TEXAS SEPARATISTS `LIENING' TOWARD OUTLAWRY : AUTHORITIES' RESPONSE COOL GIVEN MEMORIES OF WACO, RUBY RIDGE.

Byline: Sam Howe Verhovek The New York Times

Texas is the only state to have entered the Union as an independent nation, and even 1-1/2 centuries after it did so, schoolchildren say a daily pledge to ``Texas one and indivisible,'' and a state tourism slogan beckons visitors, ``Texas - It's Like a Whole Other Country.''

But to the consternation of state and federal officials, an increasingly belligerent group has decreed that Texan independence is not some quaint bit of history. As far as they are concerned, Texas is still a sovereign nation, and it is at war with the United States.

Here in the spectacular Davis Mountains of West Texas, 3-1/2 hours from the nearest commercial airport, the group's leader and self-designated ambassador at large is holed up in a tin-shed ``embassy,'' protected by armed guards.

Some of the demands of the group, which calls itself the Republic of Texas, are so outlandish that they border on the comical. It wants to receive $92 trillion in ``war reparations'' from the federal government, and it has ``ordered'' Gov. George W. Bush and all state legislators to vacate the Capitol building in Austin, none of which seems likely to happen any time soon.

Some of its actions, however, are not so funny. In what the state attorney general calls paper terrorism, members of the group, which argues that the 1845 annexation of Texas was unconstitutional, have filed thousands of bogus liens in courthouses across the state, clogging small-town courts and creating financial and legal headaches for businesses and some state officials, including the chief judge of Texas.

The members have passed at least $3 million of worthless but official-looking Republic of Texas checks, and they are simply ignoring state-ordered fines and orders to cease and desist.

Perhaps even more seriously, there is a potential for violence. This month, state officials shut two public buildings in Austin because of a bomb threat that they said was linked to the group.

In the West Texas embassy, which used to be a volunteer firehouse, the leader, Richard L. McLaren, is ignoring a citation for his failure to appear at a federal courthouse in Pecos to settle a dispute with a title company.

Mindful of the deadly results when federal agents with warrants went to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and a white separatist's cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, federal officials have taken a conspicuously low-key approach to dealing with McLaren.

The marshal in San Antonio, Jack Dean, a former Texas Ranger, said he would ``get around'' to arresting the leader at some point.

But if agents do arrive to take their leader, the chief of security for the Republic group, Chris Leonard, said, ``they'll have to kill me before they get to him.''

A visitor, escorted up a four-mile dirt road by Leonard and another guard armed with guns and a crackly walkie-talkie, found McLaren inside the old firehouse, surrounded by mounds of legal documents, computers (the group has a highly active site on the World Wide Web), fax machines and a television with an impressive collection of video movies, including ``Hard to Kill'' and ``Thelma and Louise.''

He pointed to a map and announced that the Republic had just restaked its claim to parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma that once were part of the Texas Republic.

``We've got Aspen now,'' he said. ``We've got Vail. This is great.''

Discussing the recent departure of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary general of the United Nations, a move prodded by the United States, McLaren said, ``We have very solid information that Boutros was dumped over the Texas independence issue.''

When McLaren finished talking, ``the ambassador to the Middle East,'' Karen Joy Coffey Kosier, seated in a lounge chair in the corner, spoke about what she said were her recent dealings with the Israelis and the Palestinians. ``There are some things going on,'' she said. ``But I can't be specific about them.''

McLaren is not even a native Texan - he was raised in Missouri and Ohio - although he said he had been fascinated by the state since he wrote a report on the Alamo in the third grade.

A skinny man dressed in a herringbone jacket and with a balding head flanked by two unruly clumps of wiry gray hair on the sides, McLaren looks more like a possessed academic than a military commander.

But at the mention of the federal citation, he turned steely and stared a visitor dead in the eye. ``If they try to cut this embassy off,'' he said, ``there will be a military reprisal, I promise you. Within six hours, probably 2,000 men will hit this site to defend the Republic.''

State and federal authorities said they believed that McLaren's following was far smaller than that, with perhaps a few hundred people with varying degrees of commitment. The officials said it was extremely difficult to gauge just how likely it was that McLaren or his most devoted followers would act on their statements.

Even some members of the group, which was convened 1-1/2 years ago at a cotton gin near San Antonio, have disavowed him.

In any event, the authorities said, they have no imminent plans to test his oratory by moving to arrest him. The inaction is a reminder of the troubling legacy of botched operations that resulted in deaths on both sides at Waco and Ruby Ridge.

The authorities are purposely leaving alone a wanted man, who is talking up a war with the federal government and continuing to lead his followers in a variety of legal maneuvers that are wreaking havoc in the courts.

Many of those tactics parallel those used by the Freemen, a group in Montana that surrendered last summer after an 81-day standoff with federal agents. The worthless checks are drawn on the ``Republic of Texas Trust,'' and printing on them says they are backed by the ``full faith and credit of the people of Texas.''

McLaren said he had purchased a wide variety of items, including computers, with the ``checks.''

A spokesman for the Texas attorney general's office, Ward Tisdale, said the checks were completely fraudulent. ``They are based on assets that don't exist,'' he said.

McLaren said the state Treasury was in violation of an order by his provisional government's highest court that it honor his group's checks. Disgruntled creditors ``need to take it up with these lawbreakers over in Austin,'' he added.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: ``Chief ambassador'' Richard McLaren, seated, Karen Joy Coffey Kosier, ``ambassador to the Middle East,'' left, and Chris Leonard, chief of security, are members of the Republic of Texas.

New York Times