[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: 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?

PAT WALTERS: Hey.

ROBERT: This is Pat Walters.

PAT: Yes.

JAD: So maybe you should set this up since you put this in front of us.

PAT: Yeah, this one comes from a writer named Tom.

TOM JUNOD: Tom Junod, writer at large with Esquire Magazine.

PAT: Who 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.

JAD: Maybe we should just start with—should we just, like, follow the chronology of your reporting?

TOM JUNOD: Sure.

JAD: I mean, how did you get into this?

ROBERT: Yeah, how did this start with you?

TOM JUNOD: Well, I got into it, came out, you know, in the local newspaper. It was a front-page story that came out on November 2.

JAD: Where's local for you, just so we know?

TOM JUNOD: I live in Marietta, Georgia, and ...

JAD: Okay.

TOM JUNOD: ... 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 this sketch artist that showed these guys, you know, being arraigned, four guys in their orange jumpsuits. And the headline was interesting. It said, "They Don't Fit the Profile." It wasn't "Four Arrested," sub-head "They Don't Fit the Profile." The headline was "They Don't Fit the Profile."

JAD: To explain, the article described four guys who had been caught on tape planning to buy explosives.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Are you looking for C4? I can get it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We—we are.]

JAD: Explosives that they were gonna use to blow up a federal building in Atlanta, killing presumably hundreds of government employees.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: IRS, ATF, FBI and the cops.]

JAD: They'd even looked into making this chemical called ricin, which is one of the deadliest poisons known to man.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Arsenic takes a hundred granules to kill someone. Ricin takes one to two granules.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah. Head of a pin.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh yeah.]

JAD: On tape, they talk about taking this poison and dispersing it in public places up and down the East Coast.

TOM JUNOD: Newark, New Jersey. Jacksonville, Florida. Highway 95 in North Carolina and South Carolina.

JAD: Which theoretically could have killed hundreds more people.

TOM JUNOD: They were motivated by an overarching desire to incite civil war, in which case, you know, the right side would—would battle and win and constitutional government would be restored in the United States.

JAD: Now what made them not fit the profile was—well, you could see it right there on the front page in the court sketch.

TOM JUNOD: Their white hair, their white beards.

JAD: These were not your usual teenaged terrorists. These guys, at least some of them, were in their 70s. They were retirees.

TOM JUNOD: 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, Shoney's, McDonald's, you know, the coffee klatch of retirees and, you know, you always pass these guys, and you see them every day and you go, "Well, what are these guys talking about?" [laughs] In this case, they were talking about, you know, killing people in mass numbers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We know what we want to do. We know how to do it. What we need to be is prepared to do it—equipped.]

JAD: 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who do we want to shoot? Lots of people.]

JAD: ... you're not quite sure how to feel.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: When do we want to shoot them?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yesterday.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [laughs] That's right.]

JAD: 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?

TOM JUNOD: Right. And that is the—that is the, you know, faultline that the story tries to explore.

JAD: I'm curious to meet—as much as you've met—the four guys in question. I mean, what are they like?

TOM JUNOD: I've not met any of them. They are in jail, you can't get to them.

JAD: But based on what you learn, what can you tell us?

TOM JUNOD: Well I mean, I went—I went—the most interesting of them to me was Fred Thomas.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: All right. So who's willing to take a life?]

JAD: He's the guy you hear talking the most on the tapes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: Who's willing to take a life?]

TOM JUNOD: Fred Thomas was a career Navy guy working outside of Washington, DC. Comes down here to be close to his son.

JAD: This is late 2008.

TOM JUNOD: Right before ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: I am.]

TOM JUNOD: ... Obama ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I, Barack Hussein Obama ...]

TOM JUNOD: ... is inaugurated as President.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: I, Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear ...]

TOM JUNOD: And for whatever reason, you know, he begins to see his dreams going sour.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: President to the United States faithfully.]

TOM JUNOD: And he begins going onto these militia sites saying that the country that he served has now abrogated his trust.

JAD: Pretty soon, he's hosting militia meetings at his house, ranting about how it's time for them to "do something."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: Are you committed to taking action?]

JAD: 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.

TOM JUNOD: The bomb that they were accused of buying was actually sort of an IED. It was a—a cell phone-triggered device. And that's a little bit scary, for sure.

JAD: When you heard these tapes were you alarmed?

TOM JUNOD: Sure. Sure, absolutely.

JAD: Yeah.

TOM JUNOD: But I heard the tapes before I went to Fred Thomas's house. You know, when you—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."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Frank Sinatra: [singing] You've had your first lesson ...]

TOM JUNOD: "All Others Will Be Learning the Blues."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Frank Sinatra: [singing] ... in learning the blues.]

TOM JUNOD: 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 ...

ROBERT: Typical militia.

TOM JUNOD: ... what I expected. Exactly.

JAD: He then learns that right at the height of his planning, right as Fred Thomas is saying things like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: I could shoot ATF and IRS all day long.]

JAD: ... "I could shoot ATF and IRS all day long" ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: All the judges in the DOJ.]

JAD: ... as Fred was saying all this, he was in really poor health.

TOM JUNOD: I mean, he already has, you know, a variant of emphysema that causes him to have to drag around an oxygen tank wherever he goes. He already can't get up the stairs.

ROBERT: Hmm.

TOM JUNOD: The months before the first meeting takes place, he has half a lung removed.

JAD: Really?

TOM JUNOD: Yeah.

ROBERT: When you listen to this tape, what did you think about the potential of this fellow to do something real?

TOM JUNOD: I mean, he sounds sane on this thing. He sounds determined.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

TOM JUNOD: The question is whether he or anyone could've done it.

JAD: Because of age and health?

TOM JUNOD: Right.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, wouldn't they have said that about James von Brunn, the guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum?

JAD: As we started thinking about this story, we ended up calling Dina Temple-Raston.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: I'm NPR's counterterrorism correspondent.

JAD: And she kind of complicated the age argument for us because she said this guy, James von Brunn ...

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: White supremacist.

JAD: ... on June 10, 2009 ...

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 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.

ROBERT: Oh my God!

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 89 years old.

JAD: 89?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 89.

JAD: She called us back later to say, "Actually, he was 88." But still ...

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: If you saw this man, frail, does that fit any sort of profile? It doesn't.

JAD: So the fact that Fred Thomas was 73 and dragging around an oxygen tank doesn't mean anything.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: That's right.

PAT: Yeah. In fact, I felt like when he was talking about how old and expendable ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: I'm old. I'm expendable.]

PAT: ... and how, I mean, he was gonna die soon ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: I ain't got a lot of time left on this Earth anyway. I have 18 years at the most.]

PAT: ... how he wanted to, like, leave something behind for his grandchildren and fix the country before he went out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: This country to be improved for my grandchildren. If it takes killing some people here now, I'm willing.]

PAT: Like, suddenly he felt like he was scary because he was so old and infirm.

TOM JUNOD: Mm-hmm. This is a guy with nothing to lose, wanting to go out in a blaze of glory.

PAT: Exactly. And it felt weirdly like the things that other real terrorists say.

TOM JUNOD: Right.

PAT: There was an abandon to the way that he was talking about himself.

ROBERT: 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—that's the way it seems to me.

TOM JUNOD: I mean, he's far from—you know, a lot of these guys who do these things are rootless. He is far from rootless.

JAD: Like, contrast him with the guy Dina told us about, von Brunn, who had no family, no friends.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: The only connection he had to the world was his computer.

JAD: And just before his shooting spree ...

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: He gave away his computer.

JAD: Wow!

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: So he was ready to die.

JAD: Tom says that is not Fred's story.

TOM JUNOD: For all the violence of his rhetoric, he's shown for this, you know, 73 years of life no inclination towards violence, no inclination towards crime. He's been a—from what we can see, a loyal husband, a devoted father. He's lived, in some ways, a blameless life. And that's—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 get lost. If I hear about this again, I'm gonna come out and you're in—you know, you're gonna be in trouble." To me, it would've been over.

JAD: 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."

TOM JUNOD: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JAD: You think they would've gone away?

TOM JUNOD: Absolutely.

JAD: But how can you be so sure about that?

TOM JUNOD: I just think that there was an element of fantasy in this thing, which is scary, but present in almost all of it.

JAD: 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.

ROBERT: But he didn't. He didn't shoot ...

JAD: And then Pat and Jad saying well, how can the government not take them seriously?

JAD: Dina, can we get your take here?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Sure.

JAD: 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, like, clarity as to, like, here's when 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?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 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 Smadi. They found him in a chat room talking about loving Al-Qaeda's ideas and wanting to do something against the United States.

JAD: Sort of like our militia guys.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Right. So basically they introduce 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 that he could drive it into the garage of this big skyscraper in Dallas. And so Smadi did all this.

PAT: He called the guy. They got the van, filled it with explosives.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 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.

JAD: And where are they standing at this point? Are they—are they anywhere near this building?

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: They're in a car watching the—they're actually in a car apart from the building so they could watch the explosion.

JAD: Wow!

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Anyway, they're apart from the building and they're watching it. And he hands Smadi the phone and Smadi dials the number he tells him to dial. And I don't know if this is an apocryphal part of the story or not, but it was actually the phone number for the local FBI office.

JAD: Oh!

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: And he was arrested.

JAD: Oh, so he gave Smadi the phone and said, "Dial this number. The building will blow up right in front of our eyes." And so Smadi did it.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Exactly.

ROBERT: That's beautiful police work.

JAD: That's interesting.

ROBERT: See, that's what I pay my police to do. If they can do that thing, that's brilliant.

PAT: I would want to do that to all of them.

ROBERT: [laughs]

PAT: Like, I would want to give that phone to everyone who thinks that they want to blow a building.

JAD: Yeah, because it resolves the central debate here, which is ...

PAT: Whether the possible becomes the probable.

ROBERT: Possible becomes the probable, yeah.

JAD: Because if he's willing to dial the number then you have your answer.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: But—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.

JAD: 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.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: 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.

JAD: On the other hand, the fact that they're willing to dial the phone means that they were willing to dial the phone.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: So let's get down to what we can do, what are we willing to do?]

JAD: 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.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Sims: Again, we didn't know what the price was. You're saying it's a grand for a stick.]

JAD: Which apparently costs $1,000.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Sims: [laughs] Give you a stroke already.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Fred Thomas: Sorry, guys. It is what it is.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Sims: Yeah, I know. We didn't know. We didn't know.]

JAD: 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.

TOM JUNOD: 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, an undercover FBI agent, it comes really, really close to prosecuting thought crimes. You know, there is an—there is an apparatus at work here that is precisely the apparatus that these guys fear.

SALLY YATES: Well, they weren't prosecuted for what they said, they were prosecuted for what they did.

JAD: This is Sally Yates.

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.

JAD: Huh.

SALLY YATES: Are we absolutely certain that they were gonna act on this? And I'm not gonna pretend that we were. But we were certain that that was not a risk that we were willing to take.

ROBERT: We should probably hear this—the final—so at the end of the day what happens?

TOM JUNOD: 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.

ROBERT: Who is the undercover agent pretending to be?

TOM JUNOD: He's pretending to be an arms dealer.

JAD: Hmm.

TOM JUNOD: They are there to buy a silencer and they are there to buy the explosive.

JAD: So what happens?

TOM JUNOD: They get into the truck. Sims has a wad of bills that is actually supplied by the government. He gives it back to the government, so to speak. He hands it to the undercover agent. Fred Thomas hands his money to the undercover agent. The undercover agent steps out and says, "I gotta 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 there. They were there that day. And a 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 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.

JAD: Flash grenades?

TOM JUNOD: Flash grenades. You know, flash grenades are those things that 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—from the Captain D's said that one of the things that they noticed when they stood up was, you know, they—they both had stained their pants.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: Because they were so scared?

TOM JUNOD: Yeah. You feel any safer?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: Not sure.

PAT: Kinda.

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes.

ROBERT: Thanks to Tom Junod and to our own Pat Walters.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And ...

JAD: Thanks to you for listening.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: See ya.

[LISTENER: I am Haroo Dempsky, a Radiolab listener from Portland, Oregon, and Radiolab 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.]

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