Uncover - S18: "Pressure Cooker" E1: Project Souvenir

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Police intercept two homegrown – and very peculiar – extremists intent on murder and mayhem at a national holiday festival. Pressure cooker bombs. Just like the Boston Marathon. But something about the official version of the story doesn’t add up. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/pressure-cooker-transcripts-listen-1.6563380

Hey friend, Elamin Abdelmahmoud here. Look, if you're anything like me, maybe you're constantly looking for new podcasts. Well, I have a recommendation for you. It is Sounds Good, CBC's podcast newsletter. You'll get some new show recommendations and you'll be treated to some behind-the-scenes footage of some of your favorite shows.

Subscribe to Sounds Good, CBC's podcast newsletter at the link in the description. And also, just Sounds Good. I'm so grateful for those people because they listen to everything so you don't have to. This is a CBC Podcast. You see what you make us do? We have to do this. I wasn't recruited by anybody to do this.

I'm doing this at my own free will. If anything, I was recruited by this country's crimes against humanity. You're listening to a video recorded in June 2013. A shaky camera drifts over four stainless steel pressure cookers. The inside's coated with glue and rusty nails. On a nearby desk are wire cutters, a nine-volt battery, and two analog alarm clocks with wires dangling off the sides. You can hear them ticking.

The clip cuts to two figures sitting on a bed. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, brothers and sisters. A man sits on the right. His face and head are covered by a Palestinian-style headscarf. He's wearing an unzipped black leather jacket. If you ever stop fighting them, they're going to take every last one of us and kill us all. On the left is a woman shrouded in black, a niqab covering her face.

Brothers and sisters of the Mujahideen, it may appear that we are losing, but we are not. Allah is on our side, and Allah will always bring success to his followers. Fight them, light or heavy, with whatever you can. If you have a stone, throw it. If you have a bomb, drop it. If all you can do is give them the finger, then give it to them. There's a black ISIS flag stuck to the wall with duct tape. This is a war they've declared on Islam, so we're going to fight back with everything we've got,

even if it means losing our lives. We are a people who embrace death the way you embrace life. This is John Nuttall and Amanda Karody. They're recording this video to be released after they carry out a violent plot. Fight them. Don't ever stop fighting them. They are evil, but remember this. A war on Islam is a war against the servants of God so

serve your God and fight this might be the last thing I ever say to anyone and I don't even know what to say except don't give up don't give up. Don't give up. Allah hu akbar. Allah hu akbar. It's not clear from the video what their plan is, but it's less than 48 hours away. What you're about to hear is the unbelievable story of how it came to this. The moments of terror.

I'm going to snap their necks and put their bodies in the closet. Brutal betrayal. Unlikely romance. And you can guess who that cute guy turns out to be. You're going to hear about friendship. We bonded over our mutual love of Black Sabbath and the Dead Kennedys.

And staggering absurdity. We had no knowledge of how to work a nuclear submarine. How hard could it be, honestly? Probably pretty hard. I'm Dan Pierce, that this is early 2013. The war in Afghanistan is dragging on. The U.S. is trying to get out of Iraq, but it's still a bloody mess.

Next door in Syria, it's a full-blown civil war. Allahu Akbar! Next door in Syria, it's a full-blown civil war. ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, is just beginning its rise to infamy. Thousands of mostly young Muslim men from around the world will fly to the Middle East to fight. We now know there are dozens, maybe even as many as a hundred Canadians fighting in Syria. Some started with rebel groups, many are now with extremists. In April of that year, the Boston bombers killed three people and maimed 264 more using a pair of homemade pressure cooker bombs.

Robert Mueller was the FBI director at the time. As illustrated by the recent attacks in Boston, the terrorist threat against the United States must remain our top priority. We face a continuing threat from homegrown violent extremists. Their experiences and motives are often distinct, which makes them difficult to identify and to stop. In Canada, the RCMP and CSIS, our version of the FBI and CIA, disrupt several terror plots, one just a week after the Boston Marathon bombings. After an extensive and complex criminal investigation

named Project Smooth, the RCMP arrested and charged two individuals. The two men were allegedly planning to derail a VIA Rail passenger train with the help of Al-Qaeda. Jihadist terrorism is not a future possibility. It is a present reality. Here's then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Violent jihadism is not just a danger somewhere else. It seeks to harm us here in Canada,

in our cities, and in our neighborhoods. At the same time that Canada is hyper-focused on so-called Islamic terror, there's a rash of anti-Muslim attacks, not to mention broad surveillance of Muslim communities. It is absolutely very alarming, very concerning that the Islamophobia is on the rise and people are trying to incite hate towards Muslims by using the atrocities of ISIS and create a backlash against the Muslim community. And we are as law abiding citizens as any other Canadian. While law enforcement was on high alert for terrorist threats,

John Nuttall wasn't exactly keeping a low profile. He was yelling and screaming into the phone, and I could hear the person on the other side of the line yelling and screaming back at him. This is Charlene Thompson. Late one night in July 2012, she was out on her patio having a cigarette. Just after midnight, she began to overhear one half of a phone conversation. It was her neighbor across the street, John. That's the one thing that I remember him saying was that they were prepared to do whatever they needed to do to get to the other side. At the time, John was living in a basement suite in Surrey, British Columbia with his grandmother

and his common-law wife, Amanda Carote. They live in a pretty typical residential neighborhood, quiet except for busy Scott Road right next to the house. Charlene still lives across the street. And our house was way uglier than this then, and I thought, oh, for sure he's going to blow us up. She can laugh about it now, but at the time, she says it was frightening. Charlene says John was super animated.

Imagine this 6'4", bearded guy, dressed like a soldier, stomping up and down the street, shouting about blowing up Islamic countries and getting into the afterlife. And he had on camo gear and army boots and yelling really loud into the phone. So, yeah, it kind of scared me. What he was saying scared me enough to phone the police. So you phoned the police and then did they come that night and talk to him? And like, what, did anything come of that?

No. By the time they got here, he was back inside watching a movie with his grandma and his wife, Amanda, right? So they came and told me and they parked in my driveway and I was like, what are you doing? Parking in my driveway, he's going to know it was me. But anyways, they said, no, he's fine. He's sitting on the couch watching a movie with his grandma. The cops basically brushed the whole thing off. But this is likely the first time that John's extremist views end up on the police radar.

About three months later, in October, officers are back at the basement suite responding to another complaint. This time, a man named Mohamed Chowdhury tells police that John called him up and said mosque, that Nuttall had converted to Islam about a year earlier, and was talking about wanting to go fight a holy war in Afghanistan. When the police show up at John's door, he's drunk and stoned. The smell of weed comes wafting out of the house. He tells the officers he was only joking, and that Chowdhury, he's the one who's the terrorist.

In any case, with no dead body and no reports of any gunshots, the officers leave the scene. So then there's this third thing, which comes from Canada's spy agency. We have this letter from CSIS to the RCMP, and it's regarding John Nuttall. This is our producer, Sarah Berman. And of course, it's on CSIS letterhead with top secret underlined at the top in case you missed it. And then at the bottom of the page, it says, our service has recently learned that on January 31st, 2013, John Stewart Nuttall has been attempting to purchase potassium nitrate from pharmacies in the Lower Mainland.

Potassium nitrate, that's a common ingredient in explosives, right? Exactly. So it can be used for legit reasons. There's fertilizer, or it can be used for stump removal. And it's usually sold under the name Saltpeter. But definitely, it can be used to make bombs. So I'm guessing they don't think John was planning on doing some gardening. Probably not. They suspect he's going to do something else with it. But there's still a lot we don't know. I mean, we don't know who wrote this letter. The signature line is blacked out

completely. Do we know how CSIS got this info on John? No, not at all. But we do know that CSIS is looking into him separately. They've got their own investigation going on. And they're worried enough about John to say to the RCMP, we think you should look into this guy. So now John has the attention of the RCMP's Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, or INSET, which handles terror investigations in Canada.

They start by doing a background check on John, and it's pretty messy. Starting in 1995, he racked up convictions for drugs, mischief, robbery, kidnapping, and assault. He was banned from owning guns, ammo, and explosives. Here's John's old roommate from the 90s, Michael Lohr. John was a firm believer that if he saw something he wanted and he can get away with taking it, he would take it. He had a very nihilistic view of life. Morality didn't enter into it. But his friends were very dear to him.

He loved his friends. He would do anything for his friends. John's former bandmate, Stephen Drager, knew him all the way back to high school. He was a tall, skinny, gangly dude. Really mean guitar player though. And that was the second impression I got from him after tall, skinny, gangly dude. Really mean guitar player, though, and that was the second impression I got from him. After tall, thin, and boy, could he play the guitar. He played in some local punk and metal bands in the 90s. Insett starts a surveillance operation, with dozens of officers following John around. One of the first things they figure out is that his world is pretty small. He barely leaves a four-block radius around their basement suite.

One of his regular stops is the Shell gas station to buy coffee and cigarettes. Police also start looking into John's wife, Amanda Karody. Unlike John, she doesn't even have a criminal record, and she almost never leaves the house. When she does, she covers her face with a niqab, an Islamic veil. They have a few friends in the neighborhood they hang out with, including Ashley Volpati. One night, John and Amanda meet a friend at some nearby train tracks to hit the bong and fire off some paintball rounds at electrical poles. Cops are lurking in the bushes the whole time.

It's a massive production. Investigators even tail John's grandma to the grocery store. On Valentine's Day, this fledgling terror investigation gets a secret codename. Project Souvenir. With Project Souvenir up and running, Inset pulls out the big guns to bring John down.

The whole thing is like a spy thriller, complete with wiretaps, hidden cameras, and secret microphones all over the place. It's an absolute mountain of surveillance tape, most of which we've been able to get our hands on. I could have killed 225 Canadian soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and all their families. They would have been so terrorized they probably would never ever go against Islam again after that. So if the bomb went off here, it would drive everybody onto the causeway.

So we want to get as many people into this kill zone as we can get. In Boston, there was only two people killed and one was an eight-year-old child. Sure, there was, what, a hundred people injured, but we're not after that. We're thinking big here. We want Canada to have their own 9-11. It's high time that they had it. John's wife Amanda also becomes a target of the investigation. She doesn't say much, but she's there for a lot of it.

I don't like the idea of targeting women and children. It's not too much women that bother me because I am a woman. But if they're there, that's unfortunate. At the same time, John's got a penchant for action movies, paranoid fantasies, and elaborate disguises. I could dress up like a hockey player or a jock and carry a hockey bag. And there was this movie called Rambo, part three. And Rambo, he goes to Afghanistan. I thought the cops were coming for me, and I'm standing there in the nude, and I'm like, bring it, bring it.

John's the kind of guy who does a lot of talking. He gets pretty outlandish. What police are trying to figure out is how likely he and Amanda are to follow through on that talk and put it into action. Especially once John settles on a plan. One that mimics the Boston bombers. Using simple, homemade pressure cooker bombs. Yeah, that's what they used in the Boston bombings. That's the same bomb they used.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs And this time it's going to get personal I don't know who Sober Jeff is I don't even know if I like that guy

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. What makes pressure cooker bombs so scary, aside from how deadly they can be, is that anyone can buy nearly all the required parts. It would be illegal for me to tell you how they're made, but suffice it to say, you've likely got most of what you need to build one around the house. There's the question of the actual explosive material, but that'll come later. So once John and Amanda settle on a plan to use pressure cookers to carry out their attack, they set out on a shopping trip to get supplies.

Police record the outing in stunning detail. I just can't believe I spent so much money today. Like, that was expensive. John drops about $1,000 on supplies. We got the real pressure cookers now. They're all metal construction and they screw down, you know? I got the same one they use in Boston.

I think. Police record John describing how he plans to use a clock to build the timer. We take off all the other hands, leave this hand, right? And when it gets all around to the 10, it's going to touch the piece of metal, close the circuit. It's going to send a signal from the nine-volt

battery to the explosive. The specifics of the attack are becoming clear, and we're just days away from July 1st, Canada Day. They take their bomb-making supplies to a cheap motel in Delta, not far from Vancouver. This will be the safe house where John assembles the bombs. There's a video of him working away in the motel room. He has a scarf wrapped around his head and face, and he's wearing white latex gloves as he works glue around the insides of the pressure cookers. You can hear John dropping nails into the pots for shrapnel. Amanda can be seen lying on the bed.

And they have these bushes of flowers there. Mostly she's on the computer, picking out targets. But she does help build the bombs. And John tells her to clean different spots where they may have left fingerprints. You're using bleach, right? The table is covered in tools and bomb parts. The job of making the devices continues for three days, with very little sleep. During a break, John and Amanda watch CNN. This is hard to hear over the sound of the TV, but John foreshadows their attack.

He says the aftermath will be on the news within 48 hours. This is going to rock the world. The whole world is going to hear about this. Did you catch that? This is going to rock the world. The whole world is going to hear about this. John says they'll be known as Al-Qaeda Canada. Secret agents. Mujahideen. The sleepers who've been awoken.

Mujahideen, the sleepers who've been awoken. The day before Canada Day, they pack up their things. They've built three bombs and two timers. They take a ferry to Victoria and settle into another hotel. John and Amanda head out to do their final reconnaissance. The provincial legislature has been one of their targets since this plot began, but it's only now that they confirm their plan. That's the legislature, okay?

You destroy that, it's the same as destroying the White House. The legislature is a fortress of copper domes and stone spires, topped with a golden statue of Captain George Vancouver. John says destroying this building is something that will be talked about for eternity. Books will be written about it. He alludes to the capital's ties to its British history. Britain, the British government, will take incredible offense if we destroy this building. It's evening now on the lawn of the legislature. The setup for Canada Day festivities is well underway.

There are temporary fences, tents, and a main concert stage. Hey Ocean's the headliner. We just started the three and the ten. The kids won't open the tune. People are milling around. Streetlights have turned on as the daylight fades. It's easy to pick John out of a crowd. He towers over everyone. And he's wearing a straw hat with a wide brim. The kind of sun hat your grandma might wear to the beach. Amanda looks tiny compared to John. She's about a foot shorter, in a black track jacket. She chain-smokes cigarettes as they inspect the area, looking for You don't want to destroy the edges, just you want to destroy that center building.

Mm-hmm. The couple doesn't get much sleep back at the hotel. They're up at 3 a.m. and make their way to an underground parking garage. They set the timers in the back of a white cargo van. The timer goes at 1 o.m. and make their way to an underground parking garage. They set the timers in the back of a white cargo van. The timer goes at one o'clock, okay? So two, three, four, five, six, seven, boom, okay? They decide the first splash

should go off at nine in the morning. The second and third bombs will detonate 15 minutes later, once first responders have arrived. When they roll up to the legislature, it's 5 a.m., just before the sun rises. John jumps out of the van and plants a blue duffel bag with two pressure cooker bombs in a bush close to the legislature. He returns to the van and plants a blue duffel bag with two pressure cooker bombs in a bush close to the legislature. He returns to the van wielding a large knife. I was in a bush. There was a bomb sleeping in the bush. He woke up and he's like, what's that?

And I pulled out my blade. John says the man went back to sleep, possibly saving his life. And I had the blade like this, ready to strike him. I was going to hit him right, stick saving his life. And I had the blade like this ready to strike him. I was going to hit him right, stick it right in, sever the artery. He's dead. Amanda returns after planting her bomb in another bush. Did you put the branches back and shove them down and everything? It was a perfect hole for me to put it in.

Did you cover the hole after you broke the branches and put it over and covered it? I didn't have to. I just moved the branches. It looks natural and you can't see it unless you stick your head in. Okay same with mine. But the bombs are in place, and the timers are ticking toward detonation. You did good. I saw you did good. As they drive away, the adrenaline is pumping. It feels like success. Allah, what's good?

Allah, what's good? The deed has been done, and there's no turning back. Now it's just a matter of making a clean getaway and waiting for the blasts. They're going to be looking for this van. Maybe. They will. They're going to be looking at every car that has gone by. When the sun rises over Victoria on July 1st, John and Amanda are already long gone.

The day is hot and the skies are blue as families trickle into the downtown harborfront. Pretty soon the whole area is bustling with people as far as the eye can see. The pressure cooker bombs are scheduled to go off at 9 in the morning. You guys are awesome. You look so good today. Righteous. The lawn of the legislature has been turned into a festival ground. Bagpipers and circus performers roam the streets. Kids with red maple leaves painted on their faces wave miniature flags.

The whole place is buzzing with Canadian pride. But at the end of the day, the explosions that rock Victoria are just fireworks. The next day, the Mounties' top brass stand in front of a blue backdrop and hold a press conference. Good afternoon, and thank you all for being here. On July 1st, the RCMP arrested and charged John Stewart Nuttall and Amanda Cordy for terrorism-related activities, including taking steps to build and subsequently place explosive devices at a predetermined location in the city of Victoria in British Columbia for the purpose of causing death or serious bodily injuries on Canada Day.

RCMP officers are flanked by large photos of the pressure cooker bombs, filled with rusty nails for shrapnel. I want to reassure our citizens that at all times during the investigation, our primary focus was the safety and protection of the public. While the RCMP believes that this threat was real, at no time was the security of the public at risk. This is their second big terror bust in two months, and the country's top cops aren't shy

about tooting their own horns. We detected the threat early and disrupted it. On behalf of the RCMP, I want to express our appreciation to CSIS and all our partners. The press conference starts to sound more like an awards ceremony at this point. But coming hot on the heels of the Boston bombings, who can blame them? The news media is quick to notice the similarities to the Boston attack. What was immediately noticeable, they were pressure cooker bombs, reminiscent of the explosives used by the Boston bombers in April.

And that's not where the similarities to the Boston bombing end. The RCMP began investigating the two B.C. suspects in February, exactly when U.S. investigators said that Tsarnaev brothers began plotting their attack. The RCMP said Nuttall and Korody were inspired by al-Qaeda. So were the Tsarnaevs, and both pairs were self-radicalized. The premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, addresses the media on the grounds of the legislature the very next day. What they wanted to accomplish was more than just to harm individuals on that day. What they want to do is the same thing that terrorists want to do all over the world, and that is rob us of our sense of security, to rob us of our sense that this place belongs to us. And we cannot allow them to succeed in that. Police are vague about how the

bomb plot was thwarted. But from what we know now, cops were all over them from the very start. We were able to control and ensure that the devices constructed were unable to detonate and cause harm to other individuals. The case gets turned over to prosecutors. You know, anybody can make a bomb. What's hard to find is the will to detonate it. This is Peter Eccles, who led the prosecution against John and Amanda. He's retired now, but agreed to talk to us about the case. He still remembers his first impression of the couple.

My initial sense was that they were very dangerous, very easy to dismiss, and remarkably banal for the level of evil that they demonstrated. But for Amanda's lawyer, Scott Wright, something seemed off. Wright had questions, even before he got involved in the case. He remembers seeing the news on TV. It just, the whole thing seemed odd right from the start in the way that the ceremony still was able to go on. So immediately you thought, there's just more to this story. John and Amanda's defense team eventually start to poke holes in the official narrative. I think in the official narrative.

I think in the fullness of time, the evidence will come out that might perhaps undermine some of what they were suggesting. Calling into question the whole self-radicalization story being pushed by police. Perhaps the radicalization was assisted by others. This idea that John and Amanda had help will become a common theme. Friends of the couple come out of the woodwork to defend them. There's somebody that planted a seed in the back of their head to do this. Because just the two of them alone could not have pulled this off. He didn't have the money. He didn't have transportation.

He didn't have the means. And where did he get the knowledge and the mentality to do this? How is this possible? How can this sweet couple who are searching for truth do this? I just didn't think it was possible. They couldn't have done this on their own. They could not. done this on their own. They could not. John's family would also stand by the couple in front of the TV cameras. Here's his mom and grandmother. These are two completely sweet people who are

absolutely incapable of doing such outrageous stuff. He wouldn't hurt a thing. You sure about that? I know that because we lived under the same roof. Some big questions loomed over this case like storm clouds. Like how this couple got the explosive material to make the bombs. How they paid for all the tools, supplies, ferry rides, and hotel rooms. And whether anyone else helped them concoct this scheme and pull it off. The answers will be revealed as John and Amanda's trial unfolds. It was a case that had problems, no doubt. But that doesn't mean you don't run it.

At the end of the day, I still came back to the fact that no one, no one does this sort of thing without meaning it. Absent from the conversation were John and Amanda, who were looking at the prospect of spending a lot of bad things about me. But I want you to know, whatever they say I did, I didn't do. And at the end, I wrote, I love you. And I deleted everything except for mom. I have to tell you something. I love you.

And that's all she got. That's John on the phone with me in 2020. He goes by Omar now. And his wife, Amanda, she goes by Anna. My internal struggle was mostly a struggle to survive. I just wanted to have a happy life, get a job, live with Omar, have some kids. Over the next four episodes, you're going to hear a lot more of John and Amanda. From interviews and more than hundred hours of surveillance tape.

We'll dig into their past to find out what made these two who they are and how they ended up with their violent worldview. We'll pick apart every step of this costly anti-terror operation, even the parts police and prosecutors didn't want a jury to see. And we'll try to figure out whether these two are indeed dangerous terrorists or something else entirely. That's next time on Pressure Cooker is written and produced by Sarah Berman, Rafferty Baker, and me, Dan Pierce. Mixing and sound design by Rafferty Baker. Our digital producer is S.K. Robert. Jeff Turner is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Chris Oak,

and Arif Noorani is director of CBC Podcasts. Our theme song is by Humans. Special thanks to Graham McDonald and Taranam Kamlani. Thanks for listening.