Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505080012
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The man who went undercover to help federal agents bust the Pulaski militia now carries a concealed weapon and looks over his shoulder, fearful that other members of the movement could come for him.
Raeford Nelson Thompson helped break up the fledgling militia known as the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, which he said was planning terrorism as monstrous as the Oklahoma City bombing.
Agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrested club founder James Roy Mullins - a friend of Thompson's for more than 15 years - and four other men connected with the club last summer.
"Some of the targets [Mullins] had proposed would have been equal to what happened in Oklahoma City," Thompson said.
"He's a liar," Mullins said from the Roanoke City Jail, where he has been held since being arrested last July. "There was nothing in [the club's computer files] to suggest we would attack anyone."
Thompson has no regrets about turning in Mullins, who said he once considered Thompson a father figure.
"I done this thing for, morally, I could not walk away from it," Thompson said. "If I walked away and somebody died from it, I'd have to accept part of the guilt."
ATF agents obtained a computer disk of Mullins' that contained plans for blowing up bridges, fuel storage tanks and telephone relay centers and breaking into the National Guard Armory to steal weapons.
Mullins insists his plans for guerrilla warfare were hypothetical and were meant only in the event the government struck first and began turning on citizens. Like other militia members around the country, Mullins believes gun control is too restrictive and violates citizens' constitutional rights.
A Pulaski forklift operator, Mullins denies most of Thompson's version of events and says Thompson was an "agent provocateur" planting illegal ideas with hunt club members. "He was the one who instigated all this," Mullins said.
But Thompson said he was troubled by talk of blowing up buildings and killing people. He is convinced Mullins' plans were more than just the boastful rantings of a man playing army.
"Any time a man looks you dead in the eye and not even batting an eye says he plans to kill people, I take him dead serious," Thompson said. "I'm glad we got this stopped before it got off the ground. Some of these guys were trained by the U.S. military and did know how to do things what I consider terrorist tactics."
In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, federal agents have complained that their ability to infiltrate anti-government groups is limited. In this case, they were able to watch the Blue Ridge Hunt Club from the beginning because they had information from Thompson of illegal activity.
ATF agents did more than just monitor Mullins. They watched as he created the militia; they gave Thompson money to buy weapons illegally from Mullins and Paul Peterson, a Blacksburg firearms dealer; and they got a convicted felon to go with Thompson to buy a gun from Peterson. It is against the law for felons to own guns and the ATF had Thompson ask Peterson if he'd be willing to sell to one. Peterson pleaded guilty in February to violating federal firearm laws.
ATF agents schooled Thompson the whole time in how to avoid entrapment, he said.
"There was no entrapment. In my mind, there was no coercion on anybody's part other than Mullins'. He said he'd shoot anybody between the eyes that talked too much."
Mullins and others discussed their frustrations with the federal government at Christian Coalition meetings in Pulaski, where Thompson met another man who joined the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, William Stump II. Stump says militias are the only law enforcement sanctioned by the Constitution, so he felt it was his duty to join one.
Thompson, a 57-year-old diesel mechanic retired because of a disability, describes himself as "very conservative." He's a member of the NRA and the more-hardline Gun Owners of America. But some of the militia rhetoric is too extreme for him, he says.
Thompson met Mullins at least 15 years ago when Mullins was the maintenance man at the apartment building where Thompson lived. Until late 1993, their conversations were mostly about target shooting and hunting, Thompson said.
Then Mullins began speaking of creating a paramilitary training group and of manufacturing machine guns out of regular rifles.
Mullins said he was a weapons expert in the Air Force and has been fascinated by guns for a long time. He knew how to make a silencer and fashion a rifle into a machine gun long before the hunt club began, he said in an interview at the Roanoke City Jail.
He was charged with illegally possessing both. He admits he broke laws, but he disagrees with those laws, which he believes violate the Second Amendment. "I don't see where there's anything wrong with" owning silencers and weapons not registered with the government.
Mullins was never charged with a crime for his plans to wage guerrilla warfare and to steal weapons from the Pulaski National Guard Armory.
"They were not charged with anything to do with their beliefs," said Jim Silvey, resident agent in charge of the Roanoke ATF office. A person has to go beyond having plans to acting in furtherance of those plans in order to be charged, he said.
Thompson had gone to the state police with his concerns in late 1993. By March 1994, the ATF was involved. Thompson ended up attending Blue Ridge Hunt Club meetings with electronic monitoring and recording equipment in his boot and ATF agents secretly stationed nearby, taking pictures and observing.
Thompson worked his way up to second in command - vice president and "primary firearms instructor" - so he could keep an eye on them, he said. The club wanted him to teach sniper tactics, he said, although he won't answer questions about whether he has any military training.
"I didn't feel like it was [just] talking," Thompson said. "They were setting up and getting ready to start military-style maneuvers, training, the whole shooting match."
Thompson said he never was paid by the government and was reimbursed for only part of the money he spent on gas and an occasional meal - less than $100.
The ATF did buy him a pair of tall boots in which he hid recording equipment, he said. A wire that ran into his pocket was used to turn the recorder off and on.
"I was very much on the edge, OK?''
But he trusted the ATF agents totally. "I put my life in their hands nine different times. Nine different times I went undercover - unarmed - and the only thing between me and death if I was discovered were those men."
He told police and ATF agents he only wanted to be informed of things on a "need-to-know basis."
"I was trying to keep everything in my head straight. I didn't keep notes on this. I had 18 or 19 tapes where I had recorded conversations and illegal activities."
At the group's second meeting, when the hunt club members met in Carroll County, it wasn't possible for agents to cover Thompson closely, so an ATF plane circled the site, Thompson said. "That was the only meeting I couldn't have cover within a few minutes."
He consoled himself with the knowledge that "if them yahoos had have caught me and shot me, they'd have not gone to jail on firearms charges, they'd have gone to jail for murder."
Mullins said no one would have killed Thompson if they had discovered he was wearing a wire.
Last October, Thompson was granted a permit to carry a concealed .45-caliber semi automatic pistol, about three months after the arrests of the other hunt club members. He said his life has been threatened since the arrests.
He's not so much concerned about members of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club, but by others in the militia movement elsewhere. He doesn't believe that the Pulaski club was the only militia in Virginia.
"I do honestly think there's more of them underground," he said. And they're "probably better organized than the Blue Ridge Hunt Club was."
ATF agent Silvey also believes there are other militias around, although he won't talk about them in detail.
The Blue Ridge Hunt Club in Pulaski mirrors militia groups around the country in a lot of ways: the members were white, male, blue-collar, staunchly pro-gun and conservative, with a more-than-healthy dose of distrust for their government. Mullins and the others formed the club to train in case the government ever came for their guns.
Militias are a part of the "patriots movement," which serves as an umbrella for groups as varied as tax resistors, survivalists, conspiracy theorists and constitutionalists who hold a strict and literal interpretation of the Constitution.
Stump, a member of the Blue Ridge Hunt Club whose trial has been delayed until July because of the national focus on the militia movement, is a constitutionalist. Stump sees the U.S. Constitution as the only source of powers the federal government is allowed; he believes laws passed in the last 200 years by Congress that expand federal power are unlawful.
He plans to argue in his trial on firearms charges that he is being subjected to an illegal proceeding by a federal court that has no authority in Virginia. And the ATF is also an illegal body, in his view.
Like Mullins, Stump calls Thompson an "agent provocateur" of the ATF who sought him out to entrap him.
"The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms created the Blue Ridge Hunt Club for the purpose of squelching free speech," Stump charged. It was a sting operation in which the government lied and paid others to lie, he said.
Stump said he was targeted because "I'm a rising political activist. It's the same thing done by the KGB in the former Soviet Union."
While Thompson said he did meet Stump at a Christian Coalition meeting and gave him Mullins' phone number, it was because "they were talking the same things." But there was no entrapment of Stump, he insists. "Stump did what was in him to do."
Mullins is scheduled to be sentenced May 15 after pleading guilty to seven of the 16 counts against him, including making a machine gun, possessing unregistered silencers, and conspiracy to violate federal firearm laws.
Asked if he had any regrets about starting the hunt club, Mullins said, "Not one."
by CNB