THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604280090
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: JORDAN, MONT. LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
A girl pedaling a red bicycle, children enjoying an Easter Sunday horseback ride, and two men brandishing rifles with banana clips - for one month, telephoto images like these have provided the nation with fuzzy snapshots of life inside the Freemen compound.
As FBI agents installed portable toilets at checkpoints and the Freemen start up their tractors to till alfalfa fields, the news blackout may well stretch through spring.
But new information about the community of radical tax protesters indicates that the besieged Freemen farm, located midway between Hell Creek and Devils Creek, is peopled by a cast of characters that could have stepped from a wax museum of exotic Americana.
In charge of Freemen security is Rodney Skurdal, sometimes called Skull. As a Marine Corps sergeant in the 1970s, he chauffeured dignitaries at President Richard Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, Calif., and guarded President Gerald Ford at Camp David in Maryland.
But after his discharge, he fractured his skull in an oil rig collapse and underwent a personality change. Nervous and aggressive, Skurdal today commands the Freemen's defenses, which include radios, rifles and an underground bunker.
Dale M. Jacobi is in charge of religious instruction. Once a superintendent of a Crow Indian school in Grasslodge, Mont., Jacobi now preaches a doctrine called Christian Identity - that nonwhites and Jews are descendants of Satan.
There is a couple from Colorado, Dana Dudley and Russell Landers, who fled trial in January on criminal charges of securities fraud. Dudley's daughter, Ashley Taylor, 16, is believed to be the girl on the red bicycle in the published photograph.
From North Carolina, there are a man and his two sons - Steven Hance and John and James Hance - who skipped trial on charges of resisting arrest.
From Utah, there is Gloria Ward, a member of a tiny sect of excommunicated Mormons who believe that girls are ready for marriage at puberty.
Last year, while Ward was living in Michigan, she reportedly pushed her oldest daughter, Leslie Joy, then 14, into marriage with the sect's founder, John Perry Chaney.
In October, Michigan welfare authorities placed Leslie Joy, then six months pregnant, in a foster home. Last November, one step ahead of a Utah custody order that her former husband, Robert Gunn, had won for their 10-year-old daughter, Courtnie, Ward fled here with Courtnie and Jaylynn, 8. Ward was last seen pointing a rifle at a television crew.
Presiding over this community is Ralph E. Clark, a 65-year-old patriarch who has been fighting for more than 15 years to keep creditors from taking his family's land.
Sometimes dismissed as an illiterate product of the isolation of the Missouri Breaks, this farmer is a veteran of media wars.
In 1982, during the farm foreclosure crisis, Geraldo Rivera trekked to this remote town of 450 people and interviewed Clark. That year, Life magazine also profiled Clark as: ``A farmer squares off against the Feds.''
It is against this armed assortment of eccentrics and fugitives that the FBI has matched wits in a high technology, ``soft'' siege.
To avoid creating a classic siege mentality, the FBI has placed its checkpoints largely out of sight of the 960-acre farm. From a one-room Sunday school a mile west of the compound, agents use electronic gadgetry to monitor the Freemen.
Behind blacked-out windows, agents study images transmitted by a hilltop camera that can magnify compound scenes 66 times. Overhead, a single engine surveillance plane makes leisurely passes in airspace closed to all other aviation.
To provide the Freemen with a hot line to the authorities, the FBI has given the group new portable Motorola radios. In addition, the radios are being used for internal communications. These radios encrypt conversations to prevent reporters and others with scanners from listening.
Although FBI officials are not talking, neighbors and visitors to the compound say that the Freemen are prepared for a long siege.
They have two fish ponds, stocked with walleyes and rainbow trout. They have cows for fresh beef and stocks of wheat and a mill to grind it for flour. Their underground bunker is built over a year-round spring. If they lose electricity, they have a backup generator and a diesel tank.
``The only reason they will come out is if they run out of cigarettes,'' predicted Kenneth A. Coulter, a lifelong neighbor of the Clarks.
One supporter, Marvin Maxwell Sr., said that they have ``an underground cellar full of food.''
Two weeks ago, James L. Pate, an editor for Soldier of Fortune magazine and a former reporter for The Virginian-Pilot, visited the compound, the only reporter admitted by the Freemen.
``For the most part, they seemed pretty relaxed, pretty confident in their ability to hold out,'' Pate said after his 90-minute stay. ``Skurdal seemed nervous. He kept talking, then getting up and pacing around. When he talked, he leaned forward in his seat, with very intense eyes.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Ralph E. Clark, 65
KEYWORDS: FREEMEN
by CNB