The Covenant, The Sword, The Arm of The Lord: Profile
The Covenant, The Sword, The Arm of The Lord (CSA) was founded in 1971 by James Ellison who was a former San Antonio Fundamentalist Minister. It was founded as a paramilitary survivalist group which operated an identity-oriented communal settlement near the Arkansas-Missouri border. Using the guise of being a church, CSA was a violence prone purveyor of anti-semitism and racism. In 1983, in the wake of an Aryan Nations conference, CSA leaders engaged in a series of criminal activities which included the firebombing of an Indiana synagogue, the arson of a Missouri church, and an attempted bombing in Missouri of a pipeline supplying Chicago with natural gas. In April 1985, more than 200 FBI Agents raided the CSA compound on the Missouri-Arkansas border and seized hundreds of weapons, bombs, an anti-tank rocket and quantities of cyanide allegedly intended to poison the water supply of an unnamed city.
In September 1985, CSA leaders James Ellison and Kerry Noble, along with four other CSA activists, Gary Stone, Timothy Russell, Rudy Loewen and David Giles, were sentenced to lengthy federal prison terms on racketeering and illegal weapons charges. CSA member Steven Scott pleaded guilty in an Arkansas Federal court to charges he dynamited a natural gas pipeline near Fulton, Arkansas in 1983. Former CSA member Kent Yatesalso pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to make and transfer automatic weapons silencers. The convictions and guilty pleas broke this white supremacist group.
