[1][4][5] He was first tasked with infiltrating political organisations like CPUSA branches, later posing as a military advisor to radical groups like the Alabama Black Liberation Front.
The school was opened under the parent organisation the Mercenary Association, along with gun and survivalist store Survival Shack National in nearby Troy, Alabama.
[1] In March 1981, Camper, fellow instructor Robert Lisenby, and 11 students were arrested on trespassing charges, 2 miles from the Crystal River Nuclear Plant in Citrus County, Florida.
After the trespassing incident, Camper bought a heavily wooded 77-acre plot in rural Jefferson County, Alabama on the Warrior River to serve as a training site.
[13] With a more permissive license, Camper planned to expand into areas like teaching self-defence skills to office workers, and more advanced law enforcement training.
Actor Robert Duvall trained at the school in 1985[14] in preparation for his role in Let's Get Harry,[15] a 1986 action film where he played a mercenary assisting a group of plumbers in rescuing their friend from Colombian paramilitaries.
[4] When he learnt their plans had changed and they actually intended to assassinate Gandhi during his upcoming visit to Washington, D.C., Camper assisted the FBI in setting up a sting operation to arrest the plotters.
[4] In 1985, California nursery and elementary school operators Charlotte Wychoff and Elizabeth Leta Hamilton approached Camper after seeing him demonstrate incendiary devices on a cable TV show.
[24] In 1988, Camper testified in a public hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the Iran-Contra affair about his work as a mercenary in Central America during the early 1980s.
[4] A report written by Camper and sent to military intelligence back in December 1984 was released by the committee, detailing a plan for Contra forces and American mercenaries to collaborate on combating the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
[4] In his book The MK/Ultra Secret, Camper argued that Lee Harvey Oswald was the subject of a CIA mind control project of the 1950s, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy was organized by a team of disgruntled right-wing politicians.