snow, sleet, and sunshine, and he huddled in the brush beneath a thermal NASA blanket that was silver on one side and camouflage on the other. Just then, a Ford Explorer rumbled up the driveway and stopped at a rock-and-log barricade the Weavers had put out. Sam and Vicki came down the driveway, Sam with a pistol, Vicki with a rifle and sidearm.
Roderick watched a man get out of the pickup, a logger from Oregon who’d bought some land up there and had been up the day before, when he’d talked to Randy. The man asked for Randy again.
“He’s busy,” Vicki said. The guy laid out maps and documents from the title company on the hood of his vehicle and showed Vicki where he wanted to go, on the access road past their driveway into the woods behind the Weaver cabin. They went over the maps for about twenty minutes before Vicki said okay. As long as they put the barricade back up.
The deputy marshals had long noted that the Weavers let some landowners and prospective buyers through the barricade and, occasionally, invited them in for cookies and water. Their plan had already taken shape when Roderick watched the Ford Explorer rattle up the rutted road.
Mark Jurgensen was a deputy marshal from Washington State who could fit in with the people of North Idaho for several reasons: first, he had a great beard; second, he was an excellent carpenter who could pass as someone building his own cabin; and third, he had false teeth that he could pull out, making him look like a toothless mountain man. Phase III called for Mark Jurgensen to pose as a man who’d bought land behind the Weavers. Randy was such a social guy, he wouldn’t be able to resist a friendly, bearded, toothless guy hammering away just down the road. Eventually, his guard would drop and the deputy marshals would swoop in. Or so they hoped.
RODERICK ESTIMATED THE EXPENSE in per diems, lodging, overtime, travel, and rental cars for a dozen deputies—$30,000 a month. Still, once they started the undercover mission, he was prepared to wait as long as Jurgensen needed to make the arrest. After more than a month in the field, Roderick flew back to Washington and met with his supervisor, Tony Perez. Phase II was complete, Roderick said. He was ready to start the third part of the plan.
Perez told him that Henry Hudson wanted to hold off for a while.
Hudson, the acting deputy director, had been described by the Washington Post as “a hard-liner’s hard-liner” who mowed through five years of dope dealers, corporate heads, and defense attorneys as a Virginia prosecutor. His biggest trophy had been the Pentagon procurement scandal, a web of bribery and fraud by military consultants and managers. “I offer no apologies whatsoever,” Hudson said about his tough reputation in 1991, when he left his position to work for a private law firm. Even then, he admitted he’d be back in government, perhaps in a run for Congress or as a state attorney general. Instead, his break came in 1992, when George Bush appointed Hudson to the top post in the marshals service. Now he was going before a Senate confirmation committee.
Roderick was all ready to begin Phase III of Operation Northern Exposure when Perez took him aside and told him to hold off until after the confirmation hearings.
“I’VE HAD ENOUGH!” Wayne Rau grumbled into the telephone. It was August 1992, and Rau was threatening to drive up with his father to Weaver’s cabin and settle this whole mess himself. On the other ends of the three-way conference call, Dave Hunt in Boise and Tony Perez in Washington, D.C., tried to calm him down. Rau explained that his water system, which ran creek water to their cabin, was missing, and he suspected the Weavers might have taken it. The marshals had just been sitting on their asses for eighteen months—five months since they came up with all the electronic gear. If they didn’t do something to get the Weaver family down, and if they didn’t do it fast, Rau said, he was going to sue the government.
Finally, Perez calmed the tree farmer, offered to pay for the pipe, and promised that something was about to happen.
Northern Exposure finally became operational again in early August, just a few days after Henry Hudson was confirmed as the full-time director of the marshals service. In a way, Roderick was glad for the delay. Maybe he’d lost some momentum, but he also hoped the three months had given the family some time to settle down after discovering the north ridge camera, which Roderick suspected had happened. Besides, the break had given Roderick time to get his plan into shape and get his teams assembled.
The marshals service was a small, select organization—95 politically appointed marshals, one for each federal judicial district, and 2,400 deputies. Fewer than half of those deputies actually worked fugitive cases, and just a handful of those volunteered for SOG teams. There were four regional SOG teams, unlike the Hostage Rescue Team of the FBI, which was a full-time SWAT team. SOG members handled their regular marshals duties until some problem developed; then they reported together to the crisis scene. Roderick knew who was in the service, he knew who was in SOG, and he knew whom he wanted for the first part of this mission, scouting the mountain one more time and preparing for the ruse.
In Washington, D.C., Roderick had the first team chosen. He and five other guys would take one more trip up the mountain, find the best places to hide snipers, and familiarize the marshals with the bluff. And then they would put the undercover agent in place. Dave Hunt, who knew the case and the area better than anyone, would be on the team. Roderick needed someone with medical training so he got Frank Norris, a seven-year veteran of the marshals service, a witness protection specialist from the East Coast, who was also a tactical EMT, specially trained to treat combat injuries. The electronics specialist on the mission would be Joe Thomas, a deputy based in Indiana. And, finally, Roderick requested one of the best marshals he knew: Larry Cooper. SOG, in the meantime, agreed to send another ace, Billy Degan.
While Roderick put the team together, Dave Hunt and the deputy who was going undercover, Mark Jurgensen, worked out the details of his ruse. His new name was going to be Mark Jensen. They called the owner of some dry scabland behind Weavers’ place and paid him $2,700 to let “Jensen” pretend to buy the land and spend a few months building a cabin on it. He wrote letters back and forth with the landowner and backdated them for the deputy marshal to use as proof. He got a driver’s license and a dog license with the phony names, a credit card, and a gas card. He got a government pickup, registered it under his alias, got a parking ticket, and backdated it. By the middle of August, Mark Jensen was ready to go.
He would have to be good because the Weavers were suspicious. “The feds keep sending informants up here as ‘friends’ trying to get us to show them the corner stakes of our property!” Vicki wrote to her mom earlier that spring. “They’ve tried that four times! Do they want to bury something to justify murdering everyone? It is very curious.”
The Weavers’ response to strangers was automatic. The dog barked, and the family rushed out of the house. Randy usually covered the stranger from rocks above the driveway while Vicki or one of the kids went down to see who it was. For a year and a half, they met visitors that way.
But once, in the summer of 1992, a friend of Vicki’s walked up the driveway without alerting the dogs. She thought about calling up to the cabin but finally decided just to walk all the way up. She walked past the rock outcroppings, came to the door, and knocked.
Vicki opened the door, saw her friend, and started crying. She whispered, “Do you know how long it’s been since someone has knocked on my door?”
COOP WALKED DOWN the short runway at the Spokane International Airport and smiled when he saw his best friend at the other end.
Billy Degan was what a U.S. marshal was supposed to look like. Six feet three inches tall, lean, with easy blue eyes and wire-rim glasses, Degan had a face that could be friendly and tough at the same time. His close brown hair was barely a half-inch long and was starting to pull back in front like a retreating wave. At forty-two, Degan was still athletic, a ripened version of the muscular offensive end who’d set pass-receiving records twenty years earlier for the University of New Hampshire football team. He was quiet and thoughtful, stoic even, except around old friends like Cooper, who loved his dry sense of humor. He was one of four national commanders for the SOG team and the only one who was allowed to stay in his home office—Boston—after the SOG command was moved to Louisiana. That was the kind of deference with which Billy Degan was treated.
It was a reunion of sorts in the optimistic, sixties-style terminal of the Spokane International Airport. Cooper—and to a lesser extent, Degan—had trained the young Art Roderick almost a decade earlier, and they teased him about how far he’d come since then. Cooper and Degan went even farther back, fourteen years, to the day they showed up separately at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and were given dorm rooms right next to each other. They graduated, reported to the service, and were given Special Operations Group training together; every time they traveled together, Billy and Coop shared a room. Of course, Roderick had joined SOG later, and the three men worked cases together now and then and met once a year for training at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana.
Cooper, mustached and solidly built—like a grown-up high school shot-putter—had known about the Weaver case for some time. He’d seen some surveillance tapes and knew that other SOG members had come out to help the local deputies.
But he’d paid little attention to the case until a few weeks before when he was paged out of a law enforcement seminar and told to call headquarters. Roderick had already explained the difficult assignment, and now he had a question for Cooper. Would he go?
Cooper had been trying to get away from SOG. A few months earlier, his father had died and Cooper wanted to back away from his duties as an instructor and SOG team member to spend some time with his mother. But the case sounded important, and Cooper looked forward to working with Roderick and, especially, Bill Degan.
The next morning, August 18, the deputies briefed the marshal in Spokane about what they were going to do. Cooper helped Degan with some of the SOG equipment, which he’d had on display for some Boy Scouts in Boston. Degan had it shipped to Spokane, and he and Cooper loaded it into the Jeep and a van they rented. They drove to the condo at Schweitzer and began unloading the equipment. There were a number of guns: an M-16 machine gun, a 9-mm machine gun with a silencer, a short shotgun, and a.308-caliber sniper rifle. Roderick brought other M-16s, and each of the marshals had his own pistol as well.
On Wednesday, August 19, Hunt and Roderick left the condo to talk to some people around town and gather some final intelligence. Norris and Thomas practiced packing the heavy equipment up the ski hill and Cooper went shopping at the army/navy surplus store in Sandpoint. He bought two pairs of camouflage gloves, one for himself and one for Billy. Degan stayed at the condo alone. That night, they watched the surveillance video, talked about the mission, and sat out on the balcony of their condo, which looked out over the parking lot to a pristine mountain lake and the jagged Selkirks. On a similar peak, Randy Weaver waited.
The next morning, August 20, five of the six deputies—all but Norris—drove west to a shooting range in Davenport, 100 miles away. They practiced firing the guns they’d brought and adjusted the sights, in case they’d been bumped during shipping. The hunters and local policemen had never seen some of the guns the marshals fired, and they whistled and shook their heads.
Back at the condo, the deputies checked their equipment one more time and talked about the next day’s mission. Norris, the medic, asked Roderick if they wanted a medical helicopter on standby, in case something went wrong. Roderick said not to bother. After the evening briefing, Hunt walked to the balcony of the condo and looked north at the long ridge that ran east from the ski lodge toward giant Lake Pend Oreille. He and Roderick had talked for the last few months about chartering a boat once this was all over and fishing the lake for some hefty Kamloops rainbow trout. Behind him, the other marshals talked about the mission, but Hunt stood in the cool, dry summer air, the last traces of sun painted on the horizon. Roderick joined him on the balcony. Hunt had grown fond of Artie and appreciated the way he deferred to Hunt’s experience and knowledge of this case.
“What do you think, Dave?” Roderick asked.
“I don’t know, Artie. I got a bad feeling about this one.” He explained that the plan sounded good, there was just something….
Roderick cut him off. “We’re just gonna go up there and take a quick look and then we’ll get out of there and go fishing.”