Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI William H. Matens ( ) on December 17, 2007 By Brian R. Hollstein

Transcription

1 Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI William H. Matens ( ) on By Brian R. Hollstein Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on January 21, Mr. Maten s final corrections made by Sandra Robinette on February 19, Brian R. Hollstein/ H: Just to check our signal level, would you just say your name and, and years of service. William H. Matens/ M: Bill Matens, formal name William H. Matens. Years of service, to H: Okay, good. Looks like we re all right. Just a little note on the recording that I m doing. If you ll speak up, that helps, because for whatever reasons my voice being right near the recorder here comes on very strong and usually the person I m interviewing is less strong. I see though that the leveler works pretty well when you re talking. M: Well, I ve got my on speaker phone. I can take it off the speaker phone. H: Doing okay so far. Let s keep it that way. You sound good. We ll start in with the actual interview now. Today is the 17 th of December, My name is Brian R. Hollstein. I m with William H. Matens. And a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. You, you ve already filled out a copyright form I believe. Right? M: I believe so. H: Yeah, I think that s already on file. And what that is, is only for this particular interview or for the material that you sent to us already. If you want to be interviewed in the future by someone that there s no problem with that. But the Society does hold the, the copyright on this particular interview.

2 Page 2 H: While we re talking we want to avoid discussion of sensitive methods currently in use by the Bureau. And want to stay away from classified information, the names of informants or their, their numbers, or their designators that the, that the Bureau uses internally. With that, let s get started with a little bit of background. Where were you born and go to school and how you happened to get involved with the FBI? M: Yeah, it s an interesting story really. I was born in Champaign, Illinois. My father was military. I went to school at Illinois State University and, while there, as the result of an incident on campus, we got to know the local FBI Agent, Art Woods. And later the bank was robbed in the little town that I grew up in, Heyworth, Illinois. When they asked the banker about people who might be good candidates for the FBI, myself and Ken Hancock, who were roommates at the time, were mentioned. And so we were pursued for several years and both of us ended up as FBI Agents as a matter of fact. H: What did you study in college? M: Education. At the time, my father had two children of his own and had raised two others, a cousin and a friend of our s daughter because of some things that were happening in their life, and so money was a little tight. Illinois State, if you had good grades and would agree to get a degree in education, was relatively inexpensive. M: So that s what I could afford. H: Well, that s good. And what did you teach? I gather you were teaching for a while then. M: I did not. After I got out I decided I wanted to go to law school and I went to work for the Attorney General of the State of Illinois. And one day, Art Woods, this same FBI Agent, from the Bloomington area called me and said, You know we have four percent of the world s population and yet forty percent of all attorneys in the world live here. We don t need another attorney. You need to go to Quantico. H: (chuckle) M: And with that, I had it made. 2

3 Page 3 H: Talk about a sales pitch. M: Yeah, yeah. I went down and took the test and a few weeks later I was in Quantico wondering why I was there and how I got there, very honestly. H: Well, you went through at a rather yeasty time. There was a lot going on in the late 60s. M: There was. You know, we had Days of Rage and May Days. That was going on. And, we had a lot of things going on. And most of the guys that I went through with were Vietnam veterans and former police officers and just a bunch of real law enforcement types. M: Good guys to work for and with. H: Yeah, I went through in 67, just a couple of years ahead of you. And, it was very much that way too. Just quickly, run through your career, and then we ll go back and talk in more detail concerning the things that highlights themselves. Your first office was where? M: It was in Jackson, Mississippi, and the SAC, Roy K. Moore, very famous SAC, asked me if I would go to a Resident Agency in Natchez. I had some law enforcement background and so he thought it was okay to put a first office guy in a Resident Agency. M: Then I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I might say that while I was in Mississippi, I worked Organized Crime. That was the year that we raided Carlos Marcello s gambling establishments in the Biloxi-Gulfport area. You know, the whole area down there. Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. M: Well, that, that was a very interesting time. H: And you were probably broken in by Billy Bob Williams. M: Yeah, yeah. 3

4 Page 4 H: Okay. M: And, Jim Ingram was a big player down there at that time too. M: He ended up head of the State Patrol. You know, retired Agent Jim Ingram. H: Right. M: But anyway, then I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I worked pretty much military bases since my father was military. I guess they figured I was, you know, used to being around bases. M: I worked the military bases down there and then later Fugitives and Bank Robberies. And, after a couple of years, there I was transferred to Denver due to the health of my oldest son who has a very rare disease called Cyclic Neutropenia. The Bureau was very good about taking care of its own and so they transferred me there so that he could get the attention that he needed at the Children s Hospital. H: Great. M: Yeah. It was. And I got there and they needed somebody to work Counterterrorism and, you remember the old days, I mean, you didn t have any say so in it. H: (chuckle) M: At that time it wasn t considered the sexiest thing to work. That would have been Fugitives and Bank Robberies, but I went to work and later to bomb school, because the bomb was the favorite tool of the terrorist. So for about eighteen years I did that and formed the Counterterrorism Task Force, Joint Terrorism Task Force in Denver which was, I believe, the third one ever formed. M: And then later on formed the Fugitive Task Force just before I retired and worked Fugitives the last few years. 4

5 Page 5 M: That s kind of it in a nutshell H: Okay. So most of your career then was in Denver. M: Twenty-five of my twenty-eight years were in Denver. H: Wow, that s great. M: Yeah. H: Not a, not a bad place to be. M: Well, you know it doesn t get any better than running the Fugitive Task Force in Denver, Colorado. H: (chuckle) M: Life is extremely good, but --. H: It s a hub out there. M: -- the largest cable company in the world came along and offered me a vice presidency and more money than I thought I d ever make in my life. And so I bailed out after twenty-eight years. M: Could have stayed there for a long time and been a very happy guy. H: Oh, yeah. Then you are now where? M: We re outside of Chicago. In St. Charles, Illinois. My wife s company transferred us here in Okay, good. Now, I missed out on something. You said you had a police background and that s why they -- M: Yeah, -- H: -- put you on the --. 5

6 Page 6 M: -- I worked for a while as a Deputy Sheriff in McLean County, what they called a Special Deputy at the time. M: College student working as a deputy. And then when I was with the Attorney General, I was commissioned by Eddie Ryan, the Sheriff of Sangamon County as a lieutenant in that department which gave me the right to make arrests and carry a gun. I was an investigator down there for the Attorney General. H: Oh, okay. Good. M: So that was considered a law enforcement background. H: Oh sure, that s good enough for my vote anyway. M: Right. Let s go back to Jackson. And, you were in the Natchez RA. H: What was that like at the time? M: It was a great time. George Gamblin was our SRA. He was a Mississippi native and so he kind of let you know, you know, what was expected of you down there because it, it is an entirely different culture. My fraternity at Illinois State was half black and I got down there and there was a whole different attitude about African-Americans. So, it was quite a learning experience. M: I worked in a Resident Agency where you pretty much were out on your own. You know, operating on your own. Very interesting. The head of the police department at the time and his chiefs were all suspected Klan members. The head of the newspaper was a Klansman. It was very interesting as a matter of fact. H: But you didn t work much Klan stuff then? M: I did not. You know, everybody worked a little bit of everything. So if the Klan was out harassing someone --. They had shot and killed an eighty-three year old black man down there for target practice and put him in a stolen car and burnt him up. And so we, you know, we, we did that investigation. We did, you know, some investigations like that on the Klan. We had three groups of the Klan down there. 6

7 Page 7 M: And then we had the black groups down there, which were active too. Deacons for Defense and Justice and some of the offshoot groups of the Black Panthers who operated in that area. H: So the Black Panthers were on a roll at that point then? M: Yeah, I arrested one in a stolen car as a matter of fact. He was out at Thibodaux, Louisiana, which I couldn t spell when I went to -- H: (chuckle) M: -- use the teletype on the recovery of the car and I got to spell Thibodaux. And all the stenos were laughing at me at the time. I think they put me on speaker phone when I attempted to spell that. H: (chuckle) M: Sense of humor. H: So you were in Jackson for what, just a year? M: Just a year. Yeah. In Natchez. I went to Natchez about six weeks after hitting Jackson. M: And I ll add that the car the guy stole was rented by Jane Fonda. She paid for it anyway. At least that s the story that we were told. H: (chuckle) So did you have much dealings with Billy Bob? M: No, no, not much. Uh, uh. H: How many people were in the RA at the time, roughly? M: There were five at the time. M: Norm Studde was the SRA and then we had Mike Bartley and then some other guys kind of came and went from, but those were the main guys. 7

8 Page 8 Uh, huh. Okay. And you worked Organized Crime though? M: Yeah. You know, it was basically going around to the different locations where Carlos Marcello and the Mafioso types had their gambling machines and doing affidavits. Wasn t anything real sexy. But then as I recall about three days before Thanksgiving in 1970, the raids started and we raided for three days. And that got kind of interesting. My raid area was Gulfport and Biloxi. And a lot of law enforcement were involved in that. Sheriffs and so on were taking payoffs. So once the word got out that we were raiding, we would run into, you know, bars and that where we knew that the machines were as Agents had done affidavits on them, and they were padlocked. M: We were cutting off padlocks and going in and getting into scuffles with bar owners and even law enforcement types. And as I recall Jerry Parker and some of the guys actually arrested some of the law enforcement types down there for interference and, on warrants I think that were generated as a result of the investigation. H: Huh. Those were tough times. Nobody was your friend. M: Yeah. It was really tough. The sheriff in Adams County where Natchez was, Billy Farrell, God love him, he was, he was our friend and his son, Tommy, was later the sheriff and later head of National Sheriffs Association and so on. They were great people. But I don t want to name names, but the Chief of Police at the time and his Chief of Detectives were suspected of being in the Klan s pocket and running hookers and gambling from Vidalia, Louisiana to Natchez. Natchez, you know, was the big oil, oil producing place. The oilmen would come in there and party all the time. And there were houses of ill repute. And it was kind of a wide-open town. Uh, huh. M: A fun place to work. H: (chuckle) M: (chuckle) H: Well you don t want to get into some suburb of New York. 8

9 Page 9 M: Yeah. H: Not, not particularly interesting at all. You want the colorful people. So from there then you went out to Albuquerque. M: Right. H: And you said you worked military. Is that Air Force? M: Yeah. Kirkland Air Force Base. Sandia Laboratories. M: Los Alamos. You know, there s a lot of, well, it s mostly classified work that goes on there. There s a space center there and so on and so forth. M: But what I worked were primarily Crimes on a Government Reservation cases, thefts, and rapes, and different things where civilians were involved on a military base. M: I also worked the Indian reservations up in Gallup for a time just filling in. I wasn t really truly responsible but had some interesting cases up there. H: What s it like working on the Indian reservations? I haven t interviewed very many people that had experience with that. M: It was very interesting. There was a captain from the Bureau of Indian Affairs named Al Sangria who took me to my first homicide --. Well, it wasn t a homicide. My first dead body on an Indian reservation. And we stopped at a little combination grocery store and post office there. As we got out, he took a sawed-off shotgun out of the back seat. And I said, What are you doing? And he said, he was a Tewa Indian, said, Any time there are more than five Navajos together, I always take a shotgun. There were five Navajo Indian men standing outside the place. H: Huh. 9

10 Page 10 M: So that was kind of an eye opener too. I d add that the dead body that we found was interesting because he had a hole in the top of his head. Looked like he d been shot. Kind of a blackened hole. And I said, Gee, it looks like he s been shot. And Captain Sangria said, Take his boots off. Took his boots off and there was a hole in his heel too. It was lightning that had killed him. H: Wow. M: This wizened Indian investigator was able to determine that without even taking his boots off obviously. M But he had seen it before obviously. H: Yeah, must have been a fairly common, I wouldn t say common, but not, not uncommon thing to have happened out there. M: Yeah. I don t remember if I asked him how many times he d seen it before, but, again, you know, he recognized it for what it was right away. And thinking back on it, I should have, should have maybe suspected the same thing when you got a hole right in the top of your head, you know. H: Yeah. M: Right through your cowboy hat. H: Well, you ll know better next time, right? M: I would have, yeah. H: (chuckle) M: But, anyway, it was very interesting out there and our Agents were attacked from time to time. They would spray them in the eyes with bug spray and it could be very dicey on that Indian reservation. A lot of alcoholism. A lot of problems of that nature up there. H: Yeah. What s his name? Kellerman, I think, yeah, writes, has written a series of, of novels, crime novels based on Indian reservations. And he always gives the FBI a hard time. They re always city boys that don t know anything about the desert, Indians, and what have you. M: Yeah. 10

11 Page 11 H: And it seems that like once again another hostile atmosphere to be, be working in. M: Well, yeah. That particular reservation. You know, if you had the Mescalero or Jicaria Apaches, they pretty much police their own. M: And they were very strict on their rules. The Navajos were pretty much looked down on by other Indian groups up there. And I think it s primarily because or the alcoholism and the problems that they had. H: Yeah, that s a, that s a tough one. And we, we re out there visiting a while ago and pulled into an Indian reservation hotel. A real nice place. And wanted to have our glass of beer with dinner and couldn t do it. You know, they wouldn t serve any alcohol there at all. M: Wow. I know a lot of the casinos around Minneapolis and that area for example, there s no liquor allowed on the reservation. M: We were told years ago that the metabolism, of the Navajo at least, was such that alcohol was, was a major factor in all these cases that they had and that actually it was a good defense in court for having done certain crimes. I don t know how true that was, but that was what the rumor was. H: Yeah, and you wonder whether some of this is, is just, I don t know whether you d say it this way, but just prejudice. And yet, they do have a very serious problem. M: Yeah, the Catholic Church, you know, put an alcohol treatment center up there to try to help out. I don t know how successful they were, but again it was the opinion not of white people as much as other Indian groups that Navajos had that problem. If there was a prejudice demonstrated while I was there it was by other Indians and not by us. M: Well, I shouldn t say not by white folks, but as much if not more than white people. Good. And how long were you in Albuquerque? M: A little over two years. 11

12 Page 12 So now you re three years into your service? M: Yeah. H: And you were transferred to Denver on a -- M: A hardship transfer. H: -- a hardship transfer. And, let s see, what type of work was most prevalent out there in Denver? M: Well, as I say, I was assigned to Counterterrorism. The Puerto Rican group, FALN, Armed Forces for the National Liberation of Puerto Rico. I know them very well. (chuckle) M: They were very active at that time. I think they did a total of fifty-six bombings in the course of the time that we investigated them. H: I m sorry. This is in Denver? M: Not in Denver. H: Oh, okay. M: Not in Denver. But the dynamite that we found in their safe houses all came from the Winslow Construction Company in Colorado. H: Oh, I see. M: Trucked up there by students from the University of Colorado, later determined. We had two groups of university students who were trying to build bombs and blew themselves up. Up in the Boulder area by the way. H: Huh. And then we had, I don t know for sure what year it was, I just don t remember, but Denver was third in the nation on a per capita basis for bombings. We had a group called Citizens for Truth and Justice. I forget what different names that they used, but they had a group there that was mainly a Mexican-American group with some Puerto Rican influence and so on that did several bombings including the building where the FBI office was. Got some other federal building across the street. So on and so forth. 12

13 Page 13 M: They would leave notes saying they were the Continental Revolutionary Army which was, threw everybody off, because they were actually of Hispanic nature. H: Huh. Yeah, I worked that stuff in New York. The FALN cases because I d lived and worked in Puerto Rico for a total of five years. M: We may have met then. I was out there for, you know, different --. When Kenny Walton was out there and those guys. You know, I was there actually when the Wonderful World Police was formed many years ago in a bar there after one of our conferences on the FALN in New York City. H: Huh. It s very possible. M: Jeremy Margolis. H: Let s see. Paul Brana was the Squad Leader. M: Yeah. H: And that was in 77. I left in 77. We d had just formed a squad to deal with the FALN. We d had a whole series of bombings against Chase Manhattan Bank in Manhattan. They were just little pipe bombs, but they left a bunch of them. M: Yeah. And at first, as I recall, they would call people and warn them and then after that, they stopped warning people. H: Yeah, Fraunces Tavern was the big one that, that broke things up and then, then we were working very closely with the New York PD which was a change of pace in many cases. (chuckle) M: It always bothered me that they showed a relationship in some of these made-for- TV movies and series on television where the FBI is butting heads with the NYPD. I spent a lot of time back there and, and it couldn t have been a better relationship -- H: No. M: -- than what I saw. They even gave us detectives shields back there saying that our badge wouldn t get us anywhere and --. H: It was too small. (chuckle) 13

14 Page 14 M: Yeah, they gave me a driver who they said, You just show your detective shield and say on the job and he ll take it from there. He was an oriental and we had great cooperation. H: Yeah, on the working level things, things went very well. I was part of two task forces, in fact the Organized Crime Task Force which was a great bunch of guys. And the FALN Task Force. And both of them were terrific on the working level. They really, really pitched in and they re good guys. I guess it was at higher levels and now politics comes in and a lot of other things. So there you are. Did you start right in then in Counterterrorism in Denver? M: Yeah. Bud Mullen was the ASAC at the time and he was the one that said, you know, You re in Counterterrorism. That s where we need you. My background, my family name is actually Mateus. My grandfather came here from South America. I think a few of them were under the misguided conception that I spoke Spanish, which I spoke about five words. H: (chuckle) M: I remember walking into the squad room in New Mexico and saying, There are sure a hell of streets named Calle around here. H: (chuckle) M: They looked at me like I was goofy, you know, not knowing that Calle meant street. H: Yeah, yeah. (chuckle) M: Well, I learned a little bit of Spanish in Albuquerque, but anyway, that s where they needed me. And I went right into Aryan Nations, American Indian Movement, all the groups that were popular back in that time. H: Great. Now you wrote up some material here and maybe we can just kind of start through that, from what you recall. You talked about a fellow by the name of Keith Mollohan that you had gotten hooked up with. This was back in M: Right. H: And he thought maybe he might have somebody you d be interested in talking to. 14

15 Page 15 M: Yeah, he had found out that the Denver District Attorney at the time, Dale Tooley was using a guy that, who had given me permission to discuss this by the way and who we will call Lee, like Robert E. Lee. And, Keith actually did some work on his own to find out who Tooley was using. And when he found that it wasn t that hard to identify the source, he went to the source and said, You know, you should consider working for me and maybe the FBI because, you know, you re infiltrating these groups, the Klan, and so on and so forth, for the District Attorney. And if I can find you, the other people can find you too. M: You need, you need to have a better level of protection. And that s what he was doing. He had been a member of the Klan. He had seen some things that he didn t like and he had gone to work in for the District Attorney there to try to mitigate some of the actions that the Klan wanted to take. M: So any way, Keith --. Yeah, as I put it in my little memoir to you, having talked to Keith and to Lee about this --. And the reason --. I m not doing it for personal notoriety or any benefit to Lee or Keith or anybody else, it s just that he was, this guy really risked his life for us. M: And was adjudged by Kenny Maxwell, when he was a supervisor back there, of being the best confidential source we had in the Aryan Nations. H: Huh. M: You know, and they were a very active group. To me it was just a story that should be considered for inclusion in this history project. H: Certainly. Well now, what type of operations did the Klan have out there? And were they very big? M: They weren t. I mean, you know, you would see them on Martin Luther King Day. They would show up and protest marches and different things like that. The head of it was the Fireman, from Lakewood, Colorado, and he d, you know, they just kind of ran their mouths and showed up from time to time. And they were promoting Skinheads at the time. Which we thought was kind of funny because if you look at the Skinheads and how they dressed and so on and then the Klansmen, it was --. They were diametrically opposed. 15

16 Page 16 H: Well, they weren t, they weren t really Klan as such I gather. They called themselves Klan. M: Yeah. But anyway, they were, they were doing some marching and they frightened a bunch of school kids at a synagogue and, and Lee just thought that that was wrong. And they were talking about murdering people which he didn t really think they would ever do. And he just didn t condone any of that sort of thing. He was not a racist. He was a former marine and a good guy. H: Now how did you happen --? So you were introduced to him by Mollohan then. M: Yeah, Keith Mollohan was, as I say in my little write-up, you know, he was with the Intelligence Bureau of the police department. He was a former Special Forces - Green Beret for lack of a term type.... So he was, you know, not your run-ofthe-mill police officer. H: No, a sophisticated sounding guy. M: Very, very much so. And Keith and I had gotten to know each other because I had spent a lot of time with the intelligence guys and he appreciated, you know, my spirit of cooperation. And he had that same spirit. So he called me and said, You know, this guy --. What he knows and what he can do is more national in scope and I think you ought to talk to him and see what he can do for you. And that s when we began our dialog which led to him being close friends with one of the guys who eventually became part of the Silent Brotherhood in the Aryan Nations, David Lane, and learning that Lane planned to kill Alan Berg and all that type of thing. Well, tell us a little bit about Aryan Nations. M: What would you like to know? H: Well, what were they? How were they formed? Who was in it? What was their, their purpose? M: Well, --. H: Neo-Nazis, it sounds like. M: They were pretty much Neo-Nazis. They were followers of the Identity Church. They believed that Jews and African-Americans were mud people. They were, you know, they were just, how to say it other than, right-wing extremists -- 16

17 Page 17 H: Yeah. M: -- is how we --. H: People, people full of hate. M: Yeah. H: The Identity Church? Was that an actual church? M: It was an actual church. In fact there was a branch of it up in Fort Collins, Colorado. Yeah, it was a church, again, that believed that the true followers of Christ and Israel were whites and not Jews. I never did fully understand it, I ll have to say. Yeah, most of them, their ministry is of hate and they just sort of lash out at whoever they can. So how, how big an operation? How many people, very roughly, were involved in this kind of thing? And hold on just a second. I m going to stop you here. Okay, we re on the second side of our first tape with Bill Matens. Go ahead please. M: Yeah, the church itself, Reverend Richard Girnt Butler, the founder of the church, an educated man who bought into this identity stuff hook, line and sinker, and started the compound, the Aryan Nations Compound, up in Hayden Lake, Idaho. He was running his Congresses up there. Every September he would have these Congresses. Even though he would only get about two hundred and fifty people or so at the meetings, he claimed he had a hundred and fifty thousand supporters. He had a mailing list of, I think, around five, six thousand people. M: But to say that he had a hundred and fifty thousand supporters would, I would think, would be kind of a stretch. I d add that his goal was the ten percent solution, he called it. I think one-tenth of the population in the United States is in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming as an Aryan Nation. Interesting guy. Butler, again, he had, he had been in the Air Force. That s where he learned of the Christian Identity Church. He studied for several years under Wesley Swift who was founder of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian and he formed he own Christian Identity Church as I said. 17

18 Page 18 M: Established his twenty-acre compound in a peaceful little community of Hayden Lake, Idaho. He decided that he and his church were a direct descendant of Swift and that ministry and formed that compound, again his ten percent solution in that Aryan Nation that he was being --. H: There was a lot of that kind of thing going on -- M: Yeah. You had the Shield and Sword, Arm of the Lord and the White Aryan Resistance. And most of those people showed up at these meetings. I reminisce in these memoirs that I went up there at one time to meet with the source. We would meet in the early morning hours after people had gone to bed and he would tell me what was going on and so on. We would meet out in the woods there. And it was interesting that the hotel that they had me scheduled for, I walk in and here s all these people that I had seen photographs of. Klan leaders from Texas and, you know, White Aryan Resistance people. And so I called the Agent in Charge, Wayne Manis, and said, Wayne, I can t stay at this hotel. And he goes, Oh, my God. They put me in another hotel. But, to walk in, I mean, what a shock. And yet you talk to the source, and the source went through voice stress analysis and all kinds of stuff when he was passing through security and so as nervous as I was about walking into that place, I can t imagine what it was like for him to go through some of the testing that they put him through. And he ended up being one of the main people in their security branch. So he managed to pass the voice stress then. M: He did, yeah. H: For whatever that was worth. M: He didn t think they knew what they were doing. H: I was talking to somebody, I forget who it was now, and they were saying their informant had to go in for a, a lie detector test as such. And the guy wanted to get some, some drugs or something that would help him. Quiet him down. And they, they got him something to quiet him down a bit, but it turned out that the guy didn t use it, and he passed the lie detector test and, in fact, eventually got to be the main lie detector man for this group. (chuckle) M: I love it, I love it. I m sure there s a bunch of stories like that out there. 18

19 Page 19 H: Yeah. Well, its one thing, you can buy the equipment. Its being able to use it afterwards is what the problem is. M: Sure. H: You mentioned here also Alan Berg who was a talk radio host there in Denver. M: Right. H: Maybe you can give us a little bit of that on the tape. M: Yeah. Alan Berg was an interesting guy. He had been in Chicago for years and, you know, after we found out that he was being targeted to be assassinated, if you will, by this group, I went and talked to him. Basically what he said to me was, You know, I just can t be concerned. I have to say what I want and I can t, I can t be concerned. You know, I m a controversial talk-show host and that s what I do. And he loved to take issue with people on the radio. And David Lane was the one who targeted him. One of the, again, members of the Inner Circle. The Bruders Schweigen, the Silent Brotherhood, whatever you want to call it, of the Aryan Nations. You know, he would call and argue with Berg about different things and, you know, just try to really have confrontational encounters with him. And again Berg said, You know, hey, when I was in Chicago, the Mafia, they didn t like me either. And they could have very well bumped me off if they wanted to. And I didn t get whacked. And I m still here. And so he didn t care. He just didn t think it was that big a deal. Now who was the founder the guy by the name of Robert Matthews? M: Right. He was the one who actually formed the Silent Brotherhood. Well, did any of these people speak German by the way? M: Not that I m aware of. They had a bunch --. I mean everything you saw was German. They read publications like The Death of the White Race: Open Letter to the Gentiles, you know, and they followed the teachings of people like Colonel Jack Mohr, Gordon Jack Mohr. He was one that Berg embarrassed on the radio at one time which really kind of drove him over the edge about reaching out and killing, killing Berg. 19

20 Page 20 So these people didn t have any, it was just, any connection with German activities or German-ness in particular. It was just, it happened to be something that crazies would, would, found interesting though I guess. The Nazi side of things. M: Yeah. So you told Berg about it. H: And, and then later on Berg was, was killed. M: Yeah. And it was really I d say funny. That s kind of not the best word to use I guess, but when Bruce Carroll Pierce, the gunman, when his gun, MAC calibre machine gun, jammed in the thirteenth round, they thought it was a signal from God that they had done the right thing by shooting him. M: I might add that Bruce Carroll Pierce said that he would never cooperate with the authorities or talk to the FBI. And I think his statement when he was interviewed was nineteen pages long. H: Huh. So he was willing to talk? M: Yeah, yeah. H: And did your man, Lee, was [he] able to help identify him? Or give some background information? M: Lee was the one that came to us and told us that David Lane had said to him, You know, if I ever disappear, Alan Berg will be dead and I will have gone underground with the Order. M: They tried to get Lee into the Order and he refused. He said he had too many family problems, he couldn t commit to the Order. Most of the people in the Order, you know, they, they considered themselves Special Forces types, you know, and -- M: -- they left their families for the most part and went to war against the Zionist Occupation Government. That s us, you know, the FBI and ZOG. 20

21 Page 21 M: That s what they classified the people in power in the United States that they were fighting. H: And you know, these people are still around somewhere. I mean, the people that think like this. But what was there about this particular era that made them come out of the woodwork the way they did? Because there was a lot of this stuff all over the country. M: Yeah, I mean, I don t know if there was any one thing. They certainly thought that the Jews ran the country. They were more paranoid about Jewish people than blacks or people of color. M: They just really were paranoid about, about that. And, of course, Berg was Jewish even though he wasn t a practicing Jew. But, you know, in June of 84 they gunned him down outside his house. As I say, they thought that he was, that was a big deal. M: There s a book called The Turner Diaries which, you know, is a racist novel written by William Pierce, who used the name Andrew MacDonald. And that was a favorite of the white hate groups. It s interesting to note that an unnamed Jewish radio talk show host was gunned outside his home just like Berg was -- M: -- as he stepped from his car just like Berg. And it was published long before the Berg assassination. That s one book that shed a little light on how they felt and why they felt the way they did. M: They just felt that there was a conspiracy aimed at the white race basically. H: Well, this was pretty well broken up but you don t see that as much now. You still see some remnants I guess out in the west there, but -- M: Right. 21

22 Page 22 H: -- you don t see it as, as a widespread thing. You know, we got other stuff going on now. M: I mean obviously, you know, there were other groups that --. The Sheriff s Posse Comitatus that had shootouts with the police and different groups like that. But the most organized, the largest, was the Aryan Nations and then, Butler was not seen as an action guy by Robert Matthews and the others, and that s why Matthews --. He was kind of a heartland guy and he became a member of the Aryan Nations and I think it was 1983 on his farm in Washington State when he formed the Order of the Silent Brotherhood. Lee had originally mentioned that the group was forming as an action arm. He referred to it as the Inner Circle. Kind of a small elite action arm made up of these guys headed by Butler. M: Matthews --. Talking about the German connection, he wanted a German name for the group and that s where Bruders Schweigen came in, which translates into Silent Brotherhood basically. M: It came from a German soldier s poem as I recall. H: Now, the office of origin was where, up in Washington, on a case like this? M: Yeah, it was Wayne Manis up there. At one time, I want to say that Hoxie or one of the guys, I m, I m getting a little confused here, but there was --. We had another source at one time in Arizona that began talking about the Aryan Nations and so on, so I want to say that Herb Hoxie had the case in the Phoenix Division originally and then it transferred up there. M: But I m not really sure. I just remember going to a meeting there where they talked about it and they had the source come in and --. H: But you had a major source yourself that you were managing. M: Again, Kenny Maxwell who was the head of the Terrorism Division at Headquarters. I don t know if he was part of the investigation or --. He held a Bureau position though. He said that Lee was the best that we had at one time. 22

23 Page 23 Let me stop us here for just a moment. M: Sure. H: I d rather not have us go over and over things that you ve already written but it helps to fill things in though a bit. M: Sure. H: So you and the Denver crew there had a major portion of this, of this actual case though. M: We did, considering the murder. I might add that, you know, if we had not had that information --. We actually had real problems with a lieutenant on the police department who was thoroughly convinced that the Mafia had killed Alan Berg and didn t believe the source. He thought that we were like shades of J. Edgar Hoover in seeing commies come out of the woodwork when we started talking about Aryan Nations. And, in fact, one of my best detectives got sent to Auto Theft from Intelligence because he held out for, Listen, Lieutenant, this is the Aryan Nations. This is the Order of the Silent Brotherhood. And that s not what the lieutenant in charge of it wanted to hear. M: Danny Malloy who was one of the best detectives I ever met ended up getting thumped over the thing basically. H: Huh. M: He retired as soon as he could. He retired less than a year later. H: Huh. M: Great loss to the Denver Police Department. H: Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it. M: This, you know, this was a major investigation. There were several offshoot groups. There were like seventy-five arrests in that four-year period, 83 to 87, when we did this. They did a lot of crimes. H: But, the, the murder of Berg, itself, was that handled as a, as a local murder as opposed to something, some Federal violation? 23

24 Page 24 M: It was actually a joint operation and became Federal once they found the murder weapon in Gary Yarborough s place up in Washington. H: Okay, so you had an interstate connection. M: Yeah. We basically had, you know, we sat down with the police department and told them what our suspicions were. And, I had a lieutenant who, on the police department, that didn t want to hear that. And so it kind of was in limbo and then Dave Michaud, who had later become the chief of the Denver Police Department - Dave and I sat down and he said, I believe you. And, again, we couldn t get much movement because of the hierarchy there but --. So we worked it as a joint venture kind of quietly until once again the murder weapon was found and traced back ballistically to the actual homicide and we knew it was Aryan Nations. Yeah. Interesting. M: Yeah. It was, it was a very interesting case. H: Moving on to other types of movements. You talk quite a bit about a lot of these, these different groups. Talk in terms about the Zionist Occupation Government and their relationships and what have you as we go through. And then a series of, looks like, well, no it is, talk about grocery store robbery, bank robberies though, and armored car robberies and what have you. M: Right. H: How did that, how did that start to break? M: Again, you know, we had a source. We actually had another source too who --. He wasn t mine, so I don t even want to comment on him, but there was another source developed later on within the organization. But first and foremost was my guy who reported having an inside track with the Inner Circle as he called it, knowledge of claims made by these people as to robberies in Ukiah, California, and their different activities. M: It was a direct result of having a source on the inside. H: Oh, sure. Well, how did that work out eventually? Is he still around somewhere? 24

25 Page 25 M: He is, yeah. He s a very religious guy and he is still around and owns, owns his business. And, yeah. M: Yeah, I mentioned in my memoirs, I think that the reward was like twenty-five thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest of people who killed Alan Berg, and, I think, the Bureau was able to give him like five-thousand dollars. And I said, What are you going to do with it? He said, My wife wants a new screen door on the porch. H: (chuckle) M: Just a very low-keyed, very nice guy. Okay. I m just looking here. We re getting sort of towards the end of your memoirs. They ended up with a lawsuit. The Aryan Nations M: Yeah. Some security types had harassed a family up there as I recall. I wasn t directly involved in that. H: And the rest of these people? You mentioned here that David Lane is --. M: Most of them are in prison. Yeah, for a long time I might add. M: Long, long time. Some of them have spoken. Again, Bruce Carroll Pierce who played the tough guy up until he was actually interviewed and provided, again from memory but I think, and I wasn t present for the interview --. I think his interview went like nineteen pages or something. He spilled his guts on everything. So when it came time to stand up, they didn t. At least some of them didn t anyways. M: I think Matthews did. He was, you know, shot. Well, he actually was cooked to death in a thirty-six hour standoff. A shootout in December of 84 with about two hundred Federal Agents. Projectile and incendiary devices shot into the house where he was and he basically died with all of the heat, in a bathtub where he hid. 25

26 Page 26 M: -- so on and so forth. 1985, all the members, you talk about in the Inner Circle that were left, were sentenced in a court in Seattle and given terms of forty to one hundred years in prison. Oh, it was David Tate that was listed as having, was convicted of having murdered a Missouri State Trooper. So you had twelve major people. I mean, the action arm of the Aryan Nations was gone. All of them were either put in prison or one of them became a source like I said. M: And that was kind of the end of it. H: It s interesting. There weren t that many of them. M: No. Not Inner Circle. No. You got the, you got the major players and then the rest of them just sort of disappeared because they showed up. You had a hundred and fifty people or more going, doing things or going to meetings or attending demos and whatever. M: Yeah. They had firearms practice and all kinds of stuff there and very family oriented. They took their kids. And I mean we had a lot of pictures of, that were brought to light later one. I don t what why their, what happened to their kids. If they grew up to be racists and, you know, gun toters or what the hell happened with them. Uh, huh. But as it stands now it s a dead issue. M: Yeah, though I believe that the land was sold and, course, Butler, he, passed away. Yeah. H: That s all, that s all ended. Would you like to share some other? Did you have other, other groups that you were also involved with? M: You know, primarily just the (unintel) being the FALN. I mean this was enough. (chuckle) 26

27 Page 27 M: Yeah. The FALN, you know, again, they found the safe house when John Eschew from the police department and the task force here in Chicago found the safe house and dynamite. They traced it back to Winslow Construction Company. We knew they had a lot of connections in Denver because their members were showing up out there for meetings and so on. And we did a lot of surveillance and so on of them in Colorado. And again, they did a lot of bombings. An offshoot of their group calling themselves the Continental Revolutionary Army? H: Macheteros. M: Yeah. Yeah. You know, they, they just, they had so many different names that I, I don t know. Corky Gonzalez and Juan Haro and all the Chicanos out there. So they did several bombings and one of them blew themselves up and two carloads blew themselves up. And it was very interesting there. Working cases with dead bombers. (chuckle) H: (chuckle) Not very good bombers. M: Yeah. H: Well, these Macheteros had blown up some Puerto Rican National Guard jet aircraft down in San Juan. See, I had started in 1962 and I was in the Army in Intelligence down in Puerto Rico. And we were interested in the Separatists. And FALN really wasn t something that was on our radar. I don t remember at that time. It was more the Puerto Rican Nationalists, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. And we kept an eye on it because of military problems. And then later on when I went back to Puerto Rico with the Bureau, things had heated up. That was in 1969 to 71. I was down in San Juan again, in Ponce RA. And they were making noise in terms of marches and the usual business, but, not too long after I left, a cache of arms were found there in central Puerto Rico. In fact, in our Resident Agency area. And that sort of upped the ante a bit. And then when I was up in New York, the Fraunces Tavern bombing occurred and then the whole series of bombings of Chase Manhattan Bank. And when we formed that special squad with, Paul Brana was the supervisor on it, most of us were Spanish speaking or had worked in Puerto Rico or had some experience there. 27

28 Page 28 H: And, I remember, we did a lot of, another fellow and I did a lot of research trying to see what we could find in the way of leads and ended up going down to Puerto Rico. And we talked to informants down there who were very well connected and looked through all of the files and what have you but weren t able to find any real connection to Puerto Rico. And it wasn t till after I left the Bureau that the Chicago connection was found. And that s where things really started to break then. M: Yeah, that was very fortuitous that they were able to do that. And there s a story that should be told about how John Eschew, the detective, and some of the task force people were finally, after trying and trying to surveil these people back to the safe house, how they finally were able to do it. H: Are there any Bureau people I could talk to? M: Yeah, you could talk to Bill Dyson, Pat Daly. This would probably be my choices. Pat is still here in the Chicago area. He s running security for the CTA, Chicago. I d be glad to interview those people for you if you d like. H: I d love that. I d love that. And Bill Dyson. That name is very familiar because I went through training school with Bill Dyson. He was a school teacher. M: And as you probably know, he s a walking encyclopedia when it comes to anything to do with terrorism. I mean, Bill lectures across the country for a think tank here in the Chicago area. H: Is he out in, is he out in Las Vegas though now? M: No, I don t believe so. You know, I ve lost touch with him but he did send me a book and said, And here s a book that I wrote on terrorism and you ll recognize some of the things that I talk about in there. And thanks. 28