Hayden Lake's Manis led FBI case that inspired 'The Order' film

Death and danger were closer than FBI Special Agent Wayne Manis knew when he was embroiled in a 36-hour standoff on Whidbey Island, Wash., in early December 1984.

“During the first raid, I took about 10 or 12 rounds within inches of my head," Manis said. "I knew it was close. I heard it hit the wall, but I didn’t know until later that the cedar shavings fell on top of my cap. I saw those later.”

Manis and his team were in a shootout with Bob Mathews, who founded the white supremacist domestic terrorist group The Order in 1983. The Order's members had conducted armored truck robberies, murdered Jewish talk show host Alan Berg and were building up their army to overthrow the government to create a whites-only America.

"The Order" starring Jude Law, a film inspired by the true events that took place in the Northwest, will be released Dec. 6. The film is based on journalist Kevin Flynn's nonfiction book “The Silent Brotherhood," on which Flynn closely worked with Manis. Manis also wrote about his experience in his book, "The Street Agent."

This was the FBI's largest domestic terrorism investigation prior to the Oklahoma City Bombing.

"It was an intense case," Manis said Tuesday morning after viewing an early release of "The Order" at the Hayden Cinemas.

Manis said he was not contacted by the filmmakers but only found out about "The Order" after he was contacted by Flynn.

“Seeing it and having lived it and wrote a book about it, there was a lot of Hollywood,” he said.

He said the armored car robberies and several other scenes were portrayed differently from what really happened.

“When we did the raid at Whidbey Island, it’s an absolute miracle that no agents were shot,” Manis said. “Hundreds of rounds were fired. I don’t know how many rounds.”

That night, in an attempt to remove Mathews from the house where he was holed up, Manis called in helicopters.

“A helicopter just a matter of feet from you is very intimidating," Manis said. "We thought we might be able to scare him into giving up. I guess I should have known better.”

Mathews refused to give up and fired at the helicopters, causing them to spin off. 

"That’s when I decided, ‘We need to put a flare in there,'" Manis said. "We couldn’t see what was going on, there was machine gun fire. I was taking machine gun fire through the trees. I was standing about 25 yards from the house."

Manis didn’t run into the burning building to give Mathews one last chance to turn himself in.

“I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I didn’t fall off the turnip wagon yesterday," Manis said. 

Mathews ultimately went down in flames with the building after several opportunities to give himself up.

"When you’re in a machine gun battle with a guy who’s shooting you and you’re shooting back and forth, I think the last thing on any sane man’s mind would be to go in and decide he’s going to do some charitable act," Manis said. "I’ll lay it down like it was — he was trying to kill us. At that point we were trying to kill him.

"After the battle stopped, I was standing in the dark in the still of night holding my empty K5 and it’s silent, except for the sound of fire burning," Manis continued. "Then I began to hear popping off from the fire, 'pop,' 'pop,' 'pop,' 'pop.' It sounded like thousands of rounds. I don’t know how many rounds he had; I do know he had several machine guns because during the course of the time I was engaged with him, I could differentiate between the different types of weapons he was firing.” 

Manis said some of the scenes were true to his experience — Law's character, Terry Husk, was a former Marine who worked the KKK and the mafia before receiving orders to check out rumblings about the Aryan Nations in Coeur d'Alene, which is what Manis experienced as well. He worked out of the empty federal building, where he used a broom to knock down cobwebs as he got settled.

“There I was in this little room, I’m knocking the stuff down and I called my wife to tell her, ‘Well I’m here and I hope you can get out here in a couple months,’” Manis said. "All that in the movie was very accurate. Then I discovered the terrorist group."

As the 40th anniversary of this shootout nears, Manis said something like this could happen again in this region.

“I never believed that the conceptual philosophy of The Order was killed, was gone,” he said. “There are thousands of people in the United States that view The Order and what they were trying to do favorably. They don’t think they were doing anything bad.” 

He said he is glad the film was made.

"Even though it’s Hollywood, maybe it will bring back an awareness of how serious this really was,” he said.

His daughter, Christa Hazel, was 10 when the movie takes place.

“At the time of the shootout, we were moving into our home here," Hazel said. "My mother and I were unpacking. We didn’t know where Dad was."

She said the film will serve as a reminder, for her family and for the region, of an intense time in history.

“I’m incredibly proud of the effort of my father and of the FBI," she said. "That was an incredible case and the FBI was necessary. There was truly a war going on. It was dangerous and not many people knew it.

"Mainly, what I’m excited about with this movie is the opportunity to provide a talking point, a conversation starter, for new people to this area who don’t know what was at stake in the ’80s," Hazel said. "It was a dangerous time.”