Radiolab - Grumpy Old Terrorists

Episode Date: June 4, 2012

While working on The Bad Show, producer Pat Walters ran across some recordings that spooked him--partly because they seemed like they had to be a big joke ... and partly because, at the same time, they sounded so deadly serious. In this short, Jad & Robert try to decide how to feel.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W. N. Y.

C. C? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Janet Abramrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. The podcast.

And today on the podcast, something a little different. We got to it because our producer Pat. Do you just want to get in here? This is Pat Walters. Yes. So maybe you should set this. up since you put this in front of us. Yeah, this one comes from a writer named Tom. Tom Juneau, writer at large with Esquire Magazine. I've wanted to get on the show for a really long time.

It's about a pretty recent police bust that happened a few months back that Tom's been covering. Maybe we should just start with a... Should we just like follow the chronology of your reporting? Sure. I mean, how did you get into this? Yeah, how did it start with you? Well, I got into it, um, came out, you know, in the local newspaper. It was a, you know, front page story that came out on November 2nd. Where's local for you just, we know, I live in Marietta, Georgia, and local for me is the Atlanta, Georgia area. And the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a front-page story with an illustration of these guys by the sketch artist

that showed these guys being arraigned for guys in their orange jumpsuits. And the headline was interesting. It said they don't fit the profile. It wasn't four arrested subhead. they don't fit the profile. The headline was they don't fit the profile. To explain, the article described four guys who had been caught on tape planning to buy explosives. Are you looking for a seat for? I can get it. We are.

Explosives they were going to use to blow up a federal building in Atlanta, killing presumably hundreds of government employees. IRS, ATF, FBI, and the cops. They'd even looked into making this chemical called ricin, which is one of the deadliest poisons known to man. Arsenic takes 100 granules to kill someone. Racine takes one to two granules. Yeah, ahead of a pin. Yeah.

Hell yeah. On tape, they talk about taking this poison and dispersing it in public places up and down the East Coast. Newark, New Jersey, Jacksonville, Florida, Highway 95, and North Carolina and South Carolina. Which theoretically could have killed hundreds more people. they were motivated by an overarching desire to incite civil war, in which case, you know, the right side would battle and win, and constitutional government would be restored in the United States. Now, what made them not fit the profile was, well, you could see it right there on the front page in the court sketch.

Their white hair, they're white beards. These were not your usual teenage terrorists. These guys, at least some of them, were in their 70s. They were retirees. I mean, the thing that interested me about it in the beginning was the thing that interested a lot of people, which is the fact that, you know, guys like this who you see sort of chewing the fat at the local waffle house, shonies, McDonald's, you know, the coffee clatch of retirees. And, you know, you always pass these guys and, you know, you see them every day and you go and know, well, what are these guys talking about? In this case, they were talking about, you know, killing people in mass numbers.

We know what we want to do. We know how to do it. But we need to do it. So a story like this is not our usual thing. But what got us interested in talking to Tom about it is that when you hear these tapes... Who do we want to shoot? Lots of people. You're not quite sure how to feel.

When do we want to shoot them? Yesterday. That's right. Like, should I laugh? Like, oh, these are just some old dudes getting a little heated. Or should I be really afraid? And it made us wonder, like, how do you know when someone's really a threat or when they're just flapping their gums? Right.

And that is the fault line that the story tries to explore. I'm curious to meet as much as you've met the four guys in question. I mean, what do they like? I've not met any of them. They are in jail. You can't get to them. But based on what you learn, what can you tell us? Well, I mean, I went, I went the most interesting of them to me was Fred Thomas.

All right, so who's willing to take a life? He's the guy you're here talking the most on the tapes. Who's willing to take a life? Fred Thomas was a career Navy guy working outside of Washington, D.C., comes down here to be close to his son. This is late 2008. Right before. You're prepared to take the oath, Senator? I am.

Obama. I, Barack Hussein, Obama. is inaugurated as president. I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear. And for whatever reason, you know, he begins to see his dreams going sour. A president to the United States faithfully. And he begins, you know, going on to these militia sites, saying that the country that he served has now abrogated his trust.

Pretty soon, he's hosting militia meetings at his house ranting. About how it's time for them to do something. Are you committed? taking action. And in November 2011, Fred finds himself, along with some of the other guys, in a white truck in a Walmart parking lot, meeting with an arms dealer, to buy a silencer for a fully automatic assault rifle, and two fully built bombs made of C4 explosive. The bomb that they were accused of buying was actually sort of an IED.

It was a cell phone triggered device. That's a little bit scary, for sure. When you heard these tapes, were you alarmed? Sure. Sure, absolutely. Yeah. But I heard the tapes before I went to Fred Thomas's house. You know, when you pull up to their house in the mountains of Georgia, they have a sign in the driveway that says Frank Sinatra fans only.

You've had your first lesson. All others will be learning the blues. And, you know, when I pulled up to that, house and when I saw that sign and when I went into the, you know, Sinatra shrine room there, you know, I realized that they weren't typical militia. What I expected. Exactly. He then learns that right at the height of his planning, right as Fred Thomas is saying things like, I could shoot ATF and IRS all day long.

I could shoot ATF and IRS all day long. All the judges in the DOJ. As Fred was saying all this, he was in really poor health. I mean, he already has. a variant of emphysema that causes him to, you know, have to drag around an oxygen tank wherever he goes. He already can't get up the stairs. The month before the first meeting takes place, he has half a lung removed. Really? Yeah. When you listen to this tape, what did you think about the potential of this fellow to do something real? I mean, he sounds sane on this thing. He sounds

determined. The question is whether he or anyone could have done it. Because of age and health? Right. Well, wouldn't they have said that about James von Bruhn, the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum? As we started thinking about this story, we ended up calling Dina Temple Rastin. I'm NPR's counterterrorism correspondent. And she kind of complicated the age argument for us because she said this guy, James von von Brun. White supremacist. On June 10th, 2009, he walked right up to the Holocaust Museum. The guard opened the door. He shot him at point-blank range and then started shooting up the museum.

Oh, my God. 89 years old. 89? 89? She called us back later to say, actually, he was 88, but still... If you saw this man, frail. Wow. Does that fit any sort of profile?

It doesn't. To the fact that Fred Thomas was 73 and dragging around an oxygen tank, doesn't mean anything. That's right. Yeah, in fact, I felt like when he was talking about how old and experienced, Spendable? I'm old. I'm expendable.

And how, I mean, he was going to die soon. I ain't get a lot of time left down this earth anyway. Five, eight, ten years is the most. Now he wanted to, like, leave something behind for his grandchildren and fix the country before he went out. I want this country to be good for my grandchildren. And it takes killing some people here now. I'm moving.

Like, suddenly he felt like he was scary because he was so old and infirm. This is a guy with nothing to lose, wanting to go out in a blaze of glory. Exactly. And it felt weirdly like the things that other real terrorists say. Right. There was a abandon to the way that he was talking about himself. But if you go past that little sentence, which I noticed too, and then you go and learn anything else, then suddenly it gets dull again.

That's the way it seems to me. Well, he's far from, you know, a lot of these guys who do these things are rootless. He is far from rootless. They contrast him with the guy Dina told us about, Von Brun, who had no family, no friends. The only connection he had to the world was his computer. And just before his shooting spree? He gave away his computer.

Wow. So he was ready to die. Tom says that is not Fred's story. For all the violence of his rhetoric, he's shown for 73 years of life, no inclination towards violence, no inclination towards crime. He's been a, what we can see, a loyal husband, a devoted father.

He's lived in some ways a blameless life. And that is always why I thought that, you know, really, if someone had, you know, the sheriff had pulled up to his house and said, hey, listen, we know what you're doing. We know what you're up to. Just, you know, get lost. If I hear about this again, I'm going to come out and you're going to be in trouble. To me, it would have been over. So you think that if anyone had knocked on the door and said, we know what you're up to, just quit it, just cut it out? Absolutely.

You think they would have gone away. Absolutely. But how can you be so sure about that? I just think that there was an element of fantasy in this thing, which is scary, but present in almost all of it. We ended up going back and forth on this for quite a while with Tom and Robert saying the government might be taking these guys too seriously. But he didn't. And then Pat and Jad saying, well, how can the government not take them seriously? Dina, can we get your take here?

Sure. If you're faced with tapes of octogenarians talking about using ricin and spreading it on the highway to kill dozens, hundreds of people, however far-fetched it may seem, what do you do? I mean, is there a way that you can get to some sort of clarity as to like, here's one I ignore them. And once they pass this line and here's the line right here, I can put my finger on it, then we act. Is there a line? I mean, what do you do if you're the FBI? You know, it's a gut thing. In the end, for law enforcement, it's a gut thing. And they have to decide whether or not somebody's a real threat or whether it's somebody they have to watch. But what they started doing is actually letting these so-called plots go a bit further. For example, there's a man named Samadhi. They found him in a chat room talking about loving al-Qaeda's ideas and wanting to do something against the United States. Sort of like our militia guys.

Right. So basically, they introduced someone to Smadi and said that he was an al-Qaeda sort of affiliate guy, could help him get the explosives he needed, would help him get a van in which he could put the explosives so he could drive it into the garage of this big skyscraper in Dallas. And so Smati did all this. He called the guy, they got the van, filled it with explosives. Yes, everything that this guy suggested. But here's the important point. So they put the van in the basement of the building, and this FBI-affiliated person hands a phone to Smadi and says, dial this number, and it'll blow up the bomb. And where are they standing at this point?

Are they anywhere near this building? They're in a car watching the... They're actually in a car apart from the building so they could watch the explosion. Wow. Anyway, they're apart from the building, and they're watching it. And he hands Smati the phone, and Samati dials the number he tells them to dial.

And I don't know if this is a apocryphal part of the story or not, but it was actually the phone number for the local FBI office. And he was arrested. Oh, so he gave Samani the phone and said, dial this number, the building will blow up right in front of our eyes. And Samati did it. Exactly. That's beautiful police work. That's what I pay my police to do. They can do that thing.

That's brilliant. I would want to do that to all of them. Like, I would want to give that phone to everyone who's saying. that they want to blow up a building. Yeah, because it resolves the central debate here, which is whether the possible is probable.

Because if he's willing to dial the number, then you have your answer. But, okay, here's the caveat. Because I think a lot about this, because there was a time a couple of years ago when we had something in the neighborhood of 14 of these kinds of cases in one year. The caveat, she says,

is that if they dial the cell phone, yeah, that seems to settle things, but they would never have dialed it had you not given it to them. And so one way of looking at this, and I haven't fully resolved this for myself, is that if you get them stirred up, the fact that they're willing to dial the phone, you got them stirred up in the first place.

On the other hand, the fact that they were willing to dial the phone means that they were willing to dial the phone. So let's get down to what we can do. What are we willing to do? And you have something of the same tension in this case, the Fred Thomas case, and that's really the heart of Tom's objection. Like the whole reason we have these secret tapes that we've been listening to

is because the FBI recruited a confidential informant, a guy named Joe Sims, to infiltrate the meetings, and he wore a wire. And on the tape, you hear this guy, Joe Sims, suggest to Fred Thomas and the guys that they should buy explosives. Again, we didn't know what the price was. If you're saying it's a grand for a stick, which apparently cost $1,000. I'll give you a stroke already.

Sorry, guys. It is what it is. We didn't know. We didn't know. As you can hear, Fred says there's no way he can afford that. So Joe Sims chips in to help them buy it, using government money. And then finally, he sets up that meeting with the arms dealer. That eventually led to these guys arrest.

I mean, if they weren't even at some sort of level going to do it without the addition of Joe Sims and an undercover FBI agent, it comes really, really close to prosecuting thought crimes. You know, there is an apparatus at work here that is precisely the apparatus that these guys fear. Well, they weren't prosecuted for what they said. They were prosecuted for what they did. This is Sally Yates. The United States Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia. When you put together a list of people and groups that you want to kill, when you conduct surveillance on both the ATF and IRS buildings here in Atlanta when you make arrangements to buy bombs and silencers, that's not a thought crime. I think you ought to ask yourself, is that something you want law enforcement to walk away from? Are we absolutely certain that they were going to act on this? And I'm not going to pretend that we were.

But we were certain that that was not a risk that we were willing to take. We should probably hear the final. So at the end of the day, what happens? Well, at the end of the day, They meet in a parking lot in Cornelia, Georgia. Joe Sims is waiting there in a white Ford 150 truck with the undercover agent. Who is the undercover agent pretending to be? He's pretending to be an arms dealer. They are there to buy a silencer, and they are there to buy the explosive. So what happens?

They get into the truck. Sims has a lot of bills that is actually supplied by the government. He gives it back to the government, so to speak. hands it to the undercover agent. Fred Thomas hands his money to the undercover agent. The undercover agent steps out and says, I got to make a cell phone call. Makes the cell phone call. I talked to the manager of the Captain D's that was being built in the parking lot. They were there that day. And Chevy Suburban and a big van comes ripping by these guys as they're going out to lunch. And the manager says to the owner, well, don't look now, but there's a swathing. But there's a

SWAT team in that Chevy Suburban. That thing comes in and, you know, within seconds, these guys are out, they throw flash grenades in the bed of the white pickup truck where Dan Roberts and Fred Thomas are sitting. Flash grenades. Flash grenades are those things that, you know, they explode with a blinding burst of light and also, you know, tremendous loud noise. The whole purpose of that thing is just shock and awe. They throw the flash grenades. They get these guys out. They go face down on the pavement. they're encircled by a SWAT team in full armor. Automatic weapons trained at their heads. And my sources from the Captain D's said that one of the things that they noticed when they stood up was they both had stained their pants.

Because they were so scared. Yeah. Do you feel any safer? No. Not sure. Kind of. Yes. Thanks to Tom Janow and to our own Pat Walters.

Yeah. Thanks to you for listening. I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. See you. I am Haru Zamski, a radio lab listener from Portland, Oregon. And a radio lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. End of message.