It was in February of 1997 when Liddell first met the man who
would ultimately assume the most significant role in carrying out
the Brotherhood of White Unity’s ultimate act of violence against
its perceived racial and political enemies. Maurice Axton, a one-
time architecture student who’d left school to train in one of the
Brotherhood’s self-defense courses, was an ardent admirer of Liddell
and wanted to meet him personally to broach his ideas about how to
further the organization’s cause. Selling off most of his personal
belongings, Axton bought a bus ticket to West Virginia to visit the
BWU’s headquarters, carrying with him an army surplus bug crammed
with his remaining possessions and two folders detailing his vision
for advancing the Brotherhood’s agenda. Papers recovered from the
Liddell compound after his death indicate the two men hit it off
very quickly and the BWU leader was enthusiastic about welcoming
the Brotherhood’s newest recruit into the organization’s ranks--
especially in light of Axton’s proposal to mount an attack on New
York, the city Liddell despised more than any other.
Axton excelled in the BWU’s self-defense courses, most notably
the firearms and hand-to-hand combat portions of the courses. This
prompted Liddell to earmark the former architecture student for
what he euphemistically referred to as “special instruction” by
Brotherhood paramilitary trainers. Axton turned out to be a quick
and eager learner, mastering what they taught him to the extent
that he ended up knowing more in some cases than the instructors
who were schooling him. He showed himself to be particularly adept
when it came to assembling explosive devices; in his first training
run building an IED, Axton put a working bomb together in less than
two minutes.
In August of 1998 Axton participated in his first major attack
as a member of the Brotherhood of White Unity; that month, the group
bombed the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies in Washington. A statement
anonymously faxed to the AP bureau in Washington claimed credit for
the bombing on the Brotherhood’s behalf and said the attack had been
carried as “an act of revenge for the crimes of the mud people against
the white race”. The bombings touched off a wave of anxiety not only
in Kenya and Tanzania but also in the halls of the State Department,
where many officials were understandably worried the bombings would
seriously damage U.S. diplomatic relations with those two countries.
First Lady Hilary Clinton personally visited Nairobi and Dar es Salaam
in a one-woman public relations campaign aimed at calming fears among
the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments about their diplomats’ safety.
Three months after the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies were
bombed, the BWU struck again, this time attacking the Saudi Arabian
consulate in New York with automatic rifles and 9mm pistols. Three
embassy staffers were wounded and two killed, prompting an alarmed
Saudi government to temporarily recall its ambassador from Washington
and the FBI to initiate a major crackdown against Brotherhood regional
and local branches in the New York area. Plans for opening BWU offices
in New Hampshire and Maine were shelved and the BWU sharply curtailed
operations at its other East Coast branches as it sought to avoid what
increasingly seemed like an imminent disbanding of the organization as
a whole.
But Liddell didn’t stop churning out his hate-filled video and
audio rants against those he viewed as “mud people”; in fact, barely
a month after the Saudi consulate attack he taped a 90-minute video
address lashing out against Israel, accusing its government of hiding
nuclear weapons on U.S. soil in preparation for a supposedly coming
“race war” by the mythical ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government)on all
pure white Anglo-Saxon Americans. The speech prompted Jewish-American
organizations throughout the country to hold massive rallies demanding
that the Clinton Administration shut down the Brotherhood immediately
and permanently; it also made Liddell a prime target for assassination
plots by members of the extremist Jewish Defense League. In January of
1999, just after New Year’s Day, two JDL supporters turned themselves
in to the FBI and confessed to planning a firebomb attack on the BWU’s
North Carolina state headquarters office in Raleigh.
A month later JDL members actually did attack a BWU office, the
Cobb County subsidiary branch near suburban Atlanta, but since it was
deserted at the time the attack accomplished little besides breaking a
few windows and starting a small fire which was quickly extinguished
by Atlanta firefighters. Still, the Cobb County incident prompted the
Justice Department to be that much more aggressive in probing cases of
domestic terrorism regardless of whether it was the BWU or its enemies
that was suspected of perpetrating it. The aggressive federal approach
to dealing with this upsurge in domestic terrorism gave many potential
BWU recruits cause to back away from the organization-- and prompted a
few who were already part of the Brotherhood to leave the organization
lest they wind up on the wrong side of a prison cell door. In his next
videotaped rant following the Cobb County attack, Liddell blasted such
people as “cowards” and “turncoats”, and those were simply the things
he had to say about them in public. In private his comments about them
were even harsher; indeed, since Liddell’s death former BWU members in
federal custody have told the FBI that in the last days before he died
he was still harboring deep resentment toward these defectors.
The Brotherhood of White Unity and the Clinton administration’s
efforts to crush would remain a major news story for most of the first
half of 2000, but it was during the second half of the year that the
hate group would truly start to leave its mark on the national psyche.
In October of that year the destroyer USS Cole, making a liberty call
in Jacksonville after a lengthy tour of duty in the Persian Gulf, was
seriously damaged in a bomb attack that left twelve crew members dead
and eighty-five injured. The Brotherhood made no bones about its role
in the attack-- if anything, its leadership freely boasted about being
involved in the bombing and promised that next time it would go after
an even bigger target...
