MOUNT OLIVE, N.C. (AP) β The U.S. military trained him in explosives and battlefield tactics. Now the Iraq War veteran and enlisted National Guard member was calling for taking up arms against police and government officials in his own country.
Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as βThe End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.β In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up toΒ the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a βfatal funnelβ booby trap to inflict mass casualties.
While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthurβs wifeβs ex-husband about Arthurβs increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.
Arthur isnβt an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with theΒ Jan. 6 insurrection.
At the same time, while the pace at which the overall population has been radicalizing increased in recent years, people with military backgrounds have been radicalizing at a faster rate. Their extremist plots were also more likely to involve weapons training or firearms than plots that didnβt include someone with a military background, according to an Associated Press analysis of domestic terrorism data obtained exclusively by the AP. This held true whether or not the plots were executed.
While the number of people involved remains small, the participation of active military and veterans gave extremist plots more potential for mass injury or death, according to data collected and analyzed by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.Β START researchers foundΒ that more than 80% of extremists with military backgrounds identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the rest split among far-left, jihadist or other motivations.
In the shadow of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol β led in part by veterans β and aΒ closely contested presidential election, law enforcement officials have said the threat fromΒ domestic violent extremistsΒ is one of the most persistent and pressing terror threats to the United States. However, despite the increasing participation in extremist activity by those with military experience, there is still no force-wide system to track it. And the AP learned that Defense Department researchers developed a promising approach to detect and monitor extremism that the Pentagon has chosen not to use.
As part of its investigation, the AP vetted and added to the data and analyses provided by START, and collected thousands of pages of records and hours of audio and video recordings through public records requests.
Free of scrutiny in Mount Olive, Arthur stockpiled weapons, some with the serial numbers scratched off to make them untraceable. He trained a pack of Doberman pinschers as guard dogs. He rigged his old farmhouse, where he lived with his wife, their three kids and two children from her previous marriage, with improvised explosives, including a bomb hidden on the front porch and wired to a switch inside.
As early as 2017, his wifeβs former husband had reported concerns about his children’s safety to military, federal and local authorities, according to call records and police reports.
All the while, Arthur continued growing his business and connecting with more like-minded individuals.
In early 2020, a man with a raging hatred for police and an interest in building a militia in Virginia came to the farm, eager to learn.
A festering problem
Service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions and millions who have honorably served their country.
However, when people with military backgrounds βradicalize, they tend to radicalize to the point of mass violence,β said STARTβs Michael Jensen, who leads the team that has spent years compiling and vetting the dataset.
His group found that among extremists βthe No. 1 predictor of being classified as a mass casualty offender was having a U.S. military background β that outranked mental health problems, that outranked being a loner, that outranked having a previous criminal history or substance abuse issues.β
The data tracked individuals with military backgrounds, most of whom were veterans, involved in plans to kill, injure or inflict damage for political, social, economic or religious goals. While some violent plots in the data were unsuccessful, those that succeeded killed and hurt dozens of people. Since 2017, nearly 100 people have been killed or injured in these plots, nearly all in service of an anti-government, white supremacist or far-right agenda. Those numbers do not include any of the violence on Jan. 6,Β which left scores of police officers injured.
A month afterΒ people in tactical gear stormed up the U.S. CapitolΒ steps in military-style stack formation on Jan. 6, the new defense secretary,Β Lloyd Austin, addressed the long-festering problem. He orderedΒ a force-wide βstand downβΒ to give time to local military commanders to discuss the issue with personnel. He empaneled the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group to study and recommend solutions. Among the groupβsΒ eventual recommendationsΒ was to clarify what was prohibited under the militaryβs ban on extremist activity.Β The revised policy,Β released in December 2021, now specifies that anti-government or anti-democratic actions are violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, federal laws that apply to all service members.
Some applauded the changes, but military and political leaders had been concerned about extremism in the ranks for years after a wakeup call in 1995 when Army veteran and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people inΒ the Oklahoma City bombing. And the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and a research arm of the U.S. Justice Department have all funded STARTβs research.
Bishop Garrison, a U.S. Army veteran and former senior advisor to Austin,Β led the working groupΒ to address extremism following Jan. 6 and the widespread unrest in 2020 amid theΒ COVID pandemicΒ and aΒ racial reckoning.
βWe believe the vast majority of people who serve do so honorably, and this is a small group of individuals having an outsized impact,β Garrison told the AP. βBut we also still need to analyze data to ensure that our hypothesis is correct and supported by fact.β
Yet a chief hurdle cited by Pentagon officials has been a lack of data β how to understand the scope of extremism in the ranks when there are millions of active-duty service members across all of the branches?
βWhatβs vexing about this is we donβt have a great sense of the scope of the problem,β then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN in the weeks after Jan. 6. βMany of these people β¦ work very hard to conceal their beliefs. We canβt be the thought police.β
The Pentagon did develop at least one way to detect extremist incidents across military branches and among civilian defense contractors. But it isnβt using it.
The method was revealed in aΒ research memoΒ published the summer after Jan. 6 that, until now, has not been released publicly. American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, obtained the memo through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit it brought against the Pentagon and shared it with the AP.
In a project that began in September 2020 and lasted into 2021, DoD researchers studying βinsider threatsβ and other security issues in the workforce developed a way to mine data from a DoD security clearance database to identify white supremacist and extremist incidents. This database included details from security incident reports filed about people who held security clearances β a wide swath of the military population, civilians and contractors included.
The operation identified hundreds of reported incidents of white supremacy and anti-government and other extremist activity over 20 years β the kinds of internal red flags that could identify issues with service members.
The researchers, whose names were redacted, wrote that the results were a first step toward developing a way to identify incidents of extremism, and that the method could be used in other DoD databases.
And while the research was shared among some departments in the DoD after Jan. 6, it never made it to Garrison, who was leading the Pentagonβs extremism working group, he told the AP. He called the oversight βproblematicβ given his, and the working groupβs, mission.
βI am very surprised by the existence of the report.β
A defense official did not address why the report was not sent directly to the working group. In a statement, the official said the DoD is βcommitted to understanding the root causes of extremism and ensuring such behavior is promptly and appropriately addressed and reported to the proper authorities,β and that the department has enhanced its ability to track extremism allegations.
βVery violent and very uglyβ
Arthurβs young children sat atop a blue plastic tub on his farmhouseβs porch in Mount Olive, their feet dangling as their older sister tied their shoes. In the tub was an improvised bomb that Arthur had wired to a switch inside the house, according to evidence presented at Arthurβs trial.
βThey would swing their feet as kids do and pop holes in it. I wasnβt very careful around (the explosives),β the older sister, the daughter of Arthurβs wife and her ex-husband, told the AP. The AP is not naming the children interviewed for this story because they are minors.
As an Army cavalry scout who served two tours in Iraq, Arthur learned more specialized skills than an average soldier, such as how to rig improvised explosives. He left the National Guard in 2019 to focus full-time on Tackleberry Solutions, his military tactics business where he sold access to this deadly expertise. Tackleberry was Arthurβs nickname in the Army, after the gun-loving veteran in the βPolice Academyβ films known for using inappropriately aggressive military tactics in civilian contexts.
After leaving the Guard, he also turned his attention to local politics. Arthur, a former deputy sheriff himself, backed a βconstitutional sheriffβ candidate who believed sheriffs, not federal or state law enforcement, held ultimate authority in the U.S. He tried to enlist county officials, according to court documents, to aid in creating a militia to guard against the βtyrannical government.β
βYouβre gonna have to secure your smallest municipality and governing body first, that means townships or cities will have to be conquered immediately through force,β Arthur said in a video posted just after he left the Guard.
βWhatever you do, it has to be very violent and very ugly.β
Arthurβs videos had become increasingly unhinged, said Ben Powell, who was hearing from his children that there were explosives hidden throughout the farm. Powellβs son said he often used a hand-cranked wringer in the βbomb shedβ to dry his clothes. The wringer sat near a barrel of the explosive Tannerite and Arthurβs storage area for his homemade grenades and pipe bombs.
βThe older I get, the more screwed up I see the stuff is,β the son, now in his teens, said.
Powell drove a truck as a civilian DoD contractor at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah. He said he felt a professional responsibility to report Arthur after watching the videos, and hearing stories from his kids about the goings on at the farm.
βThatβs kind of what Iβm supposed to do, is report if thereβs issues, especially if itβs an inside threat, like a guy in the military,β he said.
He called an Army βI Saluteβ hotline set up to receive βsuspicious activityβ reports, and an intelligence hotline.
βI called and said, βYou guys need to do something before somebody gets hurt. Heβs talking about killing cops. Heβs talking about killing the FBI.ββ
Heβd called the North Carolina National Guard previously with his concerns, and not seen any action. So Powell told his supervisor at the Utah Army depot about Arthur, and showed some of the videos. Still, there was no response. The North Carolina National Guard and the U.S. Army said they did not have any records of discipline involving Arthur. Heather J. Hagan, an Army spokeswoman, would not comment on the particulars of Arthurβs case but said βwe do forward all information to our law enforcement partners when appropriate.β
Things continued to escalate quickly. Arthur and his wife pulled the kids from the public school and began home-schooling them, with no input from Powell.
In March 2020 Powell spoke with the Duplin County Sheriffβs Department, where Arthur had worked briefly as a deputy in the 2000s before he joined the Army. Powell had not spoken with his children since Christmas, and was worried.
He asked for officers to make contact with the children to check their welfare. The sheriff did not respond to a request for comment, but provided records showing that a deputy reported seeing the children at the farm in March 2020. The deputy determined the children βappear to be well taken care ofβ and took no further action.
That same month, a man came for an extended stay at Arthurβs farm.
Joshua Blessed slept on a cot in the kitchen and refused to talk to Arthurβs wife or children. During the day, he would disappear with Arthur for long training sessions in wartime tactics.
The fatal funnel
Weeks later, Blessed raced his tractor trailer down a rural highway between Buffalo and Rochester in upstate New York, firing a pistol out his window at the parade of police cars behind him.
The sleepy evening in LeRoy, New York, in May 2020 had been disrupted when an officer pulled Blessed over for speeding. After a brief verbal exchange, Blessed drove away with the officer still standing on the truckβs running boards, forcing him to jump off the moving rig.
Blessed, a 58-year-old truck driver and former security guard from Virginia, had spent years posting conspiracy-laden videos that vilified law enforcement.
Now he was leading more than 40 officers on a high-speed chase and gun battle, ramming multiple squad cars that tried to slow him down.
The FBIβs office in Richmond, Virginia, had looked before at Blessed, who also went by Sergei Jourev. In April 2018, theyβd learned that he was attempting to organize a militia extremist group in preparation for βThe Army of God, for the upcoming Civil War.β
Blessed eventually found Arthur and traveled to his farm to learn about improvised explosives and other deadly warfare tactics. The two had continued texting in the weeks before Blessedβs trip to New York about the technical details of gunpowder, igniters and how to make Claymore mines, which spray shrapnel.
βUnfortunately, he knew what he was doing,β said Livingston County Undersheriff Matthew Bean, who was among those involved in the response.
Midway through the chase, Blessed stopped his rig, blocking a narrow highway onramp and trapping pursuing vehicles behind him. Heβd also turned the truckβs cab at a slight angle to see the patrol cars behind him.
Then he opened fire, his bullets pelting the pursuing cruisers.
It was a βfatal funnel,β the tactic Arthur taught that was meant to make single combatants facing a much larger force more deadly.
However, during the gunfire an officer managed to make their way around to the truckβs passenger side, surprising Blessed, who drove off. Police vehicles forced him from the interstate onto a road that crossed through farms. Officers waiting there fired their weapons as Blessedβs truck roared by.
Finally, the truck crashed into a ditch off the road. The bullet-scarred cab pulsed with police lights as rattled officers approached cautiously on foot. Inside, Blessed was slumped over dead, shot in the head.
It was βdivine interventionβ that no officers were hit by the truck or Blessedβs bullets, Bean said. Ammo struck at least five law enforcement vehicles, according to police reports; a forensics report found a bullet lodged in an officerβs backpack on the passenger seat next to him.
βAll 40 men and women who responded had some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder from that incident,β said Bean. Two left law enforcement because of it, he said.
Investigators figured that Blessed had been planning a much larger attack.
A few months later, on Jan. 6, Arthurβs apocalyptic visions of the future began to play out when many like-minded men and women stormed the U.S. Capitol. Arthur wasnβt in Washington, D.C., he said, but the aftermath found him almost immediately.
Federal agents were knocking on the doors of his fellow militia members in North Carolina, he said, and his own actions would come under tighter scrutiny.
In Blessedβs truck, investigators had found two how-to explosives and military tactics manuals for which he had paid $850 from Arthurβs Tackleberry Solutions. They would find $125,000 in cash, 14 live pipe bombs, an AK-47 with a scope, a .50-caliber rifle, a sniper rifle and tens of thousands of dollars in ammunition.
Years had passed since Powell reported Arthur to multiple military, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Powell said he called the U.S. Army, FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and others so many times that he lost count.
βAnd there was nothing,β Powell said. βThere was no response.β
When asked about Powellβs reports, an FBI spokesperson in Charlotte said the agency would not provide information beyond what was published in court records. An ATF spokesperson in North Carolina said there was no record of them opening a case.
Indeed, federal law enforcement agencies have a questionable recent history assessing domestic terrorism threats accurately. TheΒ FBI assessment of domestic violent extremistsΒ written before the Jan. 6 attacks reported, incorrectly, the participantsβ βlow willingness to take action in response to a disputed election resultβ and βthose who are interested lack the capability to carry out anything beyond a simple attack.β
And before the white supremacist βUnite the Rightβ violence in Charlottesville in 2017 that killed a woman and left others severely injured, theΒ Department of Homeland Security had focused much of its threat assessmentΒ on the dangers posed by far-left counterprotesters.
After years of missed opportunities, the FBI was investigating Arthur. βIt takes over 100 rounds and Joshua Blessed is shot and killed,β Powell said. βIt takes cops getting shot at on public roadways during a high-speed chase with a 40,000-pound truck. Thatβs what it takes before anybody even looked into this.β
βBuckshotβ
On May 5, 2021, Michael Thompson drove to a wartime tactics training session in Mount Olive. He pulled his truck up to the small, single-story farmhouse Arthurβs grandfather had built.
It was a year after Blessedβs rampage in upstate New York and just a few months after Jan.6. Thompson had contacted Arthur through the Tackleberry webpage.
They approached each other warily.
With a chuckle, Arthur assured Thompson that he wasnβt a cop.
βYou never know man, these days,β Thompson said.
βNo you donβt.β¦ And the thing is, that half the cops are good guys, and half are the bad guys,β Arthur said. βBut if I donβt know whoβs good and whoβs bad, Iβm just gonna walk in and clean house.β
As the two men became acquainted, Arthur claimed to have built a local militia with other highly trained veterans including a Navy SEAL, an Army Ranger and a couple of Marine veterans in the area. One of his military buddies he called βPriestβ stayed at the farm and trained too, according to both children who spoke to the AP.
βEvery night at about 10:30, (Arthur) would go out into the shed and open up his radios and would just call out and touch bases with a whole bunch of other people. To kind of bring together the militia that come together and exchange information,β said Powellβs daughter, who often sat with Arthur during these communications when she couldnβt sleep.
Thompson had contacted Arthur saying he needed to prepare for battle against federal agents. ATF agents confiscated some of his guns while he was out and his wife was home with their children alone, he said. They were coming back. This time he wanted to be ready.
Arthur and Thompson discussed using hidden, improvised explosive devices, and how Thompson could transform his house into a βspider webβ of fatal booby traps meant to kill raiding federal agents.
Thompson was wearing a wire for the FBI under the code name βBuckshot.β
βI want to show you something called a spider web,β Arthur said. βThis was something I built for a fellow recon buddy of mine.β
βIt is a freakinβ death box.β
Thompson and Arthur talked for hours, eventually settling into seats in the house with Arthurβs kids swirling around. Then talk turned to assassination; using snipers and hidden explosives against well-guarded politicians, according to the recordings.
Arthur said such killings will be necessary in the coming civil war β and that snipers are most effective, in many cases.
βI know if I can put a round right there in the base of the windshield where it meets the dashboard. Iβll hit him. So is the sniper hit better? Yes.
βSay itβs a whole walled-off gated house β¦ The governorβs mansion. Alright, how do I attack him? Well, heβs going to have to leave to go to the Capitol at some point, right?β Arthur said, his wife and children nearby talking about school and working in the garden.
It is these targeted attacks that the data show people with military backgrounds are making more successful. Those include theΒ 2020 murders of a federal security officerΒ and a sheriffβs deputy in California by an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant and the 2018 attack by a former Army soldier whoΒ shot six women at a Florida hot yoga studio, killing two, before he killed himself.
When military members are involved, the plots are more likely to seek and inflict mass casualties β and in an election year it is this kind of attack that worries people who are studying how military expertise is influencing extremist action. A mass casualty attack is defined as one that kills or injures four or more people.
βMy primary concern is not a march on the Capitol or any other government building. Itβs that somebody with the skills that were imparted on them by the military to be extremely lethal uses those skills,β said STARTβs Jensen.
βAnd they go out and attack civilians and have a real impact on public safety.β
Armed with Thompsonβs recordings, FBI agents planned for a way to arrest Arthur safely β a threat assessment of the farm had determined it was too dangerous to try it there.
The informant told Arthur to meet him at a gun show in Raleigh. He said he had contacts there who would buy some Tackleberry manuals.
Arthur met Thompson at the event entrance and the two passed through metal detectors β Arthur wasnβt armed. A SWAT team waiting inside surprised Arthur, who initially resisted attempts to restrain him, agents said. Officers then forced Arthur to the ground, and arrested him.
At the same time, bomb disposal teams were searching Arthurβs home. They found sandbags and cans filled with Tannerite β which, if hit by gunfire from afar, can explode. The teams also discovered the pipe bomb wired to a switch on the porch.
βYou took the oathβ
In May, U.S. District Judge James C. Dever IIIΒ sentenced Arthur to 25 years in federal prisonΒ afterΒ a jury convicted himΒ on charges related to teaching the FBIβs informant how to make bombs meant to kill federal law enforcement officers, as well as illegal weapons possession.
Prosecutors said theyβd found improvised grenades and other βmass casualtyβ and βindiscriminateβ weapons on Arthurβs farm.
A psychological workup found no evidence of mental illness, but did cite likely war trauma as a factor in Arthurβs paranoia. Still, the conclusion was that Arthur did not need βacute mental health treatment.β
Dever, also a veteran, told Arthur that his specialized military training in explosives and other warfare techniques made his conduct that much more serious.
βYou took the oath that all of us who served took,β Dever told Arthur. βYou know better.β
But Arthur is unrepentant.
In messages to AP from a federal prison in Tennessee, he said he is a target of βpolitical warfare.β
βIβm a political prisoner,β he wrote, echoing the language former President Donald Trump and others have used to minimize the crimes committed in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In Arthurβs view, the imprisonment of βvets and patriotsβ like himself and the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania prophesy the civil war he has long argued is coming.
βThis is happening,β he wrote. βAll the signs are there.β
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Kessler reported from Washington, D.C. Contributing to this story were Rhonda Shafner, Michael Rezendes and Marshall Ritzel in New York, Serginho Roosblad in San Francisco, Allen G. Breed in Mount Olive, N.C., Rick Bowmer in Salt Lake City, and Michael Kunzelman, Lolita Baldor and Tara Copp in Washington, D.C.
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