Project Megiddo: How the FBI and the Anti-Extremism Industry Incited Y2K Panic
When you're familiar with this story, you'll look at today's events somewhat differently
Project Megiddo was an advisory report published in late 1999 under Louis Freeh’s tenure at the FBI, warning domestic law enforcement about the danger of Armageddon (you can read it here). In practice, it stoked fears of violent militant activity across the U.S. in response to Y2K, by warning local police departments across the country about a problem that didn’t exist. It purported to be “the culmination of an FBI research initiative which analyzed the potential for extremist criminal activity in the U.S. by individuals or domestic groups who attach special significance to the year 2000.” Literally nothing in it came to pass. It was much ado about nothing.
I’m not going to rehash the whole history here. What I do want to do is sketch out the lines of the story, in light of new evidence we now have about the major players in it. When you consider how Israeli former FBI director Louis Freeh appears to be (working, as he has, for a sanctioned Israeli conflict minerals magnate), or House Speaker Denny Hastert, a pedophile who was probably blackmailed by the Turks and Israelis. Also the ADL, which got involved in the Y2K panic and is, as covered previously, a front for foreign intelligence and the Jewish mafia. That’s who pushed this, or was manipulated into action.
A handful of press reports at the time, while conceding that the bulk of the analysis was utter nonsense, did conclude that the final section, on the significance of Jerusalem, did seem to anticipate the Second Intifada, which would break out the following year. There’s a line in there, “Israeli officials are extremely concerned that the Temple Mount, an area already seething with tension and distrust among Muslims and Jews, will be the stage for violent encounters between religious zealots.” This seems somewhat outside the purview of the FBI, frankly, and probably a tell.
A bit of reporting by Australian-Israeli journalist Greer Fay Cashman in the Jerusalem Post in October 1999, the same time the FBI report came out:
Euan Houston, defense and military attache at the British Embassy, has a somewhat original idea. He wants to take his wife, Joanna, to Megiddo, ‘pitch a tent and wait for Armageddon’
That’s a little weird, no?
I’ll lay my cards on the table: I think it’s worth sparing a word for the apocalypticists and preppers. Most of them are perfectly harmless, and the fears that they have often lead them to develop what used to be called civil defense and emergency preparedness skills. None of that is bad. I think it’s actually pretty good. It strikes me as a bad thing that the conspiracy universe has shifted to selling dick pills and supplements instead of, like, gold and emergency preparedness gear.
There was also a Canadian aspect to Project Megiddo. I love Canadians, but Canada is a very weird country. It’s less a country at all than a resource colony and a battlefield. A lot of mobsters come from Canada—like the Bronfmans, or Nathan Reiber, the JINSA executive whose condo collapse Ron DeSantis allowed the IDF to clean up. And a lot of phenomena that exist in the U.S., you see in a more exaggerated form in Canada. Take extremism, for instance. A lot of extremist groups, when you look closely, are sort of fake. In Canada they had the Grant Bristow affair, in which the Heritage Front sort of had to shut down because a CSIS informant was in line to lead it, so pretty much anything they did would have been on them.
There were some raids of more or less innocent people as part of Project Megiddo, including Bruce Beach in Ontario, a prepper who buried 42 school buses to make bunkers in anticipation of the end of the world. Beach was in the U.S. military in the 1960s and inspected missile launch sites, so he had a preoccupation with nuclear war. From Reuters:
No charges were laid. “I call this Waco north up see, easier times and the friendly Canadian version… they came down here, I didn’t have any guns and they didn't shoot me,” said Beach, who is trying to proof his steel labyrinth of buried buses for his family and guests in time for New Year’s Eve when the Y2K bug arrives.
About 40 police and firefighters, 10 cruisers, and one dog arrived in the rural Ontario hamlet where Beach lives.
The National Post, Conrad Black’s paper, blared in a headline in late 1999: “CSIS WARNS OF MILLENNIAL CULT ATTACKS—400 GROUPS WORLDWIDE: BELIEVERS MAY TRY TO HASTEN THE APOCALYPSE WITH MASS VIOLENCE.”
The story quotes from the CSIS report: “The approaching year 2000 AD has stimulated millennial anxiety and heightened concern that its unfolding will bring an increase in potential threats by groups that would choose to assert their apocalyptic beliefs through violence.”
The CSIS report shared with the FBI assessment a real lack of detail and specificity about any real threats tied to Y2K, probably because there weren’t any.
The same day the National Post also covered the FBI Project Megiddo report, which is a little strange because it was released two months earlier. Again: “FBI’S ARMAGEDDON REPORT WARNS OF THREAT OF VIOLENCE: EXTREMIST GROUPS PREPARE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD.”
An AP story from December 16, “Hate Groups Plan New Year’s Defense,” quotes Matt Hale and Ray Redfeairn, two extremists of long standing at the time. “Not surprisingly, no hate groups contacted said they were planning violence,” reads a line two-thirds through the story. At the end, the SPLC, which had a working relationship with the FBI throughout the 90s, is quoted praising the Project Megiddo report.
On December 17, 1999, an AP story by Michael J. Sniffen, the lede of which was “The FBI will remain on nationwide alert throughout New Year’s weekend, although there have been no specific threats by terrorists, says Attorney General Janet Reno.”
Various conservative groups led by Paul Weyrich pointed out that the FBI report only targeted right-wingers, and demanded House Speaker Denny Hastert schedule hearings on the issue, which was never done. The letter signed by dozens of conservative groups pointed out “it also implies that anyone who believes in the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ also fits that description, though they may not subscribe to the beliefs of the specific cults mentioned in the report. The logical conclusion to be drawn from reading such a report is that religious people, specifically Christians of all denominations, are ‘extremists’ and should be watched.”
The letter suggests that hearings might be able to deduce that the Project Megiddo report “was partially authored by someone outside the FBI, perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute demanded answers specifically from Freeh, and criticized the initiative on First Amendment grounds.
Two weeks after the FBI released its report, the ADL released its own, Y2K Paranoia: Extremists Confront the Millennium. Abe Foxman said in a press release, “The heightened expectations of the year 2000, mixed together with the widely reported possibility of a computer meltdown, have generated a barrage of predictions and hysterical propaganda from those on the farthest fringes of society.”
In December, two days before Christmas 1999, the AP reported that another fixture in the extremism-watching galaxy, the Center for Democratic Renewal—a more or less explicitly leftist institution—was calling on the FBI to go even further. They claimed racist groups are “clearly focusing on the millennium as a time of action.” “This is an emergency,” said their chairman, “It’s an emergency for the nation, but it’s a far greater emergency for minorities.”
Greg Rampton, the FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the Denver Field Office was interviewed by a right-wing talk show host in late November. During the interview, the Mormon investigative reporter David Bresnahan is brought on and they have this exchange:
DB: Project Megiddo, when it all came to a head, I suppose at the beginning of November, attracted a great deal of attention particularly because it became obvious that this was written and provided by the ADL. Is that correct?
GR: Well, I’m not sure who it became obvious to. It was not written by the ADL.
DB: They’re taking credit for it on their website.
GR: Well, I haven’t seen…
DB: They’re bragging about it.
You can read a transcript of the interview here, which goes into the revolving door and source relationships between the ADL and the FBI.
As I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with civil rights advocacy from any group, but the problem is that the ADL has historically disguised its relationships with organized crime and foreign intelligence. And in the long run, this has proved corrupting to federal law enforcement.
This whole thing sort of has the quality of a self-licking ice cream cone, and it seems coordinated. It’s amazing to me how these storylines recapitulate themselves.