It had all the makings of an old-fashioned town meeting. Somebody rented the Meadville High School auditorium in northwest Pennsylvania. Folks from surrounding counties braved a heavy snowstorm to warm themselves around a fiery speaker. The local state legislator was even on hand and told those assembled that the guest of honor would discuss recent world developments.
For 31/2 hours, Mark Koernke sketched a tableau of conspiracy and betrayal - an impending one-world government that he believes has spirited foreign troops into the United States where they fly about in mysterious black helicopters awaiting the signal to take over the country and take resisters to awaiting detention camps.The enemy, as Koernke sees it, is a new world order run by a group of international governments and financial interests he theorizes have been at work for 50 years.
Afterward, visitors stood to applaud him, then perused tables set up in the hallways, including one for a group called the Keystone Militia, an independent army being formed out of Warren County, just east of Meadville.
"All squads should be limited to eight to 10 members," said one advisory flier. "It is very important that this procedure be followed. In the event the militia is infiltrated, the spy will only know the identity of his or her squad leader and the members of his squad."
Many of the listeners, according to those who attended, already wore caps with militia insignias.
Welcome to Armageddon.
What happened in Meadville, Pa., on Feb. 4, say law enforcement and human rights activists, is taking place in other rural areas across the United States. Armed militias, some suspected of ties to other extremist organizations, are taking shape, training with semiautomatic weapons, stashing small armories in wooded outposts.
In Michigan, members of militias have been arrested with hundreds of rounds of ammunition - some of it armor piercing, say police - and night-vision devices.
In Montana, local officials worry violence may erupt. "We just had one man named Calvin Greenup call out the militia because a helicopter flew over and he had 20 or 30 armed men there," said Marlen Hines of the Montana Human Rights Network, which monitors militia activity.
The military cadres frequently include people who believe Koernke's theory that the United States has already been invaded by United Nations-backed troops, including, he says, Dutch, Russians, even Nepalese Ghurkas in the employ of the British. They distrust government agencies, abhor the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and use the 1993 ATF assault on the Waco, Texas, compound of the Branch Davidians as a rallying cry against government tyranny.
Koernke, 37, describes himself as a former Army intelligence officer and says he has concrete evidence the new world order has set up detention centers around the country to process American patriots when the time comes to take over. He did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, and an associate said he won't speak to newspapers, which he regards as part of the conspiracy.
The militias' armament, say critics, is real; their rhetoric apocalyptic.
"We will slow them down," Koernke says of the supposed shadow government in his two-hour videotape, "America In Peril." "We probably will not stop them completely, and this will become an armed confrontation."
In a tape made 15 months ago, Koernke brandishes a Kalashnikov rifle and displays a length of nylon rope that would come in handy dealing with the new world order crowd.
"Now I did some basic math the other day, not new world order math, and I found that using the old-style math you can get about four politicians for about 120 foot of rope. And, by the way, DuPont made this. It is very fitting that one of the new world order crowd should provide us with the resources to liberate our nation.
"Remember, whenever using it, always try and find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer."
Koernke serves up his visions in two-hour talking-head videos. He has an hourlong talk show on Nashville shortwave station WWCR. Speaking tours have taken him across the country, where he finds a rural population increasingly distrustful of federal government and feeling threatened by gun control.
The turnout in Meadville - estimated at more than 1,000, including a group from Philadelphia - "won't be unusual much longer," said James Johnson, a militia leader in Ohio whose group has played host to Koernke in the past.
Those who turned out to welcome Koernke came predisposed to believe.
"I want to know more about what is going on. I think it's important that people try to learn as much as they can about what is going on in the country," said Teresa Brown, the three-term Republican state House member from Meadville who introduced Koernke and stayed for his speech. Brown says she is keeping an open mind about Koernke's assertions of an impending takeover by the mystery troops.
"It's just a personal interest that I have in this sort of thing. Like everybody has their personal interests, be it golf or whatever."
Others are firmer in their suspicions.
"I don't read newspapers. I don't listen to television. The only thing I listen to is shortwave radio," said Jim Wood, the Titusville, Pa., steelworker who said he paid $1,600 of his own money to organize Koernke's visit. Like Koernke, Wood said he wouldn't speak with reporters.
"They're gonna say we're a bunch of paranoid nuts and things like that," said Darrell Siviks, a Meadville gun dealer who attended the meeting. "But if you stop and look at how the laws have been changed in the past few years to disarm the republic and take away our constitutional rights, then it all adds up."
Siviks said he had been asked to join a local militia and probably would. He joined Koernke for coffee after last week's speech and said the two exchanged theories about a fence that has gone up around land near the former Keystone Munitions works south of Meadville. Much of the land is part of an Army reserve installation.
"His opinion was that they were setting it up either as a regional strike center or a regional detention center," Siviks said. The land, according to military officials, is an Army reserve practice field and firing range.
No one has a clear estimate on the number of militias in Pennsylvania, but the state's Department of Military Affairs reports 10 to 15 calls in recent weeks from people inquiring about establishing their own.
"We tell them what the law is - only the governor can permit that," said Fred Walters, a spokesman for the department.
In other states, including Koernke's home state of Michigan, militia members have run into trouble with law enforcement. In September, a policeman in the town of Fowlerville, west of Detroit, stopped a car passing through at 2:30 a.m. and found three men in camouflage, according to police chief Gary Krause.
"What got his attention right away was a loaded 9 mm clip on the back floor," Krause said. Officers later found three semiautomatic 9 mm pistols, an AK-47 assault rifle, an M-1 rifle, an M-14, 700 rounds of ammunition, three gas masks and night vision binoculars.
Two of the men, Krause said, told investigators they had been bodyguards for Koernke.
Krause said investigators discovered handwritten notes on surveillance techniques. The notes, Krause said, also included rules for engagement with the enemy.
"It said basically there are no rules of engagement and that anyone that sees you is to be treated with extreme prejudice," Krause said.
Michigan militia supporters protested outside the courthouse when the men were coming up for trial and some, Krause said, threatened his officers.
"They called us punks with badges. They said they wouldn't let us take their weapons again, that they'd shoot us first," Krause said.
The suspects never showed for trial, were declared fugitives and one was later caught in a neighboring county after a car chase.
In November, Koernke traveled the Northwest in a speaking tour with leaders of the Militia of Montana, based in Noxon, Mont., and founded by John and David Trochman and David Trochman's son, Randy. The tour included a daylong seminar at the Noxon High School during which Koernke spoke and some participants received lessons in sniper techniques.
A Nov. 16 report by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith says the Trochmans "have long been involved in the white supremacist movement," a charge the Trochmans deny.
The ADL report says John Trochman was a featured speaker at a meeting of the Aryan Nations, an Idaho-based neo-Nazi organization.
John Trochman spoke at the Aryan Nation church once, said Randy Trochman, "and that was criticizing the church's morality with its women and children. He was never invited back."
Trochman said he believed some racist elements might have joined the Militia of Montana. "Any organization that opposes the government will attract those elements," he said. "We just tell them to leave their religion at home."
While Koernke's theories are finding a growing acceptance in some of the population, government officials and academics dismiss them as paranoid nonsense.
"Can you imagine a program like this - even if it was planned, or a contingency - getting by the congressional committees that would have to appropriate money for this?" said Sven Kramer, a former National Security Council staffer.
"We have periodic training that involves foreign troops," said Chuck Franklin, a Pentagon spokesman. "There's very little of it that happens here in the United States."