Thus says Yahweh: Behold, I will raise up against Babylon and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me, a destroying wind...
-- Jeremiah 51:1, quoted in notes accompanying a pair of bombs set off April 1, 1996, in Spokane
It was April Fool’s Day, but this was no joke.
The two men wore masks and obviously wanted money. One clacked a round into the shotgun as they entered the bank, while the other held up a handgun and announced that this was a stickup. But these weren’t ordinary bank robbers. They had a message they wanted to send, too.
“Tell the cops to free the people of Justus or we’ll be back,” one yelled, as they herded the bank’s employees into a corner and started grabbing cash out of tellers’ drawers. As the robbery progressed, they shouted more slogans:
“Tell your government and its people not to mess with the Freemen!”
“It’s free the people in Justus!”
“Justice for the people in Justus!”
Then they shouted at everyone to get out of the bank, and the employees quickly complied. One of the men set a pipe bomb atop the head teller’s counter. As the pair ran out of the bank and into a waiting white-and-maroon Chevy van, the bomb went off, blowing a hole in the bank’s ceiling and ripping apart six teller’s stations.
The Phineas Priesthood had struck. The ghosts of The Order had returned to haunt Spokane.
{xtypo_quote_left} Of all the permutations of the Patriot movement’s Christian Identity factions, the Phineas Priesthood is perhaps the most insidious and frightening. The clear threat of violence lies at the heart of the group’s agenda, and as the Spokane bombings suggest, its members are prepared to carry it out -- on a national scale. The sect’s tendrils extend to some of the most notorious crimes of recent history, to Oklahoma City and, possibly, to the burning embers of black churches in the South. {/xtypo_quote_left}
The assault actually had begun eleven minutes earlier and thirty blocks away, at a suburban satellite office of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. A circulation worker at the plant’s rear delivery door saw the van come roaring up. Peering through a window, he saw a man behind the wheel of the van with a long white beard, while a second man in a ski mask jumped out of the passenger’s seat and came running up to the plant’s rear door. He bent down and set something near the door, looked up and saw the man watching him, then returned to the van, which screeched off.
Curious, the circulation man poked his head out the door to see what they had left. His blood froze when he saw it: a pipe bomb, fuse lit and sizzling toward its end.
For a second, he thought about being a hero and pulling the fuse out. But in the same flash, he thought about his two young sons, both just behind him, visiting him after they had finished with school.
He ran back in and yelled at everyone to call police and take cover.
“Then, boom!” he later told a reporter for his newspaper. “It was pretty unreal.”
Windows in the plant shattered. Upstairs, an editor was knocked out of his seat, and the cover of his phone was blown off. But no one was hurt. Another worker, outside in the parking lot, thought the rear end of his car had blown off. “The next thing I saw was smoke coming out of the back of the building,” he said.
Everyone in the plant, about twelve people, came running out to the parking lot, afraid that perhaps another bomb was about to blow. Then someone called the police.
Brief moments later, the two men burst through the doors of the Spokane Valley branch of U.S. Bank, this time with masks on both. When they left less than ten minutes later, the stunned and scared employees were milling in the parking lot, the sound of the bomb and the slogans for the Freemen ringing in their ears.
The robbers also were $50,000 richer. As FBI agents who quickly swooped onto the scenes of the attacks discovered, this operation had been very well planned. The robbery occurred at the beginning of the month, days on which most banks are flush with cash in order to convert payroll and government checks. And it had taken place in the unincorporated Spokane Valley, which is patrolled by the more thinly spread county sheriff’s deputies.
Read More: Orcinus
David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. He is the author of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, June 2005), as well as Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2004), and In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press). His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. He can be contacted This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .