THESE ARE A COUPLE OF THE MANY ARTICLES WRITTEN ABOUT KERRY NOBLE:
Tabernacle of terror: minister recalls trip to hell and back Extremist reforms after getting caught up in Christian Identity Movement Aline Mendelsohn, idsnews.com Published October 21, 1999
In 1984, Kerry Noble entered a gay community church carrying a suitcase filled with plastic explosives.
He planned to start a war.
Sitting in a back pew, he rested the case beside his feet. All he had to do was set the timer, leave and the building would explode into flames, killing everyone in sight. But as he examined his surroundings, he found that it wasn't what he expected. He expected to see sexually crazed individuals having orgies. Instead, he saw people.
After about 15 minutes, Noble left the church and took the suitcase with him.
"I realized, 'I can't do this, I don't believe in this,' " he said.
That moment he realized he needed to change, that he needed to leave the religious racist movement. It would be years before he finally did.
From Pacifist to Extremist
"Don't fight back," his mother told him.
Growing up in a middle-class, "God-fearing" home in 1950s Texas, Noble participated in community service since the first grade and was often bullied because of his involvement with school activities. Still, he said he always followed his mother's words.
After high school, Noble married, had two children and became a Southern Baptist minister. Through a friend, he learned of a religious community on the Arkansas-Missouri border. The minute they visited the grounds, Noble and his wife fell in love with the ministry; it seemed to provide everything they had ever hoped for community, Christian values and a place to raise children.
The ministry, which at its best point included about 150 members, secluded itself from the rest of the world. In the communal life, money, like everything else, was shared. When they first joined in 1977, Noble said the ministry was a group of honest Christians trying to raise their kids right. During the next few years, it took a sharp turn.
"It was like boiling water. When water starts to boil, it doesn't get hot all at once," he said. "It happens gradually so you don't even realize when you're boiling until you can't get out. We didn't allow ourselves to be balanced. We just accepted it."
Several of the ministers were influenced by the Christian Identity Movement, an extreme white supremacist interpretation of the Bible. Paranoia swept the congregation. Soon, everyone other than "their kind" were physical enemies. Naming their ministry The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, the group adopted an "us vs. them" mentality: God's people vs. the Devils.
"Racism was an excuse for us not to be happy with certain things in life. It was easier to blame the blacks and the Jews," Noble said. "I convinced myself to hate because I thought my religion justified it."
Envisioning a scene from Revelations, members prepared for the Second Coming of Christ and stored years worth of food and supplies. They also brought guns into the community, which, given his upbringing, troubled Noble. But he quickly pushed away independent thought.
"For the first time in my life, I felt I could protect myself," Noble said. "I didn't have a feeling of powerlessness."
In 1983, the CSA declared war against the United States. Turning its defensive mode to an offensive one, it rapidly emerged as the nation's No. 2 domestic terrorist organization.
Early in the '80s, members ignited a rash of arsons at synagogues and gay churches. In 1984, one member shot and killed an Arkansas state trooper. Also that year, Noble strapped dynamite to a major Arkansas pipeline with the intention of cutting off power as far away as Chicago, but it only blew up a small part of the line. He and other members plotted the assassination of an FBI agent, but on the way, a car accident ruined their plans.
The CSA was becoming antsy.
"We were tired of waiting for God to judge, and we thought he was telling us to judge," Noble said.
Frustrated, Noble made a decisive move. Accompanied by another church member, he drove to Kansas City with the intent of blowing up a park known for its gay inhabitants. When they arrived late in the evening, the park was empty.
Still determined, Noble came up with an alternate plan: destroying a nearby adult bookstore, but the clerk made him leave his suitcase containing the explosives at the front of the store. After these two failed attempts, Noble decided to call it a night.
The next morning, Noble's companion, who grew up in Kansas City, took him to see his childhood Baptist church. They arrived and found it had been converted to a gay church.
"I took it as a sign," Noble said.
But when he entered that church, Noble had an inexplicable change of heart. On the way home, he thought about the past seven years of his life.
"Almost all of us have longings, self-doubts," he said. "You can start off with the right intentions and almost justify overlooking what's really there."
He had always had doubts about the group's Biblical interpretations. But he so wanted the community life that he didn't question anybody. As propaganda minister, Noble had clout, the power he never enjoyed before. And there was an element of fear involved. He wasn't sure if he could get out of the cult, and if he did, he wondered where he would go.
As he drove, Noble thought about everything especially his kids. He decided that he and his family would leave the church May 15, 1985, exactly eight years after they joined.
He would never leave on his own terms.
Under siege
For much of the early '80s, state and national law enforcement had kept an eye on the CSA.
Finally, in April 1985, authorities issued a warrant for CSA leader James Ellison's arrest for illegal possession of weapons. Given the fanatic nature of the group, Noble said officials knew that stepping on CSA grounds would result in a bloodbath: The property itself was an arsenal, containing stacks of machine guns, silencers, explosives and 30 gallons of cyanide with which they planned to poison New York City and Washington D.C.'s water supplies.
On presidential orders, April 15, 1985, 250 FBI agents, snipers and Arkansas state policemen set up roadblocks and surrounded the property. Both sides waited for the war to begin. Several hours into the siege, Noble lifted his hands into the air and went to negotiate with the then-FBI commander Danny Coulson.
"Look up," Coulson told him. "If anyone fires a shot, we have a helicopter and 50 caliber guns waiting for you."
Noble liked him immediately. For the next four days, he relayed messages back and forth between Ellison and Coulson. The CSA had been waiting for this moment for years and were prepared with enough kerosene and food to last a lifetime. Thinking the end was near, Noble said his final goodbyes to his family and friends, but on the fourth day, Ellison surrendered.
"I don't think he was prepared to die," Noble explained.
The men filed out of the compound, singing a church song. Noble cried the entire way.
"I so hated what was going on, but at the same time I was glad it was going on, I was glad that it was over. So was my life and everything that I had," Noble said.
Noble was sentenced to two years in prison, Ellison to 20 years. CSA member Wayne Snell, convicted of murdering the Arkansas trooper, died by lethal injection in April 1995.
From hate to hope
While his wife and kids stayed with their grandparents, Noble was incarcerated in a federal maximum security prison in Memphis, Tenn. After he was released, he moved to Ft. Worth, Texas, and started picking up the pieces of his shattered life.
"For almost a third of my life, I hadn't been a part of society," Noble said.
He struggled to find employment; "felon" didn't exactly make his resume shine. And he grappled with guilt and the knowledge that he had attempted to destroy lives. To some degree, Noble takes responsibility for atrocities such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
His healing began in 1991, when he called the Anti-Defamation League and tearfully apologized for what he had done. He also joined a local Toastmaster's speaking group, which gave him an outlet to speak of his experiences. His autobiography, "Tabernacle of Hate," was published in 1998.
In 1995, several weeks before the Oklahoma City bombings, the FBI contacted him, hoping to gain insight into the radical religious movements. Today, he advises them regularly. He also speaks several times a year at schools, churches and other forums sometimes with Coulson, who retired in 1997.
After the siege, Noble made a friend out of an enemy: when it ended, he and Coulson developed a friendship. Today, they exchange e-mails several times a week and eat dinner together often. Their wives are also good friends.
Coulson spent most of his career dealing with terrorists and racists he arrested Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted of the Oklahoma City bombings. Still, he has never seen a rehabilitation comparable to Noble's.
"When a person risks his life to tell the truth, you have to give him credibility," Coulson said.
Noble wants to put the past behind him. It is hard for him to remember what he has done, and he doesn't want to remember. But he has to. Sharing his story has become his inherent duty.
The nights are often the hardest. Vivid nightmares still torment his sleep. And sometimes laying in bed late at night, he wrestles with "if only" thoughts.
"If I had been stronger in my convictions instead of submissive, if I had questioned the beliefs more strongly ... it's so easy for me to say I should have known better," Noble said. "There's a lot of shame, and there's a lot of reminders."
From Hate to Hope Dallas Morning News, 05/16/98, by Victoria Loe Hicks
DFW - Like Timothy McVeigh, Kerry Noble knows what it feels like to deliver a bomb to a building full of unsuspecting people.
Unlike Mr. McVeigh, he never learned what it feels like to detonate it. When the moment came to set the timer, Mr. Noble chose to pick up his briefcase full of explosives and walk away.
His target one day in 1984 was a gay church in Kansas City, Mo. His object was to secure a place in the Kingdom of God. After aborting the mission, he feared that, far from earning points in heaven, he had risked God's wrath.
"I knew I was taking a big chance," he said.
From 1977 until 1985, Mr. Noble was an elder in the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a small, isolated religious community that he now calls a cult.
CSA, hidden in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, embraced a violent, racist doctrine called Christian Identity. Its members believed they were called to make war on the United States government - a war that would usher in the apocalypse and the millennial rule of Christ.
They plotted to assassinate federal officials, poison municipal water supplies and bomb various sites, including the Oklahoma City federal building. Those plans failed, and CSA fell apart in 1985 when the FBI arrested its leaders.
Mr. Noble can't help but believe that Mr. McVeigh was following CSA's blueprint 10 years later when he chose the target for his attack.
After the bombing, "I prayed that it all be a coincidence, although I do not believe in coincidences," Mr. Noble wrote in a recently published memoir.
During the two-plus years he spent in prison after the demise of CSA, Mr. Noble sorted through the events and beliefs that had led him to the brink of mass murder. His book, Tabernacle of Hate (Voyageur), is his attempt to explain and, perhaps, to atone.
"I consider it a ministry," he said.
Nothing in his upbringing marked him as an incipient terrorist, Mr. Noble said. He grew up in Abilene, attending a Baptist church. Although he was somewhat sickly and his parents were divorced when he was 3, "my memories as a child were terrific," he said. The worst thing that befell him was moving twice during high school, which prevented him from being valedictorian. "That shot all of my dreams," he said, "everything I had planned for."
Then one night in 1972, after smoking marijuana, he had a dream in which God spoke to him, telling him he had the gifts of pastoring and teaching. He devoured the Bible and split with his Baptist church when one elder insisted that he teach doctrines that he felt were not supported by Scripture. Later, he enrolled in Christ for the Nations, a Pentecostal Bible school in Dallas.
What he hungered for, he said, was someone to follow, "someone who was in touch with God and could show me the path." He found that someone in 1977 when he and his wife visited friends who had joined a religious enclave called Zarephath-Horeb. Despite misgivings that the group might be a cult, Mr. Noble found himself powerfully drawn to its leader, James Ellison.
"I watched, mesmerized by Ellison, preaching like I'd never heard before," he wrote.
Zarephath-Horeb kept strictly apart from the surrounding society. Members practiced prophecy and interpreted virtually every event as some sort of sign from God. That filled a deep need, Mr. Noble said, the need not just to have faith but to know the mind of God.
In the beginning, Zarephath-Horeb saw itself as a refuge for the righteous, a place that would shelter the elect when God rained down tribulation during the last days. But preparedness became paranoia. Survivalism mutated into militancy. Books and tapes by various fringe preachers became pieces of a puzzle that, correctly deciphered, would reveal their destiny.
One preached that they must have guns to counter ZOG, the Zionist Occupational Government. Another touted Christian Identity, which says that white Americans are the lost tribes of Israel, while Jews are the product of a sexual union between Eve and Satan.
Zarephath-Horeb was renamed CSA. Residents began to consort with violent white supremacists: the Klan, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations and a group in eastern Oklahoma, Elohim City. Prophecies told James Ellison that he was sinless and invincible, the reincarnation of King David. He - and Mr. Noble - believed it.
"When you remain in isolation, a feeling of self-exultation sets in," Mr. Noble explained.
One thing his story proves is that racist, anti-government propaganda works, said Mark Briskman, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League's Dallas office. "Hate rhetoric really does matter," he said.
Through it all, though, Mr. Noble said, he was never really comfortable with the guns. And his misgivings magnified as one after another of CSA's terrorist plots went awry. The only two acts of violence that succeeded were both the work of one man, Richard Wayne Snell. Mr. Snell, who had ties to Elohim City, was captured after killing a black state trooper. He had already murdered a pawnshop owner, wrongly believing him to be Jewish.
Mr. Noble pleaded with Mr. Ellison to abandon violence and turn back to spiritual things. Then he felt like a traitor.
In a desperate bid to prove his loyalty, he traveled to Kansas City with a briefcase bomb. The target was an adult bookstore, but the owner would not let him take the briefcase inside. So the next morning, a Sunday, he sought out a gay church. As he sat among the worshipers, he writes in Tabernacle of Hate, "I tried to imagine how this one lone incident would start a revolution - and knew that it could not."
On April 19, 1985 - 10 years to the day before the Oklahoma City bombing - the FBI surrounded CSA, seeking to arrest Mr. Ellison. After four days of tense negotiations headed by Mr. Noble, CSA surrendered.
Mr. Noble pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to possess unregistered weapons and got five years. Mr. Ellison was sentenced to 20 years on more serious weapons charges. Mr. Snell was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.
Mr. Ellison completed his parole three days before the Oklahoma City bombing and moved to Elohim City. Mr. Snell was executed on the day of the bombing and is buried at Elohim City.
Two weeks before the bombing, Mr. McVeigh placed a phone call to Elohim City. Although that is almost the only documented link between the bomber and the earlier plotters, Mr. Noble believes there must have been others.
"I have no doubt that McVeigh had some contact with Snell," he said.
As for Mr. Noble, he has joined the other side. He advises the FBI and other law enforcement agencies about the dynamics of militaristic, right-wing religious groups.
His willingness not only to apologize but to reveal the inner workings of the Identity movement is "tremendously helpful," Mr. Briskman said.
Theologically, Mr. Noble has come to terms with his past by choosing to believe that CSA, all it did and all it stood for, were part of God's plan.
"I strongly believe in the sovereignty of God," he said. "I don't believe in free will. I believe that God is in control."
God, he said, had to shatter his idolatrous pride. Prison was the tool, and CSA was God's way of getting him to prison. Does that mean, then, that the Oklahoma City bombing was within God's intention?
"Nothing has ever gotten out of his control," he replied. "Not Oklahoma City, not CSA."
On the other hand, he believes that each person bears responsibility for his own acts - a paradox he accepts even though he can't understand it.
He does not feel at home in denominational churches, which he still finds shallow, but he yearns to pastor some kind of church. His desire is tinged with misgiving.
"I have a lot of fear of rejection. Would people listen to a guy who's been through what I've been through?"
