The true scope of the terror plot in Quantico began to unfold as FBI Special Agent Erwin “Griff” Griffin watched a large, remote farmhouse in Washington State. The farm was occupied by “a gray-bearded, broad-shouldered, proud old man with brilliant green eyes.” The old man had been questioned concerning fireworks that had been seen in the vicinity, and with him were two middle-aged women, “slender and worn-looking,” as well as six children ranging in age from three to seventeen.            

The man was listed in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC) files as Robert Cavitt Chambers, AKA Bob Cavitt, AKA Charles Roberts. In the novel, Jacob Levine of the Southern Poverty Law Center described him vividly:

“The Patriarch has lived a life of almost uninterrupted criminal activity since 1962. Before that, he was an altar boy for St. Jude’s in Philadelphia, a predominantly Irish parish. In the seventies, he committed at least five bank robberies in Oklahoma and Arizona. One arrest and trial led to a hung jury. The Oklahoma County prosecutor’s office refused to try Chambers again. I quote the DA, ‘We will always have some trailer-trash slattern with damp panties sitting in the jury box. Just get him the hell out of my state.’

“Chambers moved to Ireland in 1979. He became an expert in IED--improvised explosive devices. His specialty was nasty booby traps. Don’t hold me to it, but he may have been the guy who actually set the charge in Margaret Thatcher’s toilet in a Brighton hotel in 1986. He returned to the United States later that year, when things got too hot in the UK, but he couldn’t stay out of trouble. In 1988, Nevada State Police caught him at the tail end of a barroom brawl, drunk out of his mind, with a broken pool cue in one hand and a perforated buddy bleeding out on the floor. Chambers was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison in 1989. Sometime the next year, he broke from his Irish roots, swore off drink, and converted from Catholicism to the Aryan Church of Christ Militant. White supremacists.

“In 1992, his conviction got thrown out on appeal. Turned out an FBI technician didn’t conduct the tests he said he did. Chambers was released in 1993. After that, from 1995 to 1999, he robbed banks from Oklahoma to Alabama. They called him the Proud Poppa because he was assisted by two pre-adolescent males whom he referred to as ‘my strong and righteous sons.’ He then organized the bombing of three Planned Parenthood Clinics in Boston and Baltimore in 1999, resulting in two deaths and six injuries. He’s been on the Post Office hit parade for the last twenty years.”

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Quantico author Greg Bear noted, “I based the Patriarch on a whole rainbow of terrorists, from the IRA to folks supposedly involved in the Giancana/JFK connection. Most of this I plucked out of my head from reading over the years—and from being in Brighton shortly after the Thatcher bombing attempt. I then pared away the least convincing aspects and pushed the Patriarch west to connect up with anti-Semites and jailhouse cults. This part is loosely based on a number of NW and Idaho figures. He’s a Heinz 57 of terror.”

In recent years, several famous cases involving self-styled terrorists and messiahs have made the headlines. On February 28, 1993, the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to execute a search warrant on a compound near Waco, TX, occupied by the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Church, a group formed in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Their leader, David Koresh, taught that the government was their enemy. There were reports that he raped and abused children in the compound, and had many wives, some as young as 12 or 13 years old. The warrant, however, addressed the concern that he had dozens of weapons, some illegally modified, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The raid led to an exchange of gunfire, and four agents were killed. The subsequent siege lasted until April 19, with many of Koresh’s followers--including children--remaining inside the compound. On that day, a new assault caused tear gas to be fired into the building, but the Davidians refused to leave. Fires started, and engulfed the compound, burning it to the ground. Seventy-four Davidians, including Koresh, were killed.

In the novel, the clan led by the Patriarch caused great concern among the agents who had the farm under surveillance. Roots specific to the Branch Davidian incident in Waco showed clearly in this exchange:

“Are we sure that’s all the dependents down there?” Sprockett asked.

“No,” Griff said. “Jacob thinks there might be two young adult males, and so do I, based on those bank robberies. They’re not on the bus. There might be two more kids, and we’ve been talking over the possibility that the males have girlfriends or wives. We haven’t seen the kids all together to count them, but--”

“There’s a redheaded girl, and maybe a white-blond boy of five or six. We did not see them get on the bus,” Rebecca said. “Younger than the others. They may be the Patriarch’s grandchildren. They may all be living in the rear house.”

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Exactly two years after the deaths in Waco, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols executed a plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to avenge the incident at Waco, as well as the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege that led to the deaths of white separatists Randy Weaver, his family, and Weaver’s friend Kevin Harris in Idaho.

McVeigh detonated a rental truck filled with 5,000 pounds of homemade explosives outside the Federal Building, destroying a third of the structure, damaging buildings in a sixteen-block radius, and killing 168 persons, including six children. The building housed a day care center.

The United States has seen many other such individuals who have molded their disagreement with the government--or with other American businesses and organizations--into violent terrorism. One of the most famous is Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, called the Unabomber since his targets were universities and airlines (hence “UNiversities and Airline BOMbings”). Striking out against what he saw were the dangers posed by modern technology, Kaczynski mailed explosives to his targets, killing three persons and wounding 23 more. He was arrested in 1996.

The activities of Kaczynski, Koresh, MeVeigh, Weaver, and other such disenfranchised individuals remind us that not all terror comes from outside, and that some of our worst enemies come from within. From the pages of Quantico:

“Back in the fifties, it became obvious that nations with nuclear weapons could wipe life off the face of the Earth. Now, it could be five or ten teenagers in a high school biology lab... Or one driven monster. And who's going to set them off? The big boys build their potential careers on suspicion and fear and hatred... But where the rubber hits the road, it always comes down to the crazy little runts and the monsters.”

The Patriarch was fashioned to be one of those monsters, and he wasn’t alone. What’s more, his existence was firmly rooted in the real world. Our world.

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