Foiling A Revolt

Their numbers were small, but their dreams had a malevolently delusive grandeur: they aimed to destroy the U.S. Government "and form a new Aryan nation by armed revolution." Moreover, they were well embarked on a round of robberies, bombings and assassination attempts.

Those were the central charges in indictments won last week by federal prosecutors against 15 white supremacists. Ten men were accused of sedition by a grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark.; one of them, plus four other men, was also charged with plotting to murder a federal judge and an FBI agent. Three of the Fort Smith defendants and a woman were separately indicted by a grand jury in Denver for depriving Radio Talk Show Host Alan Berg of his civil rights -- by machine-gunning him to death in 1984.

Seven of the 15 are already serving prison terms for previous convictions. Louis Beam Jr., 40, a onetime Texas Ku Klux Klan organizer, is still at large. The other seven were arrested last week. They include two of the nation's best-known preachers of Hitlerite philosophy: Aryan Nations Leader Richard Butler, 69, and former Michigan K.K.K. Chief Robert Miles, 62. If convicted, the defendants face maximum prison terms ranging from ten years to life.

According to the Fort Smith indictment, the sedition began when some 200 white racists convened at Butler's compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, in July 1983. There, the ringleaders agreed on a revolution to be financed by robberies and counterfeiting and carried out by bombings of gas and power lines, polluting of municipal water supplies and killings of federal officials and Jews. Operations apparently began the next month with the bombing of a Jewish community center in Bloomington, Ind.

It was a well-funded, high-tech guerrilla war. Within the first year, the conspirators had transferred $3.6 million from California to Idaho. They also planned to set up a "secure nationwide computer system" to link scattered far-right groups. Authorities expect they have not heard the last of the right-wing brotherhood. White supremacists, says Kenneth Walton, head of the FBI in Michigan, "are very active in recruiting members in federal prisons. They will be released like time bombs."