APmi 06/08 2117 Robert Miles By MICHAEL BENCSIK The Oakland Press COHOCTAH, Mich. (AP) --

APmi 06/08 2117 Robert Miles

   By MICHAEL BENCSIK The Oakland Press

   COHOCTAH,  Mich.  (AP)  -- Perhaps it is just the conservatism
that comes with the years or perhaps it is the fear of  a  return
to  one of the nation's worst prisons, but Robert Miles looks and
sounds scared.

   After weeks of being locked inside  jails,  the  former  grand
dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan recently was released on bond
while awaiting trial on a federal sedition indictment.

   Back home on his 70-acre farm, the man accused of plotting the
overthrow  of  the  U.S.  government expresses none of the hatred
that has marked his life and his white-power movement.

   Miles doesn't  talk  like  a  man  convicted  of  tarring  and
feathering  a  black  Willow Run school official or conspiring to
blow up school buses  to  stall  court-ordered  desegregation  in
Pontiac.

   It  is  as  if  he has made up his mind not to appear an angry
man, a man of evil, a leader of a band of militants.

   Above all, Miles doesn't want to look like someone  intent  on
overthrowing the federal government or plotting its destruction.

   "What kind of threat can I be out here with a typewriter and a
newsletter?"  he  asked.  "Three  cows  isn't much of an invasion
force."

   During a two-hour interview on his views of blacks and Jews in
society,   he   vacillates   from   expected   condemnation   to,
surprisingly, something close to acceptance.

   "I'm   not  anti-Jewish,  I'm  anti-Zionist,"  he  said.  "The
anti-black is more in response to our government's favoritism  to
them at the expense of lower-income whites."

   But  this  is  from  a  man  who wrote in his newsletter about
"African murderers" and "Jewspapers"  --  a  white  supremacist's
synonym for newspapers.

   With  his  white  beard  and  silver  hair, Miles looks like a
grandfather inside his farmhouse.  He looks  comfortably  retired
with his  baggy  shorts, black socks and sandals.  He says that's
all he wants to be.

   But with a 12-foot-high burnt cross in his back yard, there is
no  mistaking  what  Robert  Edward  Miles  represents  to  white
supremacists.

   His  farm  has been a central meeting site for neo-Nazis, Klan
members and other extreme right-wing believers.  Behind his  home
is  the infamous Hall of Giants, a Quonset hut that serves as one
of the  main  podiums  for  the  nation's  leading  white  racist
leaders.

   Miles is  a  leader  among  those  leaders.    With two felony
convictions, he is a decorated veteran of the war for  the  white
cause.

   When  a  visitor  arrived  at  his  home recently, the man who
refers to the "Jews media" as the same as  the  news  media,  was
sitting at a dining room table reading The Wall Street Journal.

   Miles  is  an  intellectual  in  a  movement short on creative
thought.  In a twisted sort of way, Miles was the  first  to  see
the bigger picture.

   According  to  a federal indictment in Fort Smith, Ark., Miles
and 13 other white supremacists met in recent years and agreed to
form a separate Aryan nation by overthrowing the United States by
terrorism.

   The indictment  alleges  that  the  group  would  finance  the
movement   through   robberies   and   counterfeiting  and  would
assassinate federal officials and members of the Jewish faith.

   The  indictment  lists  119  overt   acts   by   the   alleged
conspirators.   Miles'  name  only appears in connection with six
incidents.  Each involves alleged meetings he  took  part  in  as
compared with the actual commission of a violent act.