Searchlight investigates the recent London bombing campaign
Searchlight June 1999
Terror in London
Searchlight
investigates the recent London bombing campaign
Three weekends, three bombs. Three dead and over a hundred injured. London's multicultural society came under deadly attack from a nazi bomber hell bent on death and destruction. While Britain has experienced nazi violence before, even bombs, the indiscriminate nature of these attacks is certainly a new development.
Hours after the third and most deadly bomb, police arrested 22-year-old David Copeland at his home in Cove, Farnborough. Among his possessions, police found bomb making equipment. Two days later, Copeland was charged with detonating all three bombs. While his arrest might have ended this present bombing campaign, it is unlikely to be the last.
Within hours of his arrest, police were confidently asserting that Copeland was acting alone and had no connections with any nazi organisations. "It is understood he was acting alone for his own motives," David Veness, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told journalists.
Whether the police truly believed that Copeland had no links, or were saying it for political reasons remains to be seen. Certainly anti-fascists in other countries, particularly Germany, are well versed in the lone lunatic theory propounded by the authorities to explain nazi terror attacks.
Due to reporting restrictions Searchlight is unable to add any further information about Copeland, except to say that a different story may emerge during and after the trial.
While the police ponder Copeland's motives, the three bomb targets should give everyone a clear indication of the bomber's political persuasion. The targets represent everything nazis despise about modern Britain. Brixton, symbolically the heart of London's Afro-Caribbean community; Brick Lane, home to the greatest concentration of Bangladeshis outside Bangladesh; and Soho, the heart of London's "out" gay community.
These areas have long been highlighted as potential targets in nazi publications. And since 1992 and the formation of Combat 18 (C18) the strategy of violence has permeated more deeply into British nazi ideology.
In fact British nazis have long used violence for political ends, including bombings and arson, but the indiscriminate nature of these recent attacks is witness to the growing importance of American nazi ideology. Just as Timothy McVeigh targeted a public building regardless of civilian casualties, so some British nazis deem everyone within society to be potential and justifiable targets.
Four nazi groups claimed responsibility for at least one of the bombs, although only two, the White Wolves and C18, claimed them all. While Searchlight immediately dismissed the claims from C18, the White Wolves were a far more serious proposition.
As Searchlight reported last month, an anonymous document carrying the name White Wolves was circulated around the nazi movement in the mid-nineties. It outlined a strategy that the writers believed would ignite a race war in Britain.
"Our main line of attack must be on the immigrant communities themselves, the black and Asian ghettos," the document said. "If this is done regularly, effectively and brutally, the aliens will respond by attacking whites at random, forcing them off the fence and into self-defence. This will begin a spiral of violence which will force the Establishment's hand on the race issue."
The White Wolves document details possible attacks, bomb manuals and counter-surveillance tactics. It is classic leaderless resistance. "We do not believe that we alone can win the race war, but we can start it," it concludes.
It may be a complete coincidence, but only days before the first bomb, warning letters were circulated in the name of the White Wolves stating their intention to begin a terrorist campaign. In addition, the leader of the north of England division of C18, which also operated under the name C18 White Wolves, apparently disappeared at the beginning of the year.
Although the White Wolves claimed the bombs, it may turn out that they have no direct connection to the bomber, but that a group using the name as a title of convenience is quite independently moving towards a similar terrorist strategy. Days before the Soho bomb, Mansfield Unemployed Workers Centre was attacked in broad daylight. The same day the local newspaper received a letter from the White Wolves warning of an imminent attack on a May Day event usually held on first Monday in May.
The night before the Chesterfield May Day demonstration, one of the largest in Britain, a car was stolen in a nearby town. After a car chase, the police recovered the car in Chesterfield and found a large amount of explosives and other components for making a time-delayed bomb. The two male occupants fled.
It may be a coincidence, but nevertheless, very worrying. Alternatively, one cannot rule out the possibility that the claims were being made by friends of the bomber to mislead the authorities.
While most people, especially Londoners, were genuinely horrified by the bombings, some racists and nazis have been inspired by the three attacks. In a series of seemingly unrelated incidents, a number of violent racist attacks have been reported from across the country. In Chichester, Sussex, an Asian shop was firebombed, as was a balti takeaway in the Lancashire town of Whitworth. In Sheffield, in an incident that went unreported in the local press, a racist youth was arrested after a suspect package was left in an Asian shop. And a man is in custody in Ipswich after bomb-making materials and an illegal firearm were found at his home.
The beginning of the spiral of violence outlined in the White Wolves document did in fact occur in east London. Minutes after the Brick Lane bomb a gang of racists gathered in a nearby pub to shout abuse at local Asians. It took local community leaders to prevent 150 Asian youths from attacking the pub.
There were several other racial incidents elsewhere in the area. Racists tried to set alight the Teviot Community Shop in Poplar, while, in what was apparently a revenge attack for the Brick Lane bomb, a mixed race boy was attacked by a gang of 15 Asians.
While most British far-right organisations have publicly distanced themselves from the bombing, fearing a crackdown from the authorities, there is enormous glee among their members. In a country which has had little history of nazi terrorism, nazis now realise the enormous impact a few crude devices can have.
The bombing campaign has been seven years coming. It is not likely to be the last. Ignored by the authorities for so long, the far-right terrorist has now been unleashed on Britain.
The recent bombings in London mark a radical new departure for Britain's nazis. Inspired by strategies that have been tried and tested in the United States, the nazis, whose support in the general population is tiny, hope to further their goals by acts of violence.
They are influenced by two competing strategies. The first involves setting up cells which have no physical connection with one another. The second consists of individuals taking action to raise racial tension so that a racist organisation can feed off it. Neither strategy has succeeded in dominating the British extreme right; it has become informed by both.
Violence has always played a central role in the practice of nazi organisations and their adherents. The use of terror to intimidate their enemies has been the Hitlerites' modus operandi since the first nazis polished their jackboots before sticking them down their enemies' throats. The far right has traditionally used terror tactics to attack opponents and enemies of the "white race" while at the same time maintaining a façade of pursuing a democratic road. When the democratic road appears to reach a dead end though, terror is all they are left with.
In the postwar period numerous terrorist outrages have been carried out by a variety of fascist groups in Europe. Murderous bombings have taken place in Munich, Paris and Bologna among other places.
Britain too has seen bombings. Immediately after the Second World War a number of nazi bombings of Jewish targets were carried out. In 1962 the Karl Marx memorial and the offices of the Jewish Chronicle, both in London, were bombed with plastic explosives. Around the same time a national newspaper revealed that nazis had been carrying out bomb practice sessions in the New Forest in Hampshire.
When four nazis were tried in December 1962 for organising the paramilitary organisation Spearhead, one item of evidence was a can of weedkiller, an ingredient used for bomb making. The wording on the can had been changed from "weedkiller" to "Jewkiller". The defendants, who included the two most important postwar figures in Britain's nazi movement, John Tyndall and Colin Jordan, were all found guilty.
In more recent years some fascist attacks have been carried out with what amounts to crude bombs, such as a blowtorch trained on a butane gas cylinder. In 1981 nazis planned to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival, but the plot was exposed.
One of the most disturbing acts was the attempt by a leading British National Party member, Tony Wells (aka Lecomber), to blow up the headquarters of the Workers Revolutionary Party with a nail bomb in 1985. Wells was convicted of that offence and of possession of electronic detonators and home-made hand grenades. He was given a paltry three-year sentence, which shows the lack of seriousness with which the judicial system treats nazi violence.
Traditionally the hallmark of nazi terror in Britain has been the petrol bomb. The majority of nazi violence in Britain has been directed at specific individuals, organisations or communal institutions, rather than randomly targeted. There have been several occasions when letter bombs have been sent through the post to anti-fascists and others, for example. Fortunately, through a combination of vigilance and luck, most of these attempts have been relatively unsuccessful.
The best known publication advocating a nazi terror strategy was William Pierce's book, The Turner Diaries, published in 1978. Several hundred thousand copies of this fictionalised account of a coming "race war" have been sold around the world.
Written by the leader of the National Alliance, The Turner Diaries depicts an underground army that foments race war in the 1990s against a Jewish-controlled American government (the Zionist Occupation Government, ZOG). The secret leadership, known as The Order, oversees a truck bombing of the FBI headquarters and a mortar attack on the Capitol building. The organisation itself is organised in small cells. The whites win in the end after gaining territory in southern California, massacring Jews and minorities, and commandeering nuclear missiles to attack Israel. The year is 1999.
In the 1980s The Turner Diaries inspired a real underground organisation also known as The Order. The Order carried out armoured car robberies to the tune of $6 million (£3.75 million) to fund the movement and carried out a high profile killing of a Jewish radio talk show host, Alan Berg. They also bombed a synagogue, killed a police officer and one of their own members who became suspect.
Most of The Order's members were arrested in 1984 and 1985. Their leader, Robert Jay Mathews, became engaged in a fierce machine gun battle with the authorities, which ended with his death inside a burning building. Mathews gained instant status as a martyr.
It was not only The Order that was inspired by The Turner Diaries. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested by the US authorities for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, he had in his possession a copy of the book.
The American extreme right was forced to reconsider its strategy of creating large guerrilla groups in the light of the Order arrests. There are now two main strategies that compete with each other. The first is set out in Pierce's second novel, Hunter. In this book a "lone hunter" carries out a series of killings, starting with multiracial couples whom he shoots. His aim is to raise the political temperature in order to create better conditions under which a racist organisation can operate.
Competing for the hearts and minds of racists is the strategy of leaderless resistance, developed by Louis Beam, former Texas Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. After the Order members were brought to trial for criminal racketeering in 1985, Louis Beam was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for his association with the terror organisation. He was arrested in Mexico and was one of ten people who faced trial for seditious conspiracy. He escaped justice when a jury acquitted him in 1988.
Beam's leaderless resistance is based on the ideas of Colonel Ulius Louis Amoss, who first described the strategy on 17 April 1962 as a means of defeating a perceived communist takeover. As Beam developed the theory, working from his own experiences, the main threat became no longer communism, but the US government.
Leaderless resistance was devised as a way of defeating state infiltration. It advocates forming small cells of between two and five, which operate autonomously but follow a similar ideological path. Crucially, there is no central organisation. Infiltration therefore can only lead to the destruction of one cell, leaving the rest intact. Leaderless resisters are encouraged to carry out racist attacks and attacks on government.
Beam began advocating leaderless resistance in 1983, but it took the experience of The Order for it to have a major national, and now international, impact. It was popularised after 400 law enforcement officers laid siege to a white supremacist family in 1992.
Followers of Pierce still believe in the Führer Principle, namely that leadership is absolutely necessary, while those who follow Beam argue that the present circumstances make leaderless resistance a necessity.
British nazis have been able to obtain Pierce's National Alliance material easily through mail order companies advertised in Spearhead, BNP leader John Tyndall's monthly magazine, among other places. This has certainly been the case since the early 1980s. In fact, so enamoured was the BNP with this terror advocate that he was a guest speaker at the party's annual rally in 1995.
Leaderless resistance was first advocated in Britain in the early 1990s by Combat 18. As well as writing about the strategy in its own publication, which was called The Order, Combat 18 also distributed old copies of Beam's quarterly journal, The Seditionist.
The terminology and ideas of the US far right are now used by all the various nazi groups. In 1995 a disturbing document headed "White Wolves" was published anonymously (see Searchlight, May 1999). It represented an attempt to develop a terror strategy in Britain following ideas from the USA. Dedicated to Robert Jay Mathews, it argued for classic leaderless resistance, yet at the same time urged readers not to leave the organisations they had already joined as that would attract attention. Pointing to anti-black riots in British history, it argued that such riots could be sparked off again by, among other things, bombing black communities.
The document is inspired by both Pierce and Beam and British nazis are drawing on both sets of ideas to create a strategy that will work for them. The contradictions of the US strategies have become more apparent in their application to circumstances elsewhere, and this has forced the British nazis to develop their own path. But the graphic violence of Pierce's novels and Beam's leaderless resistance make a dangerous cocktail.
The fact that weapons are generally not easy to come by in Britain compared to the USA, for example, creates special difficulties for British nazis. The presence of supporters of Combat 18 and other nazi organisations in the British armed forces is a time-bomb just ticking away. In the light of the recent bombings it is astonishing that this situation is allowed to persist.
It may be coincidence that the first bomb, in Brixton, went off on 17 April, the anniversary of the first publication of the leaderless resistance theory. This was also two days before the anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing and three days before Hitler's birthday.
Even though the strategy contained in The Turner Diaries has effectively been rendered obsolete by the far-right, it still offers a chilling insight into what they have to offer the British public. Referring to Europe in 1999, Pierce wrote:
"... a cleansing hurricane of change swept over the continent, clearing away in a few months the refuse of a millennium or more of alien ideology and a century or more of profound moral and material decadence. The blood flowed ankle-deep in the streets of many of Europe's great cities momentarily, as the race traitors, the offspring of Gastarbeiter met a common fate. Then the great dawn of the New Era broke over the western world."
What will it take for the government to see the relationship between material that incites racism and racial violence? Will we have to see more deaths before those that distribute and publish these provocations are prosecuted for inciting racial hatred and the other criminal acts in which they are engaged? The laws exists to do it, all that is required is the political will to act.
Britain's nazi groups all publicly condemned the three London bombings and distanced themselves from the perpetrator of this terrorism. The British National Party (BNP) described it as "a wicked nail bomb campaign", while Combat 18 (C18) leaders told the press of their disgust at the indiscriminate nature of the blasts.
That said, most put another spin on it. The National Front led the way with a claim that the bombings were the natural result of Britain's multicultural society. An NF statement released to the press read: "We are not completely surprised that such a scenario has come to pass. For many years now, the long suffering white communities across London and our other major cities have been ignored, oppressed and victimised by successive British governments and the controlled media ... branded as idiots at best, reviled as violent thugs at worst. Is it any wonder then that some individuals feel the need to resort to acts of violence to get their message across."
Most groups saw the dark hand of the state involved. The skinhead leaders of the Blood and Honour movement thought it was a state plot to close down their music operation, while the BNP saw it as an attempt to undermine the the party's European election campaign.
"Who gains from this affair?" the BNP noted on its Internet site. "Some neo-nazi individual or group who dislikes us for our legitimate [sic] democratic approach to the dismantling of British society ... The left who wish to use the bombings against us in a reverse of the manner Hitler used the burning down of the German parliament building, by a crazed former communist individual, to justify a crack-down on left-wing groups. Thirdly, the Government, which can present itself as opposed to terrorism, a repository of law, order, and civilisation, and, like the left, use public outrage to suppress politically incorrect views."
In its monthly magazine Spearhead, the BNP even suggests that the bombs might have been the work of the security services in a bid to justify the banning of the BNP. Citing the revelation that Charlie Sargent, C18's original leader, had been working as an informant for the police, Spearhead concludes: "Even with Sargent in prison, it is quite feasible that the State is still guiding or using the organisation it helped create."
Such nonsense disguises the part that the BNP, C18 and others have played in this event. Even if not directly involved their literature continues to inspire people to violence.
Amnesia has descended on the BNP and other groups on possible links with the alleged bomber. Rather than accepting their responsibility in promoting racial hatred, they squirm around in paranoid delusion, denial and self-importance.
If the BNP is really genuine about its opposition to the bombings, and more general racial violence, it would shop its members who carry out such acts. Their silence is very telling.
Amid the understandable fear and concern generated by the three bombs, London's multicultural communities stood together in defiance of this threat. The gay community marched alongside the black community and the Jewish commnity provided assistance on community safety for the Asian communities.
As the racist nature of the first bomb in Brixton became apparent, all of London's diverse communities were put on standby for possible attacks. The concern was made worse by the hoax calls that were made across the capital. In Hackney alone, there were 40 scares in the week leading up to the third bomb. In east London police carried out a controlled explosion on a suspect car. While it proved not to be a bomb, it only added to the unease in the local community.
The second bomb in Brick Lane reinforced the threat to London's people, yet out of the apprehension came a determination to resist this danger.
In Southall, supporters of The Monitoring Group acted as stewards to patrol the local shopping streets. In north and northeast London volunteers of the Community Security Trust, the defence body of the Jewish community, provided a similar service in areas with a high Jewish population. For both groups, their presence was to reassure local residents as much as it was to search the area for possible devices.
It was the third and most deadly bomb that highlighted the true nature of the fascist threat. Targeting the gay community in Soho, the bomber reminded us all that fascism threatens more than just black and Asian people. Even the labour movement was put on standby after a threat in the name of the White Wolves was made to a May Day event.
There were several protests, marches and vigils held across London to demonstrate united opposition to the nazi bomb campaign. The largest event occurred a day after the Soho bomb when several thousand people marched from Brixton, the site of the first bomb, to central London. Members of the gay community joined with the black and Asian communities, anti-racists and trade unionists to show their disgust at the bombs but their determination to remain defiant.
In another protest, 2,000 people gathered in Soho for a vigil for those who had died. The gathering was addressed by Angela Mason of Stonewall. "Nobody, but nobody, is going to bomb us back into the closet."
As people were gathering to commemorate those butchered and maimed in the Soho bomb attack, the Metropolitan Police announced the formation of a new task force to tackle racist crimes and extremists.
So eager was Scotland Yard's press department, to break the news that some of the squads that the announcement stated would be involved in the task force had not even been told consulted. What has emerged is a more robust and streamlined operation that will draw on the best available intelligence, technology and detectives at the Yard and beyond.
Yet this announcement is a recognition of the severe shortcomings in the Met's investigation into the bombings and racist and nazi crime more generally.
Firstly there has been the apparent lack of co-ordination of intelligence on the far right, both in London and nationally. Internal bickering and jealousy between rival departments hampered the investigation from the start, with information seemingly not being shared or even passed on.
While some police units were genuinely willing to cooperate and collect information from local community groups and non-governmental monitoring organisations, the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), who ran the investigation, lacked this approach.
The fact that the ATS ran the investigation at all raised some eyebrows. As was obvious during a Scotland Yard briefing the day before the Soho bomb, deputy Assistant Commissioner Alan Fry had no proper grasp of the nazi threat the capital was facing. No one denies that he is a highly skilled and experienced officer, nor that his investigating team did not perform a remarkable piece of detective work in uncovering the alleged bomber, but his unit's training had been almost exclusively directed at republican and loyalist terrorism.
During the enquiry, police forces around the country were asked to identify far-right targets and activities, especially those with violent or even terrorist connotations. It was only during this process that a host of other incidents emerged. Not only were departments not talking to each other, but information that had been held at a regional level for years had not been passed on to a central clearing house.
This is not just an organisational and intelligence deficiency confined to the bombing investigation, but something far more fundamental. As mentioned elsewhere in this magazine, the bombings have been seven years coming. It was with the emergence of Combat 18 (C18) that the US-inspired theories of domestic terrorism began to permeate into the British far right. Within a few years theories of ZOG control, The Turner Diaries and the story of The Order, a US terrorist group operating during the mid-1980s, held influence throughout the movement, even within elements of the BNP which, in 1995, invited William Pierce to speak at its rally. Pierce is leader of the neo-nazi National Alliance and author of the terrorist bible, The Turner Diaries.
While most of those regurgitating this domestic terrorism were never going to undertake such actions, it was only a matter of time before somebody did. In January 1997, C18 initiated a letter bomb campaign from Denmark. Just before Christmas 1998, the security services were again alerted that C18 was linking up with similar groups in Europe for another campaign.
However, complacency was still the order of the day, especially in London. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch briefings on the far right, which are circulated around the country, repeatedly underestimated this move to violence.
It is not as though they had not been warned. In 1993 Searchlight's submission to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee's enquiry into racial harassment and attacks had condemned the narrow thinking of those tasked with gathering intelligence on far-right groups within the police and security services and the resultant lack of hard intelligence and research.
For example, the Chief Constable of Sussex, Sir Paul Whitehouse, told the committee that, according to Special Branch and the Security Services, no formal links existed between far-right organisations in Britain and their counterparts overseas, only some minor individual contacts.
Searchlight had just delivered to the hearing a transcript of intercepted computer disks to British and other European nazi groups by the so-called National Socialist German Workers' Party Overseas Organisation (NSDAP-AO), run from the USA by Gary Lauck. The encrypted disks included bomb making instructions and a simple formula for making napalm.
Once again the police understanding of the nazi threat was lacking. Simply looking for firm organisational links overlooked the ideological influence that was creeping into Britain. Despite assurances to the committee, the police were never to contact Searchlight about the disk.
Four years on and the situation had not really changed. In October 1997 Searchlight responded to a Home Office consultation document on racial violence and harassment by highlighting the low standard of police investigations in this area and the failure all the way up the line, through the Crown Prosecution Service to the Attorney-General, to take these criminals and their activities seriously.
It was not laws that were lacking, Searchlight reported at the time, but the will to investigate and prosecute.
During one investigation in the mid-1990's, the Attorney-General threw out the case because the only evidence submitted was of anti-Jewish and anti-police hate material being sent to Jews and the police respectively. It was decided that no crime had been committed because these groups could not be incited by the material to commit criminal acts against themselves.
However, among other documents seized but not properly processed were sales records and invoices with the names of dozens if not hundreds of people in far right groups up and down the country, proving a much wider illegal distribution of the hate material.
Even when the authorities did prosecute, it was often limited. In 1998 Leighton Jones was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for producing the highly illegal Barbecue in Rostock CD by the C18 band No Remorse. And even then it was only after Searchlight forced the CD manufacturers into calling in the police.
Leighton Jones was C18's patsy. If the police and CPS had decided to use the law to its full extent, at least eight other people, including the band members, could have been prosecuted. This would not only have destroyed C18's music, and thereby its fundraising, operations, but have taken out several key activists.
Police lack of interest in nazi terrorism is not new. In the mid-1980s Searchlight warned the police that Tony Lecomber, a leading activist in the British National Party, was manufacturing bombs and attempting to set up a cross-party nazi hit squad. The response from a senior officer at Scotland Yard was that Lecomber "is just a wanker and could not possibly make a bomb". A week later Lecomber detonated a nail bomb in a car outside the south London headquarters of a left-wing group. Police who raided his home found electronic detonators and home-made hand grenades.
In March Searchlight exclusively revealed the presence of over a dozen serving soldiers with links to neo-nazi groups. Despite holding an internal investigation over 18 months earlier, the Army and the police had failed to act.
The lack of cooperation between London and provincial forces has also hampered investigations. On several occasions police and Special Branch officers in several parts of the country have come to Searchlight for information, because Special Branch in London was either unable or unwilling to provide the necessary intelligence.
One cannot separate policing terrorism from the wider issue of racism within the police force. How can we expect the police to take racism and fascism seriously when racism within the force is overlooked?
Likewise, training police officers to fully understand the nazi mindset, literature and activities is severely lacking.
Largely in response to the McPherson enquiry, the Metropolitan Police launched CO24, the Violent and Racial Crime Task Force, under the directorship of Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve. It was Grieve's intention that for the first time community involvement would play a central role both in tackling such crimes, and in rewriting some of the police service's basic manuals on racial crime and delivering a more equal service to all citizens.
The unit not only supported the use of low-level community-based intelligence but also recognised that bodies such as Searchlight could provide valuable hard information on violent and organised racists.
To achieve these aims an advisory panel of mainly lay members was formed. Its terms of reference included assisting the director in reviews of racial and violent crime cases, advising on strategy, improving community confidence in the police and developing an understanding of the concerns of minority ethnic groups.
The nazi bombings presented CO24 with its first major challenge. While CO24 has been removed from the main bombing investigation, the creation of a wider task force may see Grieve's unit come into its own, with its eyes and ears rooted at community level and the use of outside sources of intelligence.
However, to achieve its stated goals, both CO24 and the Metropolitan Police as a whole, need to work in cooperation both with itself and outside bodies. Anything less and many lay members of Grieve's group are likely to resign.
There now seems a genuine desire not to be caught out again. Hopefully the police and Home Secretary will learn the lessons of past failures.
While Searchlight is grateful for the kind words directed at it by the Home Secretary Jack Straw during a Commons debate on the bombing, we hope that he will he will take an equally positive and pro-active stand is seeing through these improvements.
For the new task force to succeed, it not only needs to work together and with outside bodies, but to change the mindset that has dominated police thinking for so long.
Copyright © 1999, Searchlight,
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