Front Burner - The Base Tapes: recordings from inside the neo-Nazi group

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

When an anti-fascist infiltrator left The Base in 2020, he took 80 gigabytes of files with him. Those screengrabs, videos and audio detail the neo-Nazi organization from its beginnings, including around 100 hours of vetting calls with white supremacists hoping to join. Today, The Fifth Estate host Gillian Findlay guides us through that audio, the first-ever interview with the infiltrator who calls himself Tradian and what the recordings all tell us about "accelerationist" ideology. Plus, FBI recordings of Base member and former Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Mathews after he fled to the U.S.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Derail some trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies. This man you're hearing is wearing a gas mask to conceal his identity.

But we now know this is a man who is trained by our own military. This is former Winnipeg Reservist, Master Corporal Patrick Matthews. You better be ready to do those things. If not, then you're not going to be ready for what's coming. In 2019, the Winnipeg Free Press outed Matthews as a member of the violent neo-Nazi group, The Base. We've talked a number of times about how The Base collected weapons and trained white nationalists, preparing for a supposed race war. But now we're getting this unprecedented look at how The Base actually operated. The reason why I wanted to join The Base is I want to fight for my future and for the future of my future children. These are interviews with potential base recruits recorded by a man who infiltrated the group from its very beginning.

He's given those recordings to the Fifth Estate and given host Jillian Finley his first ever interview about what he saw. Like those guys were on a trajectory that was going to be violent. And it was. There was no question about it. I could hear them tick. What were you worried about? I was worried that they were going to engage in spree killing. Plus, Jillian has audio from after Matthews' disappearance to the U.S., recorded by FBI surveillance.

You realize, like, they're just going to call us terrorists. They're going to go to jail anyway. Might as well do some damage to the U.S. recorded by FBI surveillance. We realize they're just going to call us terrorists. They're going to go to jail anyway. Might as well do some damage to the system. Together, it paints this vivid picture of what the base was plotting and the ideology driving its members. Today, Jillian's going to walk me through it all. And a warning, this audio is often racist and violent and may be disturbing to some. Hi, Jillian.

Hey, Jamie. How are you? I'm good. It's great to have you on the show. I know that we've talked about the base on the show before, but you've got this interview with someone who was there from the start. We'll hear his voice dubbed over with an actor here for his protection. Do you feel you're in danger? Not right now because I'm anonymous. But if you weren't? If I weren't, there'd be people who would probably want to shoot at me because I'm the enemy. So tell me, who is this guy that calls himself Tradian? Tradian, yeah.

Well, look, I can't tell you a lot for obvious reasons. I mean, this man fears for his life if he is identified, but I can tell you some general things about him. He is an anti-fascist activist in the States. He was one of the first people to join the base when it started in 2018. And, you know, he played the game. He earned their trust. He got into the inner sanctum, as it were.

You know, I should say that Tradian is a very committed anti-fascist. And he told us that he'd been trying to infiltrate extreme white national groups for some time before he stumbled on this particular group. He'd failed a couple of times in earlier attempts, but he feels he really hit the jackpot when he found the base. Just how much of the base's operations was he able to catalog here? Well, he started in mid-2018 and he left in 2020 in February. So over that period of time, he screenshotted the base's encrypted chat room. He cataloged, I think, something like 46,000 screenshots, downloaded more than 5,000 images and videos.

And also, and this was particularly relevant to us, he had recorded nearly 100 hours of vetting calls. These were the calls that people had to where they were, you know, as the name would suggest, they were vetted for membership in this group. And so this was a collection of white supremacists who wanted to join this group. Listening to these calls that you've been able to get your hands on, what have you learned about the kind of people who are trying to join the base? Well, first of all, they came from everywhere. I'm from Alabama. Grew up in Belfast. I came from the U.K. Arizona.

Bethnal Nationalist from Northwestern Australia. All around the world, most U.S. states, Europe, Britain, Australia, and they came from Canada. Exclusively, they were male, white, shockingly young in some cases, some as young as 16, 17 years old. Well, I'm 17 right now. I'm currently in high school. And what they had in common, in addition to their disturbingly racist views of the world, was the fact that they'd found the base after being radicalized on other extremist sites and platforms. So these weren't just young guys who were curious

and testing the waters, you know, they were serious enough, they'd been in other places and had found their way to the base because they were looking for ways to translate ideas into action. And that's what the base promised them. Yeah. And talking about that, I know that these files, they give us a look at the difference between what the base, you know, outwardly pitched itself as and then it's even more extremist ends. And I wonder, maybe if the best way to get at that is to focus on the founder, Ronaldo Nazaro. We've talked about him on the show before. He's also known as Roman Wolf or Norman Spear. It's like aliases. Why did I create the base? What did he tell recruits they'd have to do for the

base? Well, as you know, he's a shadowy figure, to say the least. Not even a lot of base members seem to know what to make of him. He's an American, former U.S. military contractor who now lives in Russia. And he preaches that the world order as we know it is an imminent danger of collapse and that base members and people who think like him need to get ready to capitalize on that. If things continue, if the pressure on the white population in the United States continues to intensify. There will be regional resistance movements. He's very cagey because in all those vetting sessions that we listened to, you can tell he's speaking carefully. He says to recruits, on the one hand, they're not looking for what he calls keyboard warriors.

They want people who are committed to action. But on the other hand, he says, look, we're not going to ask you to do anything illegal. You know, this is a group that ironically, or maybe it's just ironic in retrospect, was really concerned about infiltration. Lots of discussions on those calls were about operation security, OPSEX, what they call OPSEX, and the need to be careful about what was said. And so you can hear him say to them, look, we think there's a collapse coming. We're not planning to cause a collapse.

That would be illegal. There's nothing illegal about preparing for some sort of crisis scenario. We're going to try to actively bring down the system ourselves. We're assuming that it's going to fall under its own weight. We need to start planning. And that's the kind of military training that we want you to get. This idea that they want to like step in when some sort of collapse happens and do and do what? Well, they want to step in. And this is their theory, that collapse

is inevitable, but they are prepared to help it along. This is the theory called accelerationism that, you know, the world order is starting to crumble, we can expedite that by creating a mayhem, chaos, destruction. And then at the end of all of that, we will be able to, the theory goes, build the white ethno state that we have always wanted. We will be able to eliminate all those people we see as our enemies, and we will be able to build something new. And I guess it's hard to believe, but Tradian says some of them advocate for like even more extreme action than this concept of acceleration, right? Yeah, they talk about something called universal order. In which you kill literally everybody that's not white.

Kill everybody who's not white? Everyone, everyone. And it's pretty stark. Essentially, it's, you know, it's just they're being very clear. They're not talking about dominating other races or subjugating other races. Universal order, according to Tradian anyway, means eliminating them. Wow. It's terrifying.

The founder, Nazaro, what did the infiltrator, Tradian, tell you about what his actual goals were? Well, this is where it gets very interesting, because on the one hand, as I said, you can hear Nazaro being careful in what he says. But in person, Tradian says he was very clear. You know, this was not, he didn't think that there was a collapse coming or that it was inevitable. The goal of the base, according to him, was to create it, to create that reality. Nazaro knew that there was no collapse. He knew that there was, that's impossible. He said to me himself, that was never the plan. The plan was to cause the collapse, to become the crisis. The plan was to cause the collapse, to become the crisis. Even if you look back on Nazaro's Twitter feed, you can see the mask slips from time to time.

You know, at one point he's praising Hitler and promising to finish off what Hitler failed to do. On another, he's sort of posting instructions for how to stage a sniper attack. So, you know, on the one hand, there's the talk. And then there is the other hand. On the other hand, there's the talk, and then there's the other hand. On the other hand, there's what they were really planning, according to Tradian. What do the tapes reveal about the kind of members that the base was looking for? Well, the one thing that they ask over and over again is, first of all, about their worldview. They wanted to make sure that these were committed people. Tradian says every one of them would fit the description of a neo-Nazi for sure. There's no question about that to me.

Every single person who joined was a Nazi of some form or another. But in addition to that, they wanted people with military experience, whether it was weapons experience, some proficiency with weapons, or actual military training. And those people who had military training were, were prized. I mean, you could hear that in their voices as they were as they were putting these people, you know, questioning them about what their experiences have been. Once I'm 18, I'm going to try to get a gun. There's a lot of different places you can go for like, sniper training. I'm pretty proficient

go for like sniper training. I'm pretty proficient with firearms, looking to become a combat engineer. I'm currently in the military, but I'm in the National Guard. Well, I guess Patrick Matthews is, of course, one example of that. People like Matthews, perfect for this gig, specifically his knowledge of explosives, that was considered valuable. I understand there was another recruit who claimed to be connected to the Canadian military, and I wonder if you could tell me about, it's Dakov? That's how he pronounces it. That was his online handle, Dakov. All I can really tell you is how he describes himself in the vetting session that we listened to, and that Tradian actually was part of.

At the time, he said he was 19 years old, from Ottawa, had been a fascist for a couple of years already and had a long membership, even at that age, on other far-right extremist groups and chat rooms online. I got into fascism back when I was like 14, 15. But what's interesting is what really gets the vetting committee interested is when he starts talking about the military. Dakov says he's been accepted by the Canadian military, is awaiting basic training, and he has plans to follow that training with other courses in artillery and combat tactics, that kind of thing.

So, okay, you're going to JTAC school. That's pretty cool. Well, JTAC, CBRN, and airborne. Wow, nice. That's pretty awesome. And what's especially awesome to Nazar, is the word he used, is Dakov says he knows others in the area,

the Ottawa area, who he thinks he can recruit and who apparently also have access to weapons. So I found a few guys that I talked to who were willing to join. One guy named Peck. He lives like two hour drive away from me. There's one other guy, he has a Ruger Mini, and he says he's getting his restricted power license. And, you know, this was important because at that time, the base was looking to expand their Canadian presence. They wanted to set up cells that could then train together. So the idea that this young man seemed to have the makings of what might become an Ottawa cell seems pretty exciting to them.

Now, I should tell you, Jamie, that we did check with the military and they assure us that the person who called himself Dakov on those tapes was never a member. But it raises all kinds of questions. I mean, Dakov was an online handle, you know, a made up name to protect his real identity. So how would the military even know? And when we asked them that, or asked them even to tell us how they investigated to reach that conclusion, they wouldn't provide us any answers. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Some people will remember how Patrick Matthews escaped from Canada to the U.S. And I know Special Agent John Phillips from the FBI actually told you how they tracked him. So we were aware of Brian Lemley and William Bilbrow being members of the base in the state of Maryland. And they became aware that Patrick Matthews had crossed illegally into the United States. And they drove from Maryland to southwest Michigan, distance about 600 miles, to pick

up Patrick Matthews and to bring him back to the East Coast to harbor him. So I want to pick up where Matthews and Lemley were staying in an apartment in Delaware, and the FBI had them under this constant surveillance. And how did these extremists' targets and ideas shift as the FBI listened in? Well, don't forget, the FBI had been following the base for a number of months at that point. They had followed them to a training camp in Georgia, where they had overheard plans, the group talking about killing a couple of local anti-fascist activists. And they were clearly concerned enough to follow these guys as they went and set up base in Delaware. Because of the monitoring that they did, they heard an awful lot of talk over a couple of months.

Targets differed, you know, different groups. They were angry with government officials. You know, government was always seen as the enemy. We fucking killed the fucking government, which is the fucking enemy. Anyone associated with Antifa because they were, they really did seem to fear them and their influence. Stop letting them breathe. Make them fucking disappear. And you don't need to kill them all. By God, we don't have the bullets. And of course, anyone who simply, you know,

just wasn't white, including children even. I don't care if I've shot a bunch of fucking black kids and something in the back of my fucking head is ringing and it feels bad. I don't fucking care. I'm not going to... Really, really hard to listen to. How did the members of the base talk about people who had committed atrocities like mass shootings? Well, this is,

I think, one of the most disturbing things is they referred to them, like, you know, the shooter at Christchurch, for instance, as the saints. They venerated them. You know, they made stylized posters to commemorate what they had done. And in fact, Tradian told me this was one of the things that worried him the most, you know, that any one of these guys, including Patrick Matthews, he said, might just decide to join that pantheon of saints and stage their own mass attack. to join that pantheon of saints and stage their own mass attack. You know, one thing we did learn from the FBI is that when the RCMP raided Patrick Matthews' house back in Manitoba, you know, the day after he'd been outed as a base member by the Winnipeg Free Press, you know, they found in his wastebasket a handwritten list of every mass murder attack going back decades.

a handwritten list of every mass murder attack going back decades. You know, cities, dates, numbers of dead and wounded, details about the shooters responsible. And what's interesting and maybe worrying about this is that the RCMP never shared that information publicly in Canada. They found weapons in Matthew's home as well as this list, but they detained him only for a few hours before letting him go. The only reason we know about that list is because the FBI eventually entered it in the court proceedings against him in the States. Wow. What has the RCMP said about that, if anything?

Very little. They acknowledge, you know, when it became evidence in the States, they acknowledge that they did in fact seize it, but they have provided no information as to what they did at the time when they found it. And I mean, they just do not want to address this issue. Having fled to the U.S. and then joining up with these other guys and saying all of these horrible things under FBI surveillance, what action did Matthews and others like Lemley ultimately decide that they would take here? Well, eventually their plans seemed to crystallize around an upcoming gun rally in the nearby state of Virginia. This was a pro-gun rally, but the thinking seemed to

be that there was a decent chance that some kind of violence might well break out, and they were expecting large numbers. So if violence did break out, their thinking was they wanted to be there to take advantage of it. I mean, if this thing goes off, and let's say they start fighting in Virginia. We shoot at the government. We kill the cops. You know, to create havoc, destroy property, as Lumley actually says on the tapes. Get some of my blood on their hands. Once again, it was this idea of accelerating what they hoped would become a race war. But as I said, they never made it to the rally.

The FBI arrested them just days before. And as it turned out, the rally went off without a shot being fired. Right. and you know as it turned out the rally went off without a shot being fired right and then both men have since been sentenced to nine years in prison in maryland right that's right we went down to maryland for the for the sentencing in october um in which some of the the tape that we've been listening to here today was played for the judge in court and you know i've got to say it was quite something there listening to to the words that they said and the juxtaposition of looking at these two kind of pathetic looking guys

sitting there in their orange jumpsuits. You know, at one point they were asked if they had anything to say. And Matthew's the guy we just heard bragging about all the things he wanted to do and all the destruction he was going to create, essentially, you know, just says, oh, well, you know, it was all just a big misunderstanding. I just got caught up in the

wrong crowd. And really, I just want to go back home to Canada. I just want to come back to the RCMP for a second. Why do you think the RCMP or our military wasn't able to stop Patrick Matthews or, I guess, the base and the work that it was doing here in Canada sooner? I think it's a really good question, Jamie. And I don't think we in this country have an adequate answer to that yet. You know, if you recall, when Matthews was first outed by the free press, the military at first claimed to know nothing about him. You know, in fact, the head of the military at the time thanked the reporter for exposing a potential problem. But subsequently, we've learned that the military did indeed have concerns about

Matthews for quite some time, and that at least two counterintelligence investigations had been opened in the months before he was exposed in the press. They were opened, and then within a matter of days, they were closed. So what was that about? Why were they opened? What investigation was done? What did they conclude? The military won't say, just as the RCMP won't say, you know, why they were so quick to release him after that raid on his house. They found weapons. They found a list of mass murders. And yet, you know, and within hours he was released. And within days, as you say, he had fled. Yeah, that was really disconcerting to hear.

And talking about the base, given that they have now been infiltrated by the FBI, an anti-fascist and a Winnipeg Free Press journalist, as you said, it's kind of ironic that they talked about this so much. Plus six members are now in prison in the U. Like, what is left of this organization? Well, I think everybody seems to agree that not much is left. Tradian says that the base is all but defunct. You know, you can still find Nazarra posting on far right encrypted apps, but he has no following now. And as you say, with so many members now in jail are likely headed there. It's not a group, frankly, anybody really wants to join, but it's really important. Everyone we talked to says it's really important that to know that that does not mean that the ideas that the base espoused have gone away. In fact, there's an argument to suggest they're even

more widespread than before. And, you know, indeed, in our research, we found another group sounding an awful lot like the base, advocating white power and commitment to action, and recruiting in the same way with a presence in a number of Canadian provinces. So, you know, the base may be gone, but accelerationism and all that ideology is still very much with us and as Tradian says you know we've been warned right Jillian thank you so much for this thank you thank you all right so that is all for today.

Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.