Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, The

The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) was started in Arkansas as a small fundamentalist Christian group called Zarephath-Horeb, meaning “refuge and divine inspiration,” by James Ellison in 1976. Ellison eventually adopted Christian Identity, a race-based theology that claims whites are the only true descendants of God, Jews are descended from Satan, and all other races are descended from animals. The group adopted an antigovernment stance and changed its name to symbolize its paramilitary function.

Although members sold weapons, distributed hate literature, and engaged in some criminal activity, the group crossed the line into terrorism in 1983 after Gordon Kahl, a North Dakota farmer and member of the Posse Comitatus, refused to pay his taxes. After shooting and killing two federal marshals, Kahl was killed in a federal raid, making him a martyr for the extreme right. As revenge for his death, the CSA declared war on what it called the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG.

As part of its declaration of war, members planned to assassinate government officials, including a judge, an FBI agent, and a federal prosecutor named Asa Hutchison. A car wreck on the way to a target's house, however, was taken as a sign from [Page 146]God that the plan was not ready. CSA's crimes included setting fires in an Arkansas church with a largely homosexual congregation and in a Jewish center, and bombing a natural gas pipeline. The day after the 1983 pipeline bombing, however, a CSA member, Richard Wayne Snell, killed the owner of a pawnshop, mistakenly believing he was Jewish. In 1984 Snell killed a black Arkansas state trooper, Louis Bryant, and was captured by authorities.

The CSA church, located on a 224-acre compound in rural Arkansas, eventually became a survivalist paramilitary training camp for other white supremacist groups like Aryan Nations and The Order. It was there that authorities believe David Tate, a member of The Order, was heading after gunning down Jimmie Linegar, a Missouri state trooper. On April 19, 1985, more than 200 FBI agents and other police surrounded the compound. The resulting standoff, the first of its kind in which federal authorities were up against such a well-equipped militia group, lasted four days and was resolved peacefully.

Tate was eventually located and arrested in Forsyth, Missouri. He had never made it to the compound, but four other members of The Order—two wanted on federal racketeering charges and two arrested on federal firearms violations—were there and surrendered at the same time as Ellison. Subsequent searches of the compound yielded hundreds of weapons and explosives, including the remnants of a minefield, caches of gold and neo-Nazi literature, and a 30-gallon barrel of cyanide. Ellison and his second-in-command, Kerry Noble, were sentenced in 1985 to prison on racketeering and illegal weapons charges.

Snell was executed on April 19, 1995—12 hours after a bomb exploded in the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Members of the CSA have admitted that they had had a plan—which was later abandoned—to blow up that building. They and others have suggested that Snell may have been involved in the planning of the blast from his prison cell, but no conspiracy has been brought to light.

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