Oddly enough, the first group to react to the Plains Massacre was one which, in theory, should have been shielded from immediate knowledge. The majority of Plains’ men of working age were living in an impromptu civilian facility attached to a sizeable logging compound: patrolled by a small detachment of SATPO irregulars augmented by local volunteers, they ought to have been hermetically sealed from outside information. As usual, however, information spread among the civilian population inexplicably quickly: a relief detachment sent out to investigate the compound (whose CYBERSYN terminal operator had been offline for thirty-six hours by this point) on the evening of 23 June found the compound systematically stripped of all of its vehicles and valuable equipment and abandoned except for the bodies of about twenty civilians and all of the irregulars and volunteers. A cursory examination on the part of the relief detachment determined that any of the irregulars and volunteers (as well as, it was later determined, the two ostensibly civilian intelligence assets connected to Brennan’s intelligence-gathering operations) not lucky enough to be killed during the civilians’ initial rush on the guards had been subjected to extensive torture: the intelligence assets and three of the irregulars had been crucified some hours prior to death. The roughly three hundred and fifty escaped civilians, to a man, joined NWF units in the area: desiring no mercy and offering none to SATPO troopers, they developed a reputation as the most fanatical and unwavering insurgents faced by state forces.
The CSA’s leadership, in contrast, spent the first few days after the Plains Massacre with only Kanne’s reassuringly vague report about the pacification of a town in Sanders County as a point of reference: the series of televised interviews conducted by Trooper Allemann for the Pacific Broadcast Network and picked up (entirely illegally) by virtually every house in the CSA West of the Mississippi with access to a TV was as much of a surprise for the Chicago Congress as it was for the CSA’s civilian population.
By itself, Allemann’s testimony could be, and was, painted as a series of wild fabrications by a petty criminal and deserter desperate to find refuge in the PSA. Subsequent developments made this official line somewhat harder to maintain: Captain A and Lieutenant R, both noting the way the wind was blowing and wishing to ensure that their version of events was taken as indicative for the purposes of any future enquiry, both wrote up unofficial reports exculpating themselves entirely from any responsibility for the massacre and submitted these to the highest reasonable level of authority that they could find (the high command of the Army of the CSA in A’s case, the head of the Bureau of Internal Security in R’s).
The submission of these reports had come at an exceptionally unfortunate time for Alexander Haig: by this time the obvious if unacknowledged successor to an ailing Robert McNamara, he had nevertheless accumulated a large body of enemies both within the civilian and military leaderships of the CSA who saw a chance to clip his wings by tarnishing the military operation with which he was associated. These enemies ensured that both reports were unofficially in widespread circulation by mid-August 1992: by late September, the growing clamour for some sort of serious investigation could no longer be ignored.
The CSA’s official response to the allegations, which vacillated wildly at different times between asserting that no such incident as the Plains Massacre had ever happened, suggesting that any civilians killed during the routine pacification of Plains were victims of the NWF and even (at the urging of Brennan) suggesting to northwest Montana’s civilian population, through SATPO’s intelligence apparatus, that the Plains Massacre was the inevitable consequence of prolonged civilian resistance, did nothing to dampen down discontent at the conduct of SATPO. A series of military leaks to sympathetic Congressmen (in particular, the revelation in mid-October of just how much money had been entirely unofficially diverted from the Bureau of Internal Security’s budget to fund SATPO’s Irregular Division) damaged Haig’s position still further: engaged in a desperate fight to safeguard his political standing, he began to distance himself from SATPO for the first time.
Ultimately, Haig was able to prevent a formal enquiry into the Plains Massacre and, by December, had regained his previously unassailable position as successor-designate to McNamara. This had been achieved, however, by throwing much of SATPO under the bus: the Massacre, by now officially acknowledged by the CSA’s civilian leadership, was ascribed in its entirety to the actions of a handful of improperly-trained irregulars, with Haig announcing an end to recruitment efforts of the Irregular Division and the integration of the better irregulars into SATPO’s regular command structure. Brennan, who managed to escape a court martial largely because neither the Bureau of Internal Security nor the Bureau of External Security were prepared to acknowledge responsibility for him, was relegated to an entirely ancillary and officially powerless role within Operation Mountain Lion: by this time largely ignored by Kanne, North and McChrystal, he was to spend the remainder of the First Northwest Montana Insurgency virtually confined to an AFB outside Butte.
The largest effect of the failed movement to hold an enquiry on the Massacre was to manifest itself most fully in the mid-90s. The attempts in the second half of 1992 to hold Haig to account brought together, for the first time, Governors Dennis Kucinich, James Stockdale and Max Baucus and Congressmen James Traficant and R. Budd Dwyer: these men, each with fairly disparate views, would nevertheless form the nucleus of the unofficial Reform Caucus which would ultimately dissolve the CSA. On a less decisive level, the military side of the movement saw the creation of the working partnership between Colonel Andrew Bacevich and academic military theorist William S. Lind which would pose an increasing threat to Operation Mountain Lion in the last eighteen months of its existence.
Ultimately, all of this was of little interest to SATPO in comparison the dazzling moral and operational reverses of 1992. It had started the year calmly and effectively engaged in the slow strangulation of the NWF and in the anticipation that the insurgency would be reduced into a matter best handled by local police forces by 1993: it had ended it shorn of its most official public benefactor, more undermanned (relatively speaking) than ever before, and facing a civilian population which was by now universally sympathetic to the NWF. Operation Mountain Lion was never to regain the initiative.