As I said, when the Muskets began, it was just me and twelve others, including Christof and Kicks Iron. We were the high-echelon founders. The other ten started local Musket organizations and few regular members ever met us, the Founders. They knew their own “Commander,” and they could look up the names and stare at the faces of the other nine. All they had to do was go to the Musket web site. They could also obtain the names of every member nationwide and rummage through official Musket opinions on various political, economic, and social issues on our many blogs. So could anyone else. What they wouldn’t find was the names or faces of we three national leaders. That was a musket policy thought necessary for survival. Muskets were referred to by the state in which each was located; Hence, M-Arizona meant the Arizona musket, M-Texas meant the Texas Musket, and M-California the California Musket . . . there were actually two in California, one in the Bay area and one in the L.A. Basin. Together the ten muskets constituted what we termed, the Musket Brigade. The choice of words, “Brigade,” “Commander,” and “Musket” was deliberate. They grate upon, fly in the face of, political docility.

I, Christof Fawcett, and “Kicks Iron” White were “ghosted,” known only to the ten commanders and a few ardent patriots. The public side of the Muskets had grown to more than 113,000 nationwide. This popular side organized letter-writing campaigns, spoke to civic and religious groups, demonstrated, and so forth. Sooner or later, an informant would attempt to penetrate the shield separating it from the covert side. When one did, it had to be impossible to identify either the national leadership, or some forty local Muskets involved in smashing NADNARA sensor arrays along the highways, in traffic lights, or anywhere else we found them . . . at night when no one was around.

Sure enough, a year later, the policy saved our group. A Musket who was a retired cop turned private investigator by profession handled security matters for the Musket Resistance. His Montana PI firm wasn’t far from the National Field Operations Center we had established. He conducted routine surveillance of any member being considered for inclusion in a covert NADNARA group. One of the five covert members attached to the Bay area Musket office turned informant. He was detected by the M-California North Musket after our PI conducted surveillance of a member he was attempting to work into the covert group. Our PI discovered the man was an FBI agent . . . an infiltrator. The agent had been introduced to Blevins, our Bay area Commander, as “a concerned citizen, a single man,” but PI surveillance personnel reported that they had followed him and photographed him with his family. It had been difficult. The agent worked in the Bay area, but actually lived in southern California. They lost him on three separate occasions at the airport before he was (finally) spotted boarding a flight to San Diego. The next time he disappeared, two of our people were waiting in San Diego and followed him after his arrival. That required two additional weeks, because he took a roundabout route to his home. Before the month was out, we had his address and photographs of him with his wife and two children taken at the San Diego Zoo.