Family Secrets

SOMEWHERE IN THE WEST — Among the tumbleweeds and scrub pine, in the shadow of purple mountains and baked red mesas, far from cities and courthouses and those who wish them harm, Connie and Dale Jakes have come to hide.

Twenty-two days ago, the Jakeses and their two children “disappeared” again, this time into a nondescript ranch house near a forgettable intersection of roads traveled mostly by stray cattle and displaced buffalo.

On this day, the couple’s 12-year-old daughter is baking. Even with extra yeast, her loaf of wheat bread takes hours to rise because of the high altitude. So while she waits, the girl twists her blond hair up in a knot and fastens it with a pink plastic barrette, and begins to assemble the ingredients for a “Granny Cake”--an ambitious recipe of crushed pineapple, flour, eggs, nuts and brown sugar glaze.

Although it is cold enough outside to see your breath, the pale yellow kitchen is warm from the oven. The Jakeses’ 14-year-old son drops his schoolwork on the big oak table. Both children are home-schooled, and the boy finished his work early so he can help a rancher two miles over chop and stack 30 cords of wood. It will be his first real job, and he pulls on his sturdiest hiking boots and a plaid flannel shirt and goes outside to sit on the front stoop with his dog to wait to go to work.

It is an ordinary day for a family caught up in most extraordinary circumstances. The Jakeses are professional informants--members of a growing cadre of regular folks who, for any number of reasons, work full or part time as undercover operatives for law enforcement agencies. Connie and Dale Jakes’ most recent employer was the FBI. They were hired to infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Montana Freemen in April 1995.

Since that assignment ended in June 1996, the family has moved from place to place, first in Montana, and then farther west. Spooked by a run-in at a supermarket with a Freeman who recognized them, the family fled Montana in the dead of night and ended up here.

“We got to a fork in the highway and I pointed south,” says Connie with a shrug. “We had no idea where we’d end up, but this little place is good, though a bit populated for us.” Besides their house, there is a corral with three dusty horses and some chickens, a log cabin, and a trio of corrugated metal sheds--at least one of them occupied.

*

When they left their last home, it was without goodbyes and with no forwarding address. They took with them little more than their clothes, books, computers and weapons, which they packed into their big gray 4x4 truck along with Connie’s “pretties”--her fragile porcelain knickknacks and cross-stitched wall hangings from the New Testament--and their daughter’s goldfish and guinea pig, which were outfitted long ago with special traveling cases to accommodate their frequent relocations.

Because this is the lifestyle they have known almost since their birth, the Jakes children rarely complain. They joke about “going poof!” As in, “Don’t look for us here next month, because by then we’ll be--poof!”

They have been hiding out for months, since their investigation of the Montana Freemen was taken over by teams of FBI and other federal agents. On May 26, the Freemen (there are no women members), who claim to have created their own government based on common law and the belief that white people are God’s chosen people, will be tried en masse on charges of fraud and firearms violations. The Jakeses have been subpoenaed by the defense to appear at a pretrial evidentiary hearing but do not know yet whether they will be called as witnesses by the government. The Freemen were arrested after the longest siege in federal law enforcement history--an 81-day standoff in spring 1996 on a muddy hill in the tiny town of Jordan, Mont.

Connie and Dale Jakes say they are on the run because, in preparing for the trial in Billings, Mont., the government blew their cover.

“When I found out that the U.S. attorney’s office told the federal judge that wiretap information had been obtained based on affidavits from Connie and me working undercover, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Dale Jakes says.

He says he told his FBI supervisor in Montana, “You’re going to have everybody after us now.”

According to the Jakeses, the agent said, “Just be alert. Be cautious. Stay at home.”

But staying home was the last thing they would do.

The first thing they did was sit down with an author they trusted and at the end of 1996 began writing a book.

And the next thing they did was file a claim against the FBI for $316,692 that they say the government owes them for the time they spent living with the Freemen, wearing wires to record every threat and speech, and, according to their attorney Mark Stermitz, “putting themselves in real and constant danger.”

“False Prophets” (Dove Books), the Jakeses’ dramatic account of their 14 months of spying on the Montana Freemen from inside their strongholds, comes out next week. Montana author Clint Richmond, who helped the Jakeses write the book, calls it “the first insider’s look at the ugly face of our own home-grown, all-American terrorism.”

Unedited review editions of the book were beginning to make news this week because of the Jakeses’ charges that the Montana Freemen siege, which cost one agent his life, could easily have been averted had the FBI moved in on its leaders sooner. Connie and Dale say the government didn’t move sooner because while they were living with the Freemen, they were providing volumes of information about dozens of extremist groups who trooped to their cabin from all over the country for how-to courses on using common law to establish personal independence from government authority. Those early reports have set off a flurry of national media attention from People magazine, Time, “Hard Copy” and others who want to interview the family.

*

The book also opens a window on a lifestyle most Americans could not imagine existed--that of career “civilian investigators” who make a living working undercover for law enforcement agencies.

The Jakeses are among hundreds, even thousands, of what the FBI variously calls “cooperating witnesses” and “confidential informants.” By any name, they are ordinary citizens who, for reasons ranging from petty revenge to pure patriotism, agree to work with the bureau in gathering evidence to send criminals to jail.

As a rule, “the FBI will not confirm in any case someone is or is not an informant, but I can tell you many people do help us and for many reasons,” says Frank Scafidi, chief of the FBI media office in Washington, D.C. He would not comment on any claims against the bureau or on any specifics of the Jakeses’ case.

“I have lived on the edge of crime since my teens,” says Dale Jakes, 46, leaning on a weathered fence rail outside his self-made safe house. “So I think like criminals, anticipate how they’ll act, what they’ll do, when they might, y’know, wanna kill me.”

Besides the FBI, the Jakeses say their careers as professional informants have included stints with the DEA, the CIA, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as a number of local law enforcement agencies.

Dale, a part-time logger and self-described explosives expert who says he took an intensive three-month government training course in weapons use, says he has infiltrated international drug cartels, gangs of gunrunners and smugglers. But the most dangerous men he ever met, he says, were the leaders of the Montana Freemen, with whom he lived on and off during 1995 and 1996.

Connie, 40, was an independent undercover operative herself when she met and fell in love with Dale-- before finding out they both were working on the same drug case near the Canadian border. A striking blond with baby blue eyes that tear up whenever she talks about her children, she is as comfortable with weapons as her husband is. According to their book, because of Dale’s disability--he lost an arm in a motorcycle accident--Connie is more often the couple’s “wheelman” who can find and lose a tail in the space of a single, smooth U-turn. She is, in her own words, “excellent with a shotgun.”

With their children still young--”and because of our peculiar lifestyle,” Connie says she had already semiretired, spending most of her time schooling her children and keeping them out of harm’s way, when their final FBI assignment began.

“We had seen how the Freemen were terrorizing the farmers and ranchers of Montana when that day after the bombing we were in a coffee shop and saw a table of the Freemen cheering at the news of the Oklahoma City bombings--including the deaths of 19 children,” Connie says. The couple decided to go undercover “one last time.”

According to copies of contracts provided The Times by the Jakeses’ attorney, the FBI signed both Jakeses to move into the Freemen headquarters at Roundup, Mont. As they had done before, the couple sent their children to live with friends in a distant part of the state, and began documenting everything they saw and heard and turning it over during regular debriefings by their FBI supervisor in Billings.

“We knew it had to be something sorta dangerous,” recalls their son, “because they always put us in a secure place when it’s not safe for us to be together. I have to watch my sister real carefully. We know if one of the bad people Dad dealt with in the past should come around, they might take my sister, so yes, I have to be on guard a lot. And yes, we have an emergency plan. It’s secret, of course.”

The boy, whose favorite movie is the Disney tear-jerker “Old Yeller” and personal hero is “either Kit Carson or Huck Finn,” has his playful little stray, Scout, to play with but only a few friends.

“It’s hard to keep up friendships when you can’t tell anybody where you are or why you disappeared in the middle of the night,” he says. “But I begged my dad when we got here if I couldn’t please just call this one friend of mine because I wanted to talk to him so bad. He made a special exception and [on an untraceable cell phone] I got to call him up. He wanted to know where I’d gone, and I said I couldn’t say but that I still wanted to be friends and he said OK, so I felt pretty good about that.”

*

Ask either of the Jakes children about the sacrifices they make for their parents’ work, and they look puzzled.

“Sacrifice? Why, it’s my mom and dad who are making the real sacrifice,” their son says. “Sure, I’d like to go to Six Flags someday and go on a roller coaster, but is that important compared with what my mom and dad do? No way.”

The Jakeses’ daughter, who greets the first visitor to their new home with finger- and toenails freshly painted midnight blue, bakes bread and reads history books about Nazism and racism that sound a lot like the world their parents visit undercover.

“I play with my pets a lot, and I listen to CDs, mainly the Spice Girls. I’d love to see the movie someday. Is it good, do you know?” asks the 12-year-old, unaware the movie has been out for months.

One of the few times the children’s lives intersected with the parents’ work was at a difficult point in their relationship with the FBI, when their agent came to take the children out for hamburgers.

“He showed them his badge and told them what a wonderful career they could have one day as agents,” says Dale.

Such a career choice is not likely. The Jakeses’ son wants to raise buffalo in “someplace with mountains. The life of a mountain man. That’s for me.”

Their daughter says she just wants to “have a happy life somewhere.”

As for the parents, their plan is to move to Alaska and start over as something, anything, but undercover operatives.

“We did this as a calling almost,” says Dale. “We felt moved as people who love and care about this country to do the patriotic thing. To do what we could to make sure the bad guys lost and the good guys won.”

Although the contracts they signed with the FBI include no dollar amount as compensation for their work, their attorney, Stermitz, says, “Clearly, they did not infiltrate a stronghold of militant militiamen for their health. Their lives were turned upside down. They lost everything. They did right by their country; now their country should do right by them.”

As the Jakeses wait for their claim for back pay to make its way through the knotty processes that face anyone suing the United States government, the family is counting their blessings.

“We’ve been here for a little while, and it seems calm and I hope safe,” says Connie. “But we have to be vigilant, always vigilant. We notice new cars, strange people, phone calls with no one on the line.”

Next to the untraceable cell phone on a table in the back bedroom of their new home is a case of brass mini-magnum gun shells. Across the hall, their daughter is leafing through an old Teen magazine humming a Spice Girls hit.

“I can’t wait for our lives to get back to normal,” sighs Connie, gazing out her kitchen window at the paddock.

According to their book, all that stands between the Jakes family and their dream of a new start in Alaska is the money owed them and the dangers they face for wanting to “come in from the cold.”

When asked about their case, FBI spokesman Scafidi refused to comment, but added, “Coming in from the cold is more like a John le Carre novel than the FBI. If somebody wants to come in, nobody around here is standing in the doorway.”