Purpose of Evasion Read online

  Brad was reared in his legacy prep school when his Dad’s duty station was stateside, and Anglo-American schools when the Navy took them overseas. Brad “left the dark side” for college at Oberlin, a school so liberal that the ROTC program had not been kicked off campus during the Vietnam Era because it had never even existed.

  After law school at Stanford, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama and spent the next five years climbing the ladder at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He became one of the youngest senior staff members in the group’s history, and the managing attorney for the former Rust Belt states.

  During the economic crisis, hate groups were proliferating like foreclosures. When the Civil Rights Division of the FBI came knocking a few years ago, Brad answered. Last time Sami met him he was as committed to the work as ever, although Civil Rights was not the same priority for this White House that it had been before the 2016 election.

  “They’ve gutted the mission! Am I going to let them gut the talent, too?” He was brave. He was committed. He was late.

  Sami looked around the low-ceilinged lounge area. Banquettes were scattered around the room to favor privacy over sightlines. A handful of tables that would be well suited to a corner pizza parlor ringed the small, elevated stage. Even the most diminutive performer had to consider hairstyle choices to avoid bumping against the drop ceiling. In the reddish light, Sami could see that the tiles predated the District’s smoking ban in 2006.

  2006. Brad was in Montgomery, Alabama. Sami was in Samarra, Iraq.

  22 February 2006. Al-Askari mosque’s golden dome came down in a bombing. Sami spent the next week on foot patrols with Army infantry and MP units. House-to-house. Al-Askari was a Shia mosque, a most holy place, and he was the litmus tester. He remembered the instructions from the Lieutenant Colonel in command of the response team.

  “All you do is tell me which flavor they are. The kind that blowed-up this place, or the kind that would be mad it got blowed-up.”

  He said that. He said “blowed-up.” Sami had dialed up his best Arabic and become Samir, Your Muslim Friend in the U.S. Army. He went back and told the Colonel which doors they should knock on for information, and which they should kick down with guns drawn.

  That Colonel was like the current President. He misspelled his every tweet and wouldn’t know a Sunni from a Shia from a Shiner Bock. Which was what Brad drank, and what Sami had ordered for him ten minutes ago, and he watched the bottle sweat condensation on the bar.

  Those were the people Sami fought to protect. He, a gay Muslim, was making the world safe for a country that did not understand what caused radicalization. He protected free expression for the groups Brad prosecuted when they crossed the line from expression to oppression.

  Maybe he and Brad had not been doing such different work in 2006. They were each policing their own. Brad his WASPs, Sami his Muslims. The martini was on-board now. Thank God Brad walked in.

  They exchanged pleasantries and Brad charmed the bartender into trading the Shiner Bock on the bar for a cold one from the well.

  “You still have the charm,” Sami observed. “Didn’t even have to flash your badge.”

  “Oh, please. They only stock Shiner Bock for me.” There was a mischievous glint in Brad’s eye. “You are very sneaky!”

  “Well, we know that.” Coyly. It was amazing, Sami supposed that it was part and parcel of his professional training, but he could switch his mannerisms on a dime. Here and now, he was not the same person who met Karim in a bar less than a week ago. He was a far sight from the same person who went house to house, flavor-testing Iraqis, back in 2006.

  “Rebel Creek.’ And then nothing? So cryptic.”

  “You know how it is.”

  “I know, but you picked a hell of a week.”

  Brad was referring to the bombing in Annapolis and the near-miss in Tysons Corner. Sami didn’t bite. He waved off the bartender’s offer of another martini.

  “Oh no, he will have another,” Brad corrected. “If it’s story time, you drink with me.”

  “I’m already two ahead.” Sami jiggled his near-empty martini glass toward Brad, who frowned unsympathetically. “Fair enough.” Sami gestured the glass toward the bartender, who grabbed the shaker and directed a spout of vodka in. The sight satisfied Brad. He loosened his tie and began.

  “Rebel Creek are a nasty bunch. The rank-and-file are our stock-in-trade. Old. White. Male. Angry about everything that’s happened since the March on Washington. Pretty typical in philosophy and membership.”

  “What makes them so nasty?”

  “Tut-tut.” Brad didn’t just make the sound, he enunciated the words. “Patience! I have a narrative arc here.” He swallowed a sip of cold beer. “You don’t have to read Foreign Policy to understand the resurgence in populism, nationalism, and nativism. And it’s not just here. UKIP’s down but Brexit is still popular. Marine Le Pen made it to a run-off in France. The same is happening throughout Europe, even into Scandinavia. But the radical right is nothing new in this country. The Know Nothings were a national party before the Civil War – they became Republicans, by the way.”

  “The KKK started in the early-20th century. Everyone thinks they know the KKK, but they don’t. They set the American model for organized but incoherent political racism.”

  “Put that on their letterhead!” Sami interjected.

  “Depending on where the KKK were in the country, there were different bad guys. Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, unions. What held them together as a national movement in the 20s was Prohibition. Did you know that? Most people don’t. Anyway, the thing that has always united Klansmen is the ultimate enemy. Intellectuals. Elites. They were defenders of the common American: the pure, white, Christian, self-sufficient man. Sound familiar?”

  Brad was a well-trained lawyer and he made an impeccable opening statement. Other than a penchant for intricate detail, Sami could see where he was also a very effective briefer for senior FBI officials.

  “There have been 31 flavors since then, but it’s all the same ice cream shop. McCarthyism begat the John Birch Society in the 50s and 60s. The Skinheads of the 80s went online to create today’s Stormfront. Rebel Creek is most closely aligned with the Constitutional Militia movements that spread in the 90s. Specifically the splinter movements of Aryan Nations.”

  Sami was familiar with modern Aryan theories, but the group was not familiar. “That’s capital A, capital N?”

  “That’s right. Founded in Idaho. Plain, vanilla white supremacists.” Brad exaggerated the pun. “About twenty years ago they were popular. On everyone’s radar. The FBI called them a terrorist threat. RAND said they were the only nationwide terror threat in the U.S. Remember, this was around the time of Ruby Ridge and Waco. The Southern Poverty Law Center won a multimillion-dollar judgment against them, after some of their thugs shot and beat a woman and her teenage son outside the Idaho compound. They claimed that the woman’s car backfired, they mistook it for gunfire, and they returned fire in self-defense. We kicked their asses in court. Won millions and put them out of business. It was a siren song to a young, idealistic gay man looking for a career in civil rights law. It meant that we could hold some of these groups accountable for damages, and since they were not flush with liquid assets, we could take their property.”

  “Their compounds,” Sami nodded.

  “Their safe havens.” Brad held up his bottle and clinked with Sami’s fresh martini glass.

  “This sounds familiar,” Sami added.

  Brad had just paraphrased the justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The invasions will deprive the enemy of their safe havens…and something about yellow cake.

  “I had fun following the model a couple more times, putting other groups out of business. But what should also sound familiar are the unintended consequences. The lawsuits worked, but they don’t kill the ideology. Shit, they don’t even kill the bad guys.”

  Sami knew the unintended consequences on his side of
the fence: an unstable Iraq, the rise of ISIS, an empowered Iran, Russian adventures in Syria. The devil we knew being better than the spawn of Satan that we didn’t.

  Brad continued. “The group fragmented. Some holdouts in Idaho. A Florida group. And a Pennsylvania group. Western Pennsylvania.”

  “Rebel Creek?”

  “Gold star. But there’s more.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “The group was based in Washington County, Pennsylvania. South of Pittsburgh. Notable until the early 2000s only for having been the locus of the Whiskey Rebellion. It was a tax protest that turned into a brief insurgency during Washington’s presidency. It was Hamilton’s fault, to tell the truth. I know it’s sacrilegious for me to say it because the musical is so amazing, but he was an asshole.”

  Brad could see Sami’s patience flagging at the idea of a history lesson. “Bear with me, this is important. Revolutionary War veterans were paid in Continental paper. Hamilton tricked them into believing that it was worthless and encouraged his New York buddies, speculators, to buy up all the paper they could find for pennies on the dollar. Then he created the National Bank and insisted that those holding the paper be paid in full, with interest. To raise the money, he proposed taxing distilled spirits. Corn rots, but whiskey only gets better with age. In the absence of stable paper currency, whiskey was the lingua franca in rural areas. It held stable value. Hamilton’s plan taxed farmers to pay the debts that were owed to them but had been arbitraged to Hamilton’s buddies. In Washington County, Pennsylvania, they tarred-and-feathered the collectors. The whiskey rebels called themselves the Mingo Creek Rebels.”

  Sami nodded in recognition of the historical connection to present-day Rebel Creek.

  “It got so bad that Washington saddled up his horse again and led troops. Against Americans.”

  “That was 200 years ago.” Sami had been patient, but he could feel a break coming. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Right. Other than for being home to a handful of football players, Washington County had not been on the radar since then. It’s a quiet, hilly place like a lot of others. 99% White. Kind of rednecky, but northern, right? Not Appalachia. Not the Deep South. People in my business took their eye off the ball when Aryan Nations fractured. We paid attention to the Idaho group because they had been front-and-center. We had a guy undercover in the Florida splinter group, so we watched them. But Pennsylvania was quiet. I mean, who the fuck cared about militiamen after 9/11?”

  “Then came that resurgence you mentioned. Populism. Nativism. The Tea Party. The 2016 campaign.”

  “Would you let me finish?” Brad chugged the rest of his beer and signaled for another. “I was always told Pakistanis were insufferably formal. Tea ceremonies and the like.”

  “I thought the rap on gays was no foreplay!”

  “I guess neither of us are a credit to our race.” They both laughed. Sami raised a hand to refuse a refill of the martini he had only taken one sip from. This time Brad let him get away with it. Their business was almost done. Soon it would just be a date.

  “You skipped ahead of something very important.”

  Brad paused. It seemed interminable. Sami caved. “What?”

  “Fracking.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fracking. In 2004, they drilled the first commercial well in Southwestern Pennsylvania. In 2005, Katrina and Rita wipe out the Gulf Coast gas industry. In 2006, more than 30,000 natural gas wells are drilled in the U.S. Twenty-nine in Pennsylvania. In 2010, Pennsylvania had 1,300 holes poked in it. Land that was leasing at $500 an acre in ’06 was now going for $5,000 an acre. Washington County got more than $5 million from the Pennsylvania fracking impact fund in 2015. That’s just the public money. It doesn’t count the leasing fees paid to individual landowners. Which gets us back to where you so rudely interrupted.”

  “The Pennsylvania splinter group of Aryan Nations? Rebel Creek?”

  Brad nodded and sipped. “Yes, led by Tom Tinker.”

  “That’s his name?”

  “It’s an homage. A brief detour back to the 1790s: remember the original Mingo Creek Rebels? The intellectual rabble-rouser of the group – sort of their Thomas Payne – signed his letters as ‘Tom the Tinker.”

  “We have a history buff on our hands.”

  “Buff?” Brad let the word hang between them before continuing. “I don’t know. He’s aware. But he had reasons for the name change. His name used to be Brian Lydon. He was connected to Aryan Nations leaders in Idaho but after the split, he fell off our radar. He owned 800 contiguous acres in Washington County. The leases alone were worth millions, and he struck at the right time. Took his money in 2009 and 2010, leveraged his ass off, and then turned around to buy more land rights from neighbors and family members. Pennies on the dollar. The farmers of Washington County got fleeced again. In true Hamiltonian fashion, after Lydon sold the rights off to the gas companies, he used some of the proceeds to pressure them. Remember those anti-fracking movies a few years back, about how you could light the water on fire in Pennsylvania? We traced funds used to produce one of them back to Rebel Creek.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t trace those funds because the FBI’s getting into the business of policing Netflix?”

  “That’s the rub, isn’t it?” Brad gestured to the bartender for another beer. Now he was the one being cryptic. Between two trained intelligence and law enforcement officers, silence could linger a while before someone broke. This time it was Sami.

  “What’s the rub?” They both arched their eyebrows to acknowledge the innuendo. The bar was filling up but that was not the reason Brad leaned in close before continuing, the hint of beer on his breath mixing with an afternoon sprinkle of cologne.

  “I wondered when you guys would come for them,” Brad whispered.

  Sami was confused, but he hoped Brad read it as playing dumb. “When we would come? For them? Rebel Creek?”

  “We gave the Aryan Nations too much credit. A nationwide terror threat? They were a bunch of whiny old white guys. ‘Remember the Alamo’ types. Worse than that, they had no money. The FBI had their panties in a twist about this group’s capabilities and they were taken down by a tort action. They were nothing. How did we destroy ISIS? Degrade their ability to refine and sell oil. The floor dropped out on the price, too. That helped. Thanks, Saudi Arabia! But, oil money put them in the game and took them out.

  “Same for Rebel Creek,” Brad continued. “Fracking money bought Tinker a seat at tables that Aryan Nations could only have dreamed of. Bad tables. The kind from James Bond movies where creeps from all over the world are twisting their mustaches. We thought we had something before. The Netflix trail was a huge breakthrough because it helped us understand how they were laundering money. Their signatures.”

  “So, what?” Sami asked, “You think he’s gone from white nationalism to funding terrorism?”

  “That’s not a transition. White nationalism always had elements that wanted to weaponize the culture war they were waging. And losing. They see the writing on the wall. Every Supreme Court decision since Brown v Board of Education has gone against them. But we’re talking about more than funding. His vision is bigger. Think Hamas. Hezbollah.”

  “Sponsoring?”

  “That’s right. He dabbles in funding. He dabbles in arms. They have a media operation. But they have ambition like ISIS did.”

  “Come on! ISIS?” Sami was incredulous. He was glad he had been, because the moment called for it. Then he thought about the Annapolis bomb, and Tysons Corner, and the Council of Muhammad, and the money trail, and the sophistication of it all and he wondered how much Brad knew.

  “Remember the JV comment?” Brad asked. Sami did. Everyone in D.C. did. Early in 2014, President Obama referred to ISIS as “the JV team” when the burgeoning group conquered Fallujah. Republicans still used the quote as a cudgel against the former President and his party.

  “It is an apt comparison for Rebel Creek. The
y aspire to do things that no domestic group has ever aspired to in this country. Only Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS. They don’t just want to terrorize. They want to retake territory. Like ISIS did, starting in Fallujah. These guys live in the U.S., they have free access to small arms and the elements needed to build high explosive. They have money. They have an ideology that aligns with every other fundamentalist religious separatist group in the world. They are early-stage. Small scale. But we knew it all added up. And we saw indications they were becoming operationally effective. We never could put the pieces together. And now, you guys have.”

  “No, Brad— “

  “I showed you mine,” Brad leaned in even closer. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Sami allowed the entirety of what Brad said to wash over him. Now was not the time for deep reflection. He needed to stay “on” until he left Brad. It was more concern for Brad than deference to Andy, but the more he heard, the more certain he became that he could not give Brad any indication of what his team had already discovered. Sami needed to shift gears quickly. James Clewes was locked up back at the safe house. This wasn’t a date anymore. Brad read the hesitation as reluctance. Sami hoped he misinterpreted the reason for it.

  “My bet?” Brad said, sitting back onto his stool. “It’s not funding. I don’t think you can connect Rebel Creek to this homegrown cell in Annapolis. They’re all U.S.-born. They appear to be middle-class guys. They didn’t need anyone to fund an apartment or whatever. So, they self-radicalize. Online. And thanks to this imam, Khalifa. Who is missing, by the way. He had a ticket, but we know that he never boarded a flight to Toronto, and we have not seen him transit any other international border. He’s the connection to Daesh. But he’s not operational. He couldn’t blow up his microwave with a Costco roll of tin foil. And, this ain’t France. Not with this President. They know that if any of these Annapolis guys visited Syria, or anywhere they can train with active Islamist groups, they’ll never get back into the U.S. So they need someone to train these guys. Bombmaking material. Detonators. Tradecraft.”