The ex-Green Beret commando who helped talk white separatist Randy Weaver into surrendering to federal police at Ruby Ridge in August 1992 told Congress Wednesday he is convinced an FBI sniper team deliberately killed Weaver's wife, Vicki.
Retired Lt. Col. James "Bo" Gritz testified that the head of the sniper team told him: "We targeted Vicki Weaver because the (FBI) psychiatrist profiled her as the maternal head of the family who would kill her children rather than ever allow them to surrender."Gritz's comments - sharply at odds with the official FBI version and disputed by an FBI agent Wednesday - came on one the strangest days of a Senate Judiciary panel's hearings on the standoff in northern Idaho, in which not only Weaver's wife but his son and a federal marshal were killed.
Gritz - whose negotiations in Weaver's cabin were monitored via an FBI "bug" he wore on his shirt - described a plan under which he and a fellow negotiator would grab Weaver and his children in bear hugs and wrestle them to the floor, shouting "Alaska!" That was a code word to signal the FBI. The aim, he said, was to shield the Weavers from authorities' bullets and capture them for their own good.
In the end, they surrendered voluntarily.
Gritz, a Vietnam veteran, has a reputation as a swashbuckler. He staged abortive unofficial missions to rescue American POWs in Southeast Asia in the early 1980s and testified Wednesday wearing military emblems on his lapel - paratrooper wings and the Combat Infantryman's Badge.
Gritz ran as the right-wing Populist Party's presidential candidate in 1992 and is developing a community for anti-government survivalists in the woods of northern Idaho called Almost Heaven.
Despite his unconventional, offbeat profile, senators questioned him somberly Wednesday and appeared to take him seriously.
Fred Lanceley, an FBI negotiator at Ruby Ridge, took issue with Gritz's statement that Vicki Weaver had been "targeted" by the snipers.
He told the panel Gritz might have misunderstood a remark that actually meant FBI agents, not realizing she had been killed, were targeting Vicki Weaver in appeals to surrender over a loud speaker because they regarded her as a family leader and a key to any negotiated solution.