MILL POINT, W.Va. - The remote compound of the National Alliance sits almost a mile into the woods at the end of a nearly washed-out dirt trail barely wide enough for a car.
The main building is a simple two-story office structure that William L. Pierce, the neo-Nazi organization's founder, designed and built himself. A large 'life rune,' which looks like a cross with uplifted arms, marks its facade.
Six years after the Oklahoma City bombing, Pierce, the man whose novel is believed to have inspired the bombing, is prospering, his dream of a whites-only nation bolstered by a growing number of ardent followers.
Watchdog groups consider him their No. 1 threat. According to one such group, the Anti-Defamation League, dozens of violent crimes in the past several years - including murders, bombings and robberies - have been traced to Alliance members or appear to have been inspired by the group's propaganda.
The attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. The convicted bomber, Timothy McVeigh, is scheduled to be executed May 16.
The bomb's aftershock of publicity has been good for business, Pierce said last week in an interview at his compound.
'It frightened some people, and we lost some members who were afraid of the publicity,' he said. 'But it probably gave us more name recognition, and therefore we were able to recruit more people.'
Tall and trim and bespectacled, wearing a double-breasted suit as he shambled among the handful of buildings on his 400-acre mountaintop compound - at times stooping under a conference table and chairs to retrieve Hadley, his Siamese cat - Pierce, 67, more resembled the university physics professor he once was than the strident ideologue he has become.
His boxlike headquarters houses the studio where he records his 30-minute weekly radio address, 'American Dissident Voices.' Other offices contain video equipment and computers.
Pierce employs a salaried worker in the San Francisco Bay area to maintain the National Alliance's Internet site.
'We've got to be quick to use it, just as our Hebrew brothers were quick to use television in the '30s,' an employee at the compound said. He refused to give his name.
In all, 10 salaried employees assist Pierce at his compound, filling orders and creating recruitment materials. Another employee in Cleveland runs Resistance Records.
Inside the compound's offices, idealized paintings and drawings of Aryans hang neatly on the walls. A black-and-white photograph depicts a two-story outhouse. Its top floor is labeled 'Whites'; its bottom door, 'Colored.' The caption reads, 'The Natural Order.'
Across the office building's courtyard, Pierce has added a Quonset hut warehouse for books, compact discs and other materials distributed by his various subsidiaries. Beside the warehouse sits a garage big enough to house a backhoe. A few modest wood-frame houses dot the hillsides.
Farther up the mountain, Pierce sometimes retreats to fire off a few rounds from his 12-gauge shotgun, his M1-A semiautomatic military rifle and his Glock .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.
'I like to be proficient with the weapons I depend upon,' he said.
His home and his family remain off-limits to the media.
If he could, Pierce would return the favor McVeigh has granted him. He would tell McVeigh - who has declined to appeal his sentence or delay the execution date - to keep fighting.
'I'd tell him to 'Hey, put it off. Stall this thing off. The revolution may come before your execution date.''
McVeigh, Pierce said, 'seems to be a guy with a very strong sense of ethics, a very soldierly sort of person. And he decided it was his responsibility to tell the government that 'Hey, we're not going to tolerate that kind of behavior. And if you treat us that way, we're going to treat you that way.''
Yet Pierce thinks McVeigh made a mistake when he bombed the federal building.
'I don't think it was very useful, and I wouldn't have done that,' Pierce said. 'And I've often said in my radio programs that what we need is not random acts expressing our personal feelings but organized activity if we're ever going to turn things around.'
Today the soft-spoken and seemingly mild-mannered Pierce is regarded as the most dangerous hate-group leader in the country by organizations that monitor extremists.
'No other hate group has been so successful in capitalizing on technology, both for moneymaking sort of ventures and for recruitment and indoctrination,' said Joel Ratner, who oversees the Cleveland office of the Anti-Defamation League.
The Ku Klux Klan, by comparison, is 'down at the heels,' Ratner said.
Ratner monitors a region that includes western Pennsylvania, where he says National Alliance activity is on the rise.
Though Pierce won't release membership information, his estimated overall following - which includes members who pay monthly dues of at least $10, as well as regular listeners to his broadcasts and visitors to his Internet Web page - numbers in the tens of thousands. He said the biggest spike in membership has come in the years since the bombing.
Times have changed.
When he founded the National Alliance in the early 1970s, Pierce had hoped to advance the goals of the American Nazi Party, without all the uniforms and flags. Such theatrics didn't seem right to him.
But at first his following remained pitifully small. Then came Pierce's 1978 novel, 'The Turner Diaries,' and ultimately McVeigh.
The novel, which Pierce wrote under the name Andrew Macdonald, describes a racist, anti-Semitic underground that bombs the FBI headquarters and the Pentagon as its members take over the United States. The Aryans drop atomic bombs on several East Coast cities, purge the country of nonwhites and launch a nuclear attack on the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv.
The novel taught Pierce an important lesson about trying to communicate in the television age. Before he published 'Diaries,' Pierce had struggled to drum up support for his ideas in scholarly essays and articles in various National Alliance publications. With the success of the novel, he said, came the realization that the best way to advance his message was through entertainment.
To date, 'Diaries' has sold about 350,000 copies through Pierce's National Vanguard Books.
Now Pierce promotes the National Alliance through a sophisticated Web site, through weekly radio broadcasts also available on the Internet, and through neo-Nazi comic books and compact discs of neo-Nazi bands. The CDs he distributes through Resistance Records, which has estimated yearly sales of $1 million.
'We're trying to get people in the right frame of mind,' Pierce said, 'to persuade them that they need to make up their minds now that they will do whatever is necessary.'
For now, Pierce said, the National Alliance favors this nonviolent approach.
'I believe there is violence ahead,' Pierce said. 'But certainly we are not in the business of promoting violence now, because we couldn't possibly succeed. We're far outgunned.'
But there has been violence, some of it close to home.
In February 2000, Michael Stehle, a 26-year-old National Alliance member from Pittsburgh's South Side, was charged in the shooting death of Brian Hartzell, 24, of Oakland. The charges were dropped because prosecutors concluded Stehle acted in self-defense.
'He should've gotten a medal for it, but instead there was a big hassle,' Pierce said.
Police said Hartzell belonged to Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, a group that claims to fight against white supremacists. Hartzell and another man entered Stehle's apartment and ultimately pulled a pistol on Stehle's roommate, police said. Stehle, also armed, shot Hartzell in the head.
'These were 'nice liberal boys' that came into his house, and 'he's a bad racist,'' Pierce said. 'Therefore, they couldn't quite come to grips with it. ... I think the local (district attorney) was sweating it. He was saying, 'If I drop charges against this guy, the Jews are going to be on my a-.''
In August, U.S. marshals arrested a German fugitive who they said had been staying at Pierce's compound for months. Hendrik Albert Viktor Moebus, 24, was wanted in Germany, where he was in violation of his parole for kidnapping and murder convictions.
While still a teen-ager, police said, Moebus had lured another youth, whom he considered a 'non-Aryan,' to an apartment and strangled him. Moebus left Germany last March, after breaking parole by making extremist comments about the victim and giving the Nazi salute during right-wing gatherings.
Undercover marshals watched Moebus at the compound for two weeks, waiting for him to leave. When he did, they arrested him without incident.
Pierce wasn't charged. He said last week that Moebus spent about 10 weeks as a guest at the compound and consulted Pierce about resistance music in Europe. Pierce said Moebus is a victim of liberal politics and that the murder he was convicted of wasn't a hate crime but a case of schoolyard rivalry.
Though not a recognized National Alliance member, Richard Baumhammers often visited Internet sites that contained National Alliance material, prosecutors said last week.
Baumhammers, 35, of Mt. Lebanon, is accused of killing five people, all religious or ethnic minorites, and wounding a sixth last year in a rampage through Allegheny and Beaver counties.
The suspended immigration attorney had founded his own group, the Free Market Party, which he hoped to use to purge nonwhites from the country.
Pierce said he had never had any contact with Baumhammers.
But Pierce agrees with Baumhammers' goals.
'I just want to get America to be a white, European community again,' Pierce said. 'By whatever means necessary.'
Chuck Plunkett Jr. can be reached at cplunkett@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7996.
