Biography: Oscar Benjamin Liddell
Part 3 by Chris Oakley
The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union
in the early 1990s led to a paradigm shift for right-wing hate groups
in America. Where in the past the boogeyman for these organizations
had been Communism, now the primary targets of their rage were radical
Islam and illegal immigrants from Central and South America. And the
Brotherhood of White Unity was particularly well-equipped to exploit
these new demons. The organization’s Texas branch, for one, regularly
published pamphlets and magazines full of lurid stories about crimes
both real and imagined by illegal immigrants against native-born U.S.
citizens; more often than not these same publications also carried
long, paranoid anti-Muslim diatribes which would have made the most
fanatical Middle Ages crusader shake his head in disbelief at their
vitriolic tone. One of the most consistent themes in these tracts was
the assertion that American Muslims constituted a “fifth column” whose
primary agenda was to help their terrorist brethren in the Middle East
establish a so-called “global caliphate” that would oppress the Anglo-
Saxon peoples of the world.
These accusations brought heated protests from American Muslim
advocacy groups and ridicule from non-Muslims who questioned the BWU’s
paranoid take on Islam. They also brought concerns from the FBI’s hate
crimes division that the Brotherhood was trying to incite anti-Muslim
violence in U.S. cities; while the odds of such violence were slimmer
than popularly believed on the left, the bureau wasn’t about to take a
chance of such a threat becoming reality. For the first time they put
the Brotherhood under full-time surveillance, looking for a signal of
any possible intention to launch organized attacks on American Muslim
individuals and institutions.
The Brotherhood responded by devising an elaborate system of
code phrases and numbers meant to keep law enforcement personnel in
the dark about their true intentions. The code was invented by Liddell
himself drawing on what he’d learned from the business courses which
he’d taken in college, and breaking it took the FBI months of mentally
(and physically) exhausting work. And even after the code was cracked,
the bureau’s anti-terrorism branch had its hands full tracking all of
the activities and movements of Liddell’s supporters. When the Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed in April of 1995, it was
at first erroneously assumed a Brotherhood chapter or splinter group
had carried out the attack. A few Brotherhood chapter leaders had in
fact proposed mounting some sort of operation within the Oklahoma City
area, but Liddell had vetoed the idea on the grounds the organization
lacked sufficient resources for any activity there.
It would be six months after the Murrah Building bombing before
the Brotherhood established its first chapter in Liddell’s former home
state, but after that they would quickly make up for lost time. By the
spring of 1996 there would be five BWU chapters in place in the Sooner
State and a sixth chapter in the process of being organized. Shortly
after that sixth chapter was founded, one of the Brotherhood’s older
branches was implicated in the killing of an aide to the commandant
of the West Virginia state police and an attempt to murder the state
police commandant himself. This brought the organization a great deal
of unwanted attention from the Justice Department-- and things would
only get worse for them on that score when, just three weeks after the
West Virginia killing, a member of the Brotherhood’s Maryland state
chapter was arrested in connection with a sniper attack on the Saudi
Arabian embassy in Washington. The Saudi embassy shooting prompted the
FBI to turn up the heat on Liddell’s organization, and furthermore it
drew scrutiny from anti-terrorism agents at the State Department who
wanted to keep the sniper attack from escalating into an international
incident.
In June of 1996 the West Virginia state legislature began debating
on a bill which if passed would outlaw the Brotherhood as a terrorist
organization. Around this same time two Brotherhood supporters were
arrested in California after they were caught casing the Marine Corps
naval air station in El Toro, California. Those arrests would further
increase the unwanted attention being focused on Liddell and the BWU;
one Brotherhood state branch closed down operations altogether rather
than run the risk of having its offices raided by the FBI. Those BWU
state chapters which remained open became increasingly paranoid on the
matter of internal security.
A textbook example of this paranoia surfaced in mid-July of 1996
when police in Altoona, Pennsylvania found a BWU member beaten into a
state of near-unconsciousness and dumped on the outskirts of the city.
Upon questioning the unfortunate man, police investigators learned he
had been accused of leaking information about illegal BWU gun stashes
to the FBI and viciously clubbed with baseball bats when he wouldn’t
“confess” to his alleged sins. In spite of the vicious assault he had
suffered, however, he was initially adamant about not answering police
detectives’ questions; it took them nearly a day and a half to finally
get even vague responses to their questions about his attackers.
The incident further reinforced the reputation for ruthlessness
Liddell and his supporters had sought to cultivate since the BWU was
first established. Wanting to get his followers within the group and
potential converts among the public in the proper frame of mind for
what he still considered an inevitable race war, Liddell portrayed
the man as a closet Marxist who had infiltrated the Brotherhood for
the express purpose of causing chaos within its ranks; while Justice
Department investigators might have found this premise a bit hard to
swallow, Liddell’s disciples accepted it as unvarnished gospel truth.
The man became a pariah among his former comrades in the white power
movement and eventually had to go into the FBI’s Witness Protection
Program to avoid being assassinated by a vengeful BWU.
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