Tuesday, March 5, 1968
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Daily Kansan editorial essay
Minutemen hide out in Colorado
By Fred Shook
"See the old man at the corner where you buy your papers? He may have a silencer-equipped pistol under his coat. That extra fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman who calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milk man? Arsenic works slow but sure. Your auto mechanic may stay up nights studying booby traps. These patriots are not going to let you take their freedom away from them. They have learned the silent knife, the strangler's cord, the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Traitors beware. Even now the cross hairs are on the back of your necks."
It sounds at once like a combination of sleazy spy-fiction and melodramatics. But the words were authored by the ultra-right Minute man organization and printed on gummed stickers with the cross-hairs of a telescopic sight, to be distributed throughout the summer.
Just what the Minutemen are up to at the moment remains a mystery that may be taking a new turn even now somewhere high in the Colorado mountains.
Many people tend to regard the Minuteman organization as a crack-pot, cloak-and-dagger operation that, if left alone, can be tolerated so long as it poses no threat to personal security. And that's the point in question at the moment.
Taking it from the top, the man who heads the organization, Robert Bolivar DeFugh, of Norborne, Mo., is a scarce fellow these days, and he has been since the assassination of American - Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
DePugh has hardly communicated at all with the outside world since Rockwell was shot to death Aug. 25, 1967.
Six days later, before dawn, a dynamite bomb ripped open a wall of DePugh's Patriotic party headquarters building at 611 E. Alton in Independence, Mo. The building was purchased by De-Pugh in the late 1950s and soon was being used as a center for Minuteman activities.
There is speculation in the case of the bomb, however, that it may have been planted by Minutemen for publicity, as the building was considered a bad insurance risk in its rickety condition, and also was marked for razing by the Missouri State Highway Department to allow widening of Alton street.
An aide of DePugh, Robert L. Gourley, who was sleeping in the building with three members of his family when the bomb exploded, could say only that "perhaps it was done by someone mistaken about who they were aiming at. You know there is supposed to be an order out that DePugh is going to be assassinated."
Tape recordings sent
By Sept. 3, DePugh had tape recordings distributed to the three Kansas City television stations and the Kansas City Star. The copies were labeled as identical to a tape-recorded speech delivered to three regional meetings of the Patriotic party in Hot Springs, Ark., King of Prussia, Pa., and Dearborn, Mich.
DePugh, with a weary voice, told of setbacks in Patriotic Party plans and in the operation of his drug company business in Norborne.
He told of a temporary staleate in his zeal to follow through with plans for the Patriots and the Minutenem.
And he said he had learned from "one of our contacts very high up in one of the government intelligence services" that Communist assassins had been instructed to execute four right-wing leaders as soon as possible.
He said the death message originated in Havana, Cuba, and identified the leaders as himself, Rockwell, Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, and Robert Welch, head of the John Birch Society.
"Well, it's one down and three to go," he said, referring to Rockwell's murder.
"If the other leaders are shot, I don't know what their followers will do, but I do know what the members of the Minutemen organization are going to do when Robert B. DePugh is assassinated.
"We know, day by day and hour by hour, the location and the habits of 25 top Communist leaders and Communist traitors in this country. And when I am assassinated, those 25 men had better make sure that they're paid up on their life insurance premiums."
The tape recorder continued, "Our strike teams are standing at the ready, and their targets have been picked, and if I'm killed my death is going to be avenged very quickly and very efficiently."
Convictions made
DePugh is now facing a four-year prison term for conviction of violations of the National Firearms Act.
He is free on $5,000 bond while appealing the conviction handed him in Kansas City last November in U.S. District Court.
Walter Patrick Peyson, of Chicago, and Troy Houghton, of San Diego, both aides to DePugh, were convicted with him.
Also about Sept. 3, it was made public that a federal grand jury witness, Michael Desmond Sadewhite, said that he had infiltrated the Minutemen and Ku Klux Klan for the FBI. Sadewhite stated that the Minutemen had plans to begin isolated acts of violence sometime in September.
Sadewhite said DePugh had told him of escape routes and false identities previously established so that, in the event DePugh lost his court appeal, he would not go to prison.
Sadewhite said "the new strategy was to involve isolated acts of violence, starting around September, 1967, and timed to appear as a reaction to the rioting he expected this summer.
"DePugh told me the Minute-
men had already run through a simulated bank robbery in Kansas City, taking all the necessary steps up to turning in a false alarm, but not including the actual killing." Sadeh said.
"This would incite the people to fight the police, who were the enemy of the people. He said this would show the people it could be done.
"He talked about things like planting bombs in police stations, city halls, state buildings, sniper activity — although he didn't say against whom—and even a bank robbery."
Tending to bear Sadewhite out are statements in literature distributed by the Minutemen this year urging followers to "prepare the nucleus of an escape and evasion team..." to make "special studies on the use of terrorism, sabotage and assassination as instruments of psychological warfare," and "obtain and stockpipe types of material needed in resistance warfare . . . in keeping with your own talents."
At about the same time, De-Pugh urged the abandonment of the cosmetics millionaire, William Penn, Patrick, as the Patriotic party's candidate for vice-president of the United States, because Patrick had failed to come up with money for the Patriots.
DePugh withdrew his support in a tape-recorded message that was to be played at eight regional party conventions.
Patrick, the president of Holliday Magic Cosmetics, Inc., of San Rafael, Calif., was endorsed at the party's second national convention in Kansas City, Kan., last July.
DePugh also was critical of George Wallace, who was endorsed by the party for United States president during the same convention because "Wallace has failed to do enough for the conservative cause" and "failure to accept chances to speak before the party."
George Wallace criticized
In the middle of September Jim Garrison, New Orleans district attorney, broke a short-lived silence to say the Minuteman organization was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
"Somewhere along the line, the plot to assassinate the President was infiltrated by Nazi or Nazi-influenced people. The Minuteumen became tremendously involved after the organization was infiltrated by Nazis," Garrison said.
"The Dallas police force is involved in it, too. A large percentage of the Dallas police are Minutemen," Garrison continued.
He said "some of the people involved are from California" and charged the actual murder of Mr. Kennedy was carried out by former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.
"The more we went into it, the more we became aware there was a very large conspiracy," said the district attorney.
(Garrison's words, of course, must be weighed while taking into consideration the findings of the Warren Commission and the reliability of what Garrison has said earlier during his one-man campaign to expose a very intricate plot to kill President Kennedy.)
DePugh immediately responded to the charge with a retort that seems to have been conceived in the very soul of his obsession with communism, that President Kennedy was murdered by "Communist assassins."
Garrison rebuked
His personal spokesman journeyed to Kansas City to rebuke Garrison. Walter Peyson solemnly assured news media that at least a part of what Garrison charged about some Dallas police being Minutemen was true, that "there are Minutemen on every major police force in the United States."
DePugh apparently already was well in hiding when Peyson was in Kansas City Sept. 16 denying Garrison's charges.
Peyson said his leader was on a road trip making several speeches, and that he did not know where DePugh could be reached.
It appears now, however, that
DePugh is in hiding in the mountains of Colorado, at a guerrilla training camp for Minutemen ostensibly established to prepare a campaign of terror to unleash in the event the group decides the United States has been sold out to Communism.
DePugh in Colorado
Evidence that DePugh is in Colorado comes from two sources—in a copyrighted story in The Denver Post, and from an article in The Kansas City Star.
The Star reports that, in a tape-recorded interview, a government witness in the federal trial of DePugh, Jerry Brooks, says he was forced to deny court testimony against the Minutemen by signing an affidavit that he had committed perjury, then tell the same version to two television stations in Kansas City.
Brooks says he was then forced to go to St. Louis, and from there fly to Spokane, Wash., where he was watched until he was later instructed to go by bus to Denver, Colo.
According to the statement, he was met at the bus depot in Denver by a Minuteman, and taken to a home in Golden, Colo., where he spent three days before "escaping."
Brooks says he then decided to return to the Minutemen and rejoined them in the Colorado mountains. He said he spent several days in another house 8,000 feet above sea level and again decided to "escape" after hearing plans discussed to assassinate secretary of state, Dean Rusk.
He said that after escaping the second time, he asked for protection at the Jefferson County, Colo., jail, and made statements to two FBI agents.
According to a copyrighted article published by the Denver Post, the first house Brooks was taken to in Golden was a modest frame bungalow at 1801 Ford St. Post investigation shows it earlier had been purchased by Ramona Von DePugh, which is the same name as that of Robert B. DePugh's wife, and sold about a month ago by Ramona Von DePugh, only eight days after Brooks made his statement to the FBI regarding Minuteman activity in Colorado.
Do-it-yourself kits
The article further states that the Post has uncovered a cache of weapons, ammunitions, dynamite and "other gear"—including "plans for a do-it-yourself machine gun."
The find has been turned over to a special investigator for the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit (ATTU).
According to Bob Whearley, a Denver Post staff writer, the Minuteman guerrilla training camp is in the foothills west of Denver.
So perhaps now the crosshairs are on the back of Brooks' neck; perhaps not. He has dropped out of sight, and is said to be hiding in Kansas City.
The story basically can only be told as the Minutemen tell it, scrap by scrap, as new information comes to life.
See Minutemen, page 4