[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: An upscale mall in Nairobi has turned into a battleground. Armed men stormed Westgate Mall in the Kenyan capital just before lunch time, firing weapons and throwing grenades. What appears to witnesses to be at least a dozen gunmen have taken hostages inside. Others have reported that the—there have been reports, there have been unsubstantiated reports. No, no. Let me not do those ones. Kenyan police and counter-terrorism officers are ...]

GREGORY WARNER: I almost feel like I need to start with a caveat that all these other stories that we've, you know, gotten to do together ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Mm-hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: ... have been me telling you a story as a journalist. I feel like this story, it's gonna be a story where I'm gonna have to stop being a journalist at some point.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Oh, I keep waiting for you to say, "The podcast." But we don't do that anymore.

ROBERT: Oh, we don't do that anymore.

JAD: That guy you just heard, that was NPR's East Africa correspondent Greg Warner, who's done a bunch of stories with us. Recently, he came to us with another one. It was all about a struggle he was having trying to figure out how to tell a story that is true. Let's leave it at that.

GREGORY WARNER: It's actually a story about the aftermath of an event that probably got more media coverage than almost any event in East Africa last year. That is the—the terrorist attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi. This was September 21, 2013. It was a kind of balmy Saturday afternoon. Westgate Shopping Mall, crowded with more than a thousand shoppers. Even more families than usual were there that day because there was a children's cooking competition. In fact, the kids were just setting up their ingredients and parents had just taken their seats when shortly after noon ...

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: ... gunmen entered the building shooting AK-47s, going floor to floor killing people. And the siege would last for four days.

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: Now for four days essentially, I and, you know, like, dozens of international and—and local journalists are outside the mall listening to the sounds of gunfire.

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: Trying to guess what's happening inside because the press is of course not allowed in while this battle is ongoing. Meanwhile, I'm getting on the air every hour sometimes, trying to just piece things together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Once they were inside, they continued to shoot. I'm mentioning there's a plume of tear gas coming my way, so I'm gonna have to try not cough as I'm answering this—this question.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Scott Simon: Gregory, move as you need to move, by all means.]

GREGORY WARNER: But my point is that there was no information at the scene other than this gunfire. What there was were a whole bunch of survivors.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: How do you feel?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: You know, helpless. Helpless, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: In fact, all the journalists—myself included—were racing around interviewing eyewitnesses.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Everybody was. I mean, everybody was really running for their lives.]

GREGORY WARNER: Talking to them and also to Kenyan officials to get a picture of what happened. And the story that emerges from those interviews is basically this: that the number of terrorists inside that mall—or at least in the beginning—was 10 to 15 gunmen.

[NEWS CLIP: Between 10 and 15 gunmen.]

[NEWS CLIP: 10 to 15 attackers.]

[NEWS CLIP: Up to 15 armed militants was reported.]

GREGORY WARNER: But the profile is multi-ethnic.

[NEWS CLIP: Came from Kenya, the United Kingdom and, you know, Arab origins.]

GREGORY WARNER: This is like a rainbow coalition of Somalis, Kenyans, Arabs. Mostly men, but also including a British woman.

[NEWS CLIP: A young British woman they called "The white widow."]

GREGORY WARNER: Eyewitnesses—eyewitnesses on different floors of the mall all talking about "their" gunmen, the people they saw. And it's this multi-ethnic group. And then of course perhaps most alarmingly for those of us, you know, living in Nairobi, there was a report that at least one gunman had, after shooting some people, thrown away his gun and actually escaped with the fleeing shoppers. We hear that from a couple witnesses. So that's the initial story. But it's not really until eight weeks later, in November, that US officials invite about a dozen British and American journalists into a conference room in the US embassy and we meet an official there from the FBI. Now we had known that the FBI was involved in the postmortem analysis.

[NEWS CLIP: Forensic teams from the United States and Europe joined the investigation.]

GREGORY WARNER: Because this is like a global terrorism event, so Kenya had invited Scotland Yard and the FBI to figure out who these terrorists were. But the FBI had not actually said anything officially. And this meeting inside the US embassy was on what's called deep background, which isn't even off the record. It's—it's a deeper level of secrecy. We weren't at that time even allowed to say that a US official had said any of this stuff, this was just information for us to know. Since then, I can talk about this meeting because everything that was revealed there has now become part of the public record. In fact, the FBI has come out publicly and said all these things.

GREGORY WARNER: But at the time, this was new. And what the FBI person said at the time was that his team had access to all the closed-circuit camera footage. Remember, this is—this is a mall. It's a modern mall, so there's cameras everywhere. He's seen it from the beginning to the end of the attack from all those different perspectives, and that according to that footage everything that we had reported in those first few days was wrong.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Wrong? Wrong in what way?

GREGORY WARNER: Well for instance, 10 to 15 terrorists? No, there weren't 10 to 15 terrorists. There were four.

ROBERT: Four. Huh.

GREGORY WARNER: They also said, "Okay, you've been reporting this—this multi-ethnic coalition of Arabs, Kenyans and Somalis that so many eyewitnesses told you. No, they're all Somalis. They're all Somali ethnicity, all four of them. And there's also no evidence that any of the gunmen escaped."

JAD: I'm just curious from his perspective, was he trying to—I don't know. What was your read on this meeting?

GREGORY WARNER: You know, I actually felt—and I know other people in that room felt a huge sense of relief because, you know, here we all are trying to do the work of journalism, you know, trying to get credible testimony, and suddenly here's a guy saying, "Okay, take away all that speculation, all those contradictory stories, all those different reports, here's some objective evidence. You can't see this tape because it's secret for various anti-terrorism reasons, but this is solid." And after that time ...

[NEWS CLIP: New details tonight about the ...]

GREGORY WARNER: ... everybody was reporting the same thing.

[NEWS CLIP: Unreleased surveillance video shows four armed assailants.]

[NEWS CLIP: Only four terrorists.]

GREGORY WARNER: Four terrorists.

[NEWS CLIP: Security cameras show four armed assailants.]

[NEWS CLIP: All four suspects are believed to be from Somalia.]

GREGORY WARNER: They're all Somalis.

[NEWS CLIP: They confirmed that all four were killed.]

GREGORY WARNER: And none escaped.

[NEWS CLIP: The attackers are now dead.]

GREGORY WARNER: So it kind of put a cap on all those conspiracy theories and speculations that were really filling the media.

ROBERT: You weren't the slightest bit curious about why—what might have been left out?

GREGORY WARNER: Well I mean, what I guess I really felt was—was sort of empty. Because I'm, you know, not only a reporter in Nairobi, I'm also a person living in Nairobi. I mean, I live here. You know, I go to dinner parties, I take my kid to birthday parties. And, you know, I remember especially then in the first months after Westgate there were so many people in that mall, invariably somebody would be there at the party who had their own survivor's story. And, you know, it's one thing to say, "Oh well, that was all this eyewitness testimony. You know, it's not accurate." But it's another thing to look into the eyes of somebody who's sitting there with a paper plate of cake in their hand telling you that the terrorists that they saw is not the terrorists that saw on this bit of footage that had been released and was playing on heavy rotation on Kenyan television.

ROBERT: Did that happen more than once?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, it happened much more than once. I mean ...

GREGORY WARNER: So I'm gonna use only your first name.

PUNI: You can say Puni, my nickname.

GREGORY WARNER: ... I'll give you an example. My friend Puni, former neighbor of mine in Nairobi. That Saturday morning she went into the Westgate Mall to get a present for her friend's daughter.

PUNI: I think it was a puzzle. A little puzzle for a four-year-old girl. And I'm standing there, I'm just about to pay, and then boom! Explosion.

GREGORY WARNER: Automatic weapons.

PUNI: Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. You know, they were shooting. You could hear the grenades.

GREGORY WARNER: She says she ran out of the store, passing a bunch of chairs and tables that had been set up for that cooking competition.

PUNI: I didn't have much time to think. I just ducked under one of those tables. And then it got quiet. You could hear people praying, muttering prayers.

GREGORY WARNER: She said she heard a man.

PUNI: Gasping for breath.

GREGORY WARNER: And she says at one point, another woman was under the table with her.

PUNI: Her and I were literally, yeah, squeezed together. She was pregnant.

GREGORY WARNER: She was pregnant?

PUNI: Yeah. And that's the first thing she said. She's like, "I'm pregnant and I'm shot." I didn't have the presence of mind to help her. She basically took one of those drapes and wrapped it around her leg to stop the bleeding. Later on—I mean, because we were there for quite some time she said to me, "I'm dying." And yeah, at that point I was stroking her hair saying, "No, you're not. You're fine. It's just your leg. It's just your leg."

GREGORY WARNER: And Puni says that while she was under that table she would try to peek up ...

PUNI: Through the cloth. And for the longest time I couldn't see anything. Finally, I see—I see the guys. Two—there was two young boys. Cute, little, young, innocent-looking boys. You know, yeah, it's hard to imagine. You can't reconcile what they're doing with how they look. One of them was—was kind of—I don't know, maybe a 17-, 18-year-old kid?

GREGORY WARNER: And cute?

PUNI: I don't know. It's just—I could just see him as being the son of one of my friends. This particular one who was closest to us was wearing a red t-shirt.

GREGORY WARNER: And here's where you get to a small but significant discrepancy that still haunts Puni. She says she is sure that the two guys she saw—and they're just a few feet away from her—were wearing short-sleeved shirts.

PUNI: And afterwards, I keep seeing these images of four guys, none of whom were wearing short sleeves. I mean, at the beginning if you remember they were saying there were 15 guys, so then it kind of made sense that well, the two guys that I saw were different from the four that we're seeing on TV.

GREGORY WARNER: But then when people like me started to report that there were only four ...

PUNI: Categorically only four guys. Then I started to say, "Wait. Wait a minute." I saw their arms. I know I saw short-sleeved t-shirts. You know, it just does not make sense. Nothing adds up. I start to think, am I crazy? Is my mind playing tricks on me? I think I saw one thing and then I didn't, but I'm quite sure I saw this. I mean, every day, every moment of the day you're thinking about what happened, what happened that day.

GREGORY WARNER: You know, at these parties I'd hear all of these stories like Puni's that weren't the official narrative. And yet it felt real. All the details seemed weird enough to be true, surreal enough to be true. You know, another person was talking about the—this powerful story where this man was shooting and then he got a phone call and stopped shooting long enough to answer the phone, and then hang up and start shooting again. I mean, it's like you don't make details like that up. And this is what I think made things so awkward in those conversations because they knew that the terrorist they saw was different than on the video, and what that left them with was two things. One is that I might think that they were lying. And that two, that the terrorist that haunts them is still out there.

PUNI: You know, that guy could just be around. He could see me again.

GREGORY WARNER: And here's where things get a little weird. Okay, so this is four months later, definitely the news cycle has kind of moved on. As a journalist I don't really have to report on Westgate anymore. It's Saturday afternoon again. I'm actually just at home with my kid. And ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: ... I get a phone call.

JAD: It's a call that kind of upended the whole story for him. And that's after the break.

[LISTENER: This is Darlene, calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab is supported in part 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.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And we'll get back to Greg—reporter Greg Warner's story of the aftermath of the Westgate terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya. You just heard the beginning.

ROBERT: We're now gonna tell you the end—if there is an end.

JAD: Yeah. We'll pick things up with Greg getting a phone call ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: I get a phone call.

JAD: ... from a guy we haven't met yet. A guy named Farooq. Now Farooq is not his real name. He asked Greg to change his name for the story. It'll become clear why a bit later.

GREGORY WARNER: Now Farooq ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Can you move further up please? Please? We're right in the line of fire here.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... Farooq is one of the first people I met in the parking lot on that first day of the attack.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Everybody was—I mean, I just heard gunfire, gunshots. And I was just—everybody was running away.]

GREGORY WARNER: When I met him, he was actually trying to reach his fiancée.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: She's stuck in there.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Still in there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah. She's not picking up the phone. I've written a message, a message that "I'm okay. How are you?" But she's not responded yet. Even I lost my specs.]

GREGORY WARNER: He had lost his eyeglasses as he was fleeing, so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Well, let me see. If you want me to look. What name are you looking for?]

GREGORY WARNER: ... I have to read it. He hadn't gotten a text from her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I wrote her a message. There is no reply. Then I called her, no reply.]

ROBERT: What happened to her?

JAD: Was she killed?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, she was later found among the bodies at the morgue.

JAD: Oh, gosh.

GREGORY WARNER: But then a week later I met back up with Farooq, and he told me some things that he'd not told me that morning.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: From first floor, everybody was going to second floor.]

GREGORY WARNER: He says there was this moment in the mall. Utter panic where a bunch of people were running up the escalator, and one of the terrorists came down the opposite way, down the escalator.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And this guy was pushing everybody down with shootings.]

GREGORY WARNER: Somehow, Farooq says, he got spun around in the opposite direction of the crowd.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And then I saw him.]

GREGORY WARNER: He gets a good look at this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I saw the person very clearly. This person, he was an Arab guy.]

GREGORY WARNER: He says he's sure of it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yes.]

GREGORY WARNER: And then he says that he ran and found a hiding spot.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And after some time ...]

GREGORY WARNER: He pokes his head out and he saw him again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: When I saw this guy, he was changing his clothes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Changing what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: He had clothes on him now, but he removed those clothes. Then he was wearing another clothes inside, under the clothes inside.]

GREGORY WARNER: Basically, he says that after that first part of the siege, the guy changed his clothes, dropped his gun and then insinuated himself into the crowd.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And when we came out, this guy joined us. He joined us. So then I saw him outside, and I was telling everybody, "He's one of them. He was one of them." But everybody was in shock. Nobody could see what I'm saying.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: And—and do you know what happened to him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, I don't know. No idea.]

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, so ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: ... back to that phone call in January that I was telling you about.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: Farooq, he calls me out of the blue. He says, "Hey, I'm sitting in a bar at a place called Diamond Plaza." Which is interesting because Diamond Plaza happens to be one of the prospective terrorist targets in Nairobi, a known terrorist target besides Westgate Mall. And he says across from him a few tables away is the fifth gunman, the guy who got away.

JAD: Whoa!

GREGORY WARNER: "I see him. He's at the next table." And he says, "Can you come?"

JAD: And you actually went?

GREGORY WARNER: Well, at first I told him, "You should just finish your beer and go home." I actually hung up. But then I thought I probably shouldn't blow this guy off. If this were happening in the United States, I could have just said to the guy, "Look, if you're so sure about this, why don't you just call 911?" But there is no 911 in—in Kenya. And so he called me. And I basically said to him, "Well, what do you want me to do?" And he said, "Just let the police know." And then I did. I called the—a source that I know in the police department, and he called his people, and they said, "Okay, we're gonna be right there. Where is his location?"

JAD: Hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: You know, they treated it seriously, so I took it seriously. Plus, there was this small but amazing possibility of this being an incredible scoop.

JAD: Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, this is my plan, basically. I figure like, okay, I'm gonna wait downstairs until the police show up, and then, you know, COPS-style, I'm gonna race up with them and sort of be behind the police. So I'll be able to witness it but I'll be safe, right? But I get there and the police are, like, not there yet. So I'm waiting downstairs at this bar. Farooq's calling me, like, "Where are you, man?" And I say, "Well, I'm downstairs." And he's like, "Okay. Come up."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Come, come, come.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I don't know if I should go upstairs.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Come on, man!]

GREGORY WARNER: I'm like, "I don't think this is a good idea."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I'm gonna stay down here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No! Come on! Come!]

GREGORY WARNER: And as I'm sitting there arguing with him he says, "We have to hurry because I've invited this guy, this supposed terrorist, to sit with me at my table."

JAD: What?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I've told him to sit with me.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: You told him to sit with you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah, yeah, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: I guess the guy was about to leave and Farooq didn't want him to leave, so he jumped up and somehow convinced this guy, this stranger, to sit and have a drink with him at the table.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And he's—he's really scared now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: He's scared? Hold on. I think it's going to emerge soon that ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, it's okay. You come. You are a friend of mine.]

GREGORY WARNER: As I come up, I walk into this bar, past the pool table, and it's this out—outdoor bar. He brings me to the table, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And this is from Yemen.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Oh, from Yemen?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah, yeah, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... there's this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No English, no Swahili.]

GREGORY WARNER: Late 20s, fairly slender. He was wearing a t-shirt, black jeans. One odd detail that stood out to me was that he was wearing two watches.

ROBERT: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: What are you drinking?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Tusker. Tusker.]

GREGORY WARNER: So I sit down, order a beer, make up this terribly lame story about why I'm there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I'm doing all right. I'm just getting a phone case for my wife.]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Were you able to talk to the guy?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, well the guy didn't speak English, so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Do you like Nairobi?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, he doesn't—he doesn't know English.]

GREGORY WARNER: I did try to engage this guy in conversation. He didn't really understand what I was saying except for very basic stuff. But within a few minutes of my sitting down the police finally arrive.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Warner?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Hello, officers. This is obvious for you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Hi. Gregory.]

GREGORY WARNER: Right away, Farooq jumps up, IDs the guy who is completely confused about what's going on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I saw him at Westgate.]

GREGORY WARNER: He claims that he was at the mall the day of the attack.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I told you my wife got three bullets.]

GREGORY WARNER: And so the police start to question the guy. And the interaction is—is very suspicious. They ask him where he's from. He says Nairobi, even though he had told us that he's from Yemen. And then they ask him for a passport, and then he says, "Oh, I don't have my passport." But then he does. So then he says, "Oh, I'm from Yemen." So—anyways, so that's enough for the police. They put the rubber handcuffs on him and they take him away.

JAD: Well, how did the guy react?

GREGORY WARNER: He didn't—he seemed kind of—well, he seemed high, actually. Something I hadn't mentioned was that the guy had been chewing a narcotic leaf, it's known as miraa or khat. And so he—he seemed, you know, like a scared, high person, you know? Where you're scared but you're kind of numb to everything that's happening. It all seems like a dream. I mean, this is, like, very conjectural but what was not conjectural was that as the police were leading him out, Farooq just loses it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: [inaudible] You kill my wife, and now you ...]

GREGORY WARNER: He says, "You killed my wife!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Mother [bleep]. [inaudible]]

GREGORY WARNER: "You mother [bleep]." He starts cursing at the guy, you know?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And I don't give a [bleep] anyway.]

GREGORY WARNER: And then he starts just shouting so that anyone at the bar can hear him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: He's the person who was shooting. Him! Huh? He's the one!]

GREGORY WARNER: Like, it's all we could do to kind of calm him down.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I mentioned something four months back, didn't I? You know, my family's saying you are putting your life in risk. I said I don't have a life. I lost my life. I saw him and he was watching me! He shot my love, man. How can I let it go? This is the guy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: You're sure?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: 110 percent!]

GREGORY WARNER: And that's when the call to prayer comes out of the speakers from a nearby mosque.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: This guy is the one.]

GREGORY WARNER: And Farooq ranted all the way through it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Right now. This is the guy.]

GREGORY WARNER: He then left directly from the bar to go to the police station to give his statement. And I—I felt really bad, actually. I'd never felt like I was doing something wrong per se, but I felt that harm had come to this person. And actually at that point I didn't feel that he was a terrorist, and I just hoped that the system to which I had helped commit him would treat him fairly.

GREGORY WARNER: After that, I kept calling the police station every few days. About 10 days later I found out the guy was released and he hadn't been charged with anything. And at that point I was like, "All right. Great. This all worked out fine. Poor guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time and, you know, got falsely ID-ed possibly, but look, everything is done. Everything kind of worked out the way it was supposed to. And that's what I assumed, you know, for months basically, and kind of like, went off to do other kinds of reporting other stories.

GREGORY WARNER: But a few months later I was talking to that police source again, and I happened to mention—we were talking about a different story, I said, "You know, whatever happened to that—to that guy from Yemen, that fellow that was picked up at Diamond Plaza?" And he said "Oh, you know, it's funny. The witness that you told us about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, source: He didn't show up.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... he never showed up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: He didn't show up?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, source: He didn't show up. They called him for three consecutive days, but our man never showed up.]

GREGORY WARNER: I said, "What? Farooq never showed up to give his testimony?" Like, you can hear from the tape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I'm going right now. This is the guy!]

GREGORY WARNER: The one thing that's so clear is that he's on his way over to the police station full barrels blazing. And so I called Farooq ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, recording: Sorry, the mobile subscriber cannot be reached.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... and his phone is off. And then I call him a week later, his phone is still off. It's giving this, like, "This phone number is no longer in service" kind of thing. So it's actually not until close to the year anniversary of the Westgate that I get a call.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Hello, man. You okay?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Yeah, are you okay?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I've been trying your number and it hasn't worked for weeks.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, I've just come back. I was out of the country]

GREGORY WARNER: And it's Farooq. And he's very nervous. He says, "Are you alone?" Asking me not to record this conversation, and he tells me he had gone to the police station. Just as I suspected, he marched right over to the police station. And they told him, "Oh, well, no. This is being handled by the anti-terrorism police. So you leave your phone number and the anti-terrorism police will give you a call. A week later he started getting calls, several calls from unknown numbers where people who did not identify themselves threatened him, told him not to say anything about this guy he had had arrested, not to talk to the press or he'd be sorry and his family would be sorry. He was extremely rattled by these phone calls, and ultimately actually turned off his phone. That's why I couldn't get a hold of him. Had left the country for a short bit, had come back and was laying very low. And that's why I'm using an assumed name for him. I'm not telling his full name because he doesn't want that.

JAD: And do you believe the stories about the threats, and ...

GREGORY WARNER: I have absolutely no way of knowing for sure. That part of his story, though, seemed the most likely to be true—the fact that the anti-terrorism police had called him allegedly and made threats, that does not sound strange unfortunately to me. I've heard that story from lots of very credible people.

ROBERT: Does this make what he saw truer or untrue? Or we don't ...

GREGORY WARNER: I don't know. Suddenly—suddenly I found myself less willing to discount the story. And I was less comfortable with the official narrative than I wanted to be at that point. So I called up one more guy, a guy who is not a government official, who is not the FBI, and yet who had seen all the videotapes from the mall.

DAN REED: Okay.

GREGORY WARNER: So can you just give me your name and your—and your title?

DAN REED: My name's Dan Reed. I'm a producer and director of documentaries, most recently Terror at the Mall, which was made for HBO and the BBC.

GREGORY WARNER: And for that documentary, Dan got exclusive access to all the surveillance footage inside that mall.

DAN REED: Right.

GREGORY WARNER: I figured if there were more to this story, he could tell me.

GREGORY WARNER: So how much footage did you get, if I can ask? I mean, how many hours, or ...

DAN REED: The footage we obtained added up to about more than 2,000 hours.

GREGORY WARNER: Wow.

DAN REED: And we analyzed the timeline, where the cameras were, and we figured out the offsets between different cameras, we really did a huge forensic job. It's mind-numbingly tedious to watch a lot of it, but if you do go through it you do get the key to a lot of the mysteries of Westgate.

GREGORY WARNER: Like me, he'd gone into this project open minded.

DAN REED: There were some very kind of, you know, sober, sensible people who said, "Yeah, there were seven terrorists. I saw seven terrorists." I mean, you dream of being able to confirm that there were seven gunmen. You dream of being able to confirm that they all escaped. What if that were true? What if we could find evidence, some evidence that that were true?

GREGORY WARNER: But in the end, he didn't.

DAN REED: No. As we progressed further and further with our forensic analysis it became harder and harder to give any credit to some of the wilder pieces of—of eyewitness.

GREGORY WARNER: He says what you see on those tapes is what the FBI said you'd see: four guys, all Somali, no evidence they escaped.

DAN REED: Exactly.

JAD: Well then how does he square the stories you were hearing with the stories you were reporting?

DAN REED: Well ...

GREGORY WARNER: That part was actually quite interesting.

DAN REED: ... we had a lot of people say yeah, there was a woman.

[NEWS CLIP: A young British woman they called "The white widow."]

DAN REED: And it's interesting because when I was going through this footage, my wife looked over my shoulder ...

GREGORY WARNER: Pointed to one of the four terrorists on the screen.

DAN REED: ... and at one point she said, "Oh, is that a girl?" And we came to the conclusion that one of the gunmen was, you know, very slender, and he actually does sashay along in what is frankly quite an effeminate way.

GREGORY WARNER: And similarly, he says, you can justify some of the reports that one of the gunmen was an Arab because one of them did, in fact, have lighter skin than your average Somali. And you can explain that people thought that there were more gunmen, 10 or 15 gunmen, because there were a lot of guys with guns running around, including security guards and later, policemen.

DAN REED: There were a lot more policemen than there were gunmen.

GREGORY WARNER: I did speak with one eyewitness who said that he saw one of the terrorists—[coughs] excuse me—change clothes and escape. Is that a story you heard about?

DAN REED: Well, no. That doesn't—that doesn't match anything that we saw. I think the thing to question your eyewitnesses is how do you know this person with a weapon who changed clothes was a terrorist? It may have been a policeman. We certainly heard stories of policemen taking off—changing clothes or taking off their—any distinctive clothing. I don't know if those stories were true, but we heard stories.

GREGORY WARNER: Oh, so people were saying that uniformed policemen took off their uniform because they didn't want to fight.

DAN REED: Yeah. I guess, yeah. But that's pure—Greg, that's pure—I mean ...

GREGORY WARNER: Right. Totally speculation. And your—and you did not see that on the—any of the security tape.

DAN REED: We certainly didn't. I mean, I've just had so many conversations, like, people saying to me, "No, they escaped." And I'm like, "Why do you think they escaped?" You know, these guys don't come to escape. If you escape, you fail.

GREGORY WARNER: He says take the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Terror in Mumbai: They had murdered 35 people at the hotel.]

GREGORY WARNER: This is another film that he made. There's a moment in that film where one of the gunmen, one of the last remaining gunmen ...

DAN REED: The guy is trapped in a hotel room, and he's next to—he's in a bathtub next to his comrade who's dead, who's dying.

GREGORY WARNER: ... he's talking to one of his handlers on the cell phone. Dan was able to get a recording of that call.

DAN REED: And the handlers very calmly say to him, "You know, your mission will not be a success until you are killed." And then they say to him, "Please leave your phone on, switched on. Leave the line open in your pocket so that we can hear when you go out and are killed by the enemy security forces." So there is a whole script for this kind of operation. And it ends with the death of the gunman at the hands of the enemy.

GREGORY WARNER: Wow.

GREGORY WARNER: That's how he knows they didn't escape, he says. Not just because there's no evidence on the film, but because it's the last thing they would've wanted. And yet ...

DAN REED: I mean, I—the rumors that the terrorists escaped, the rumors that there was a woman amongst them, the rumors that they got changed, the rumors they don't seem to go away even when confronted by quite solid evidence. It's almost as if the facts don't matter.

GREGORY WARNER: So I called Farooq. He's still sticking to his story. He says he saw what he saw, though he's really too nervous to go on tape. But I did run it by Puni, my former neighbor in Nairobi who's still pretty sure that the guy she saw in the mall hasn't been accounted for.

PUNI: I think I'm sure about it, but ...

GREGORY WARNER: What if the government said, "Here's the bodies, here's the DNA evidence, here's the four. They all died, they died on the second day or third day or whatever it was, this is how they died and here's the DNA proof."

PUNI: You know what would really make me happy is if they even asked the questions, be it the media, be it the government. Why did we go from 15 to four?

GREGORY WARNER: So I told her.

GREGORY WARNER: I can quickly tell you how we arrived at four.

GREGORY WARNER: I told her about the meeting with the FBI, and how we got this information. Then I told her about Dan Reed watching 2,000 hours of videotape. And I told her about how I investigated Farooq's story, and mostly came up empty. I told her not just everything that I know, all these facts, but how I got to them. Because in the end maybe the facts aren't enough. The facts need to make sense—especially for people who were there.

PUNI: But I can imagine for anybody who was not there, anybody who's reading it, yeah, the evidence says and then you move on.

GREGORY WARNER: Listening to you, I feel like I'm learning much more about my job and being a journalist. And maybe it's not so pretty because I feel like that day coming out of that meeting with the FBI and feeling like okay, now we have some solid evidence that can be reported and we can move on felt good. I mean, it felt like offering—instead of offering shaky testimony, we could offer truth, at least as best we could understand it. But it feels like maybe that was too sudden and too—too uninquisitive in a way to match the emotions that were still in the air in Nairobi at that time. Maybe it felt like abandonment even though it was meant to feel like clarity.

PUNI: Hmm. For me, it's still—there's a little glimmer of maybe that's not the full story. I—I'm inclined to believe that there were four, but then it's like what I saw does not make sense. And that I'll never be able to really reconcile, and I just kind of have to leave it at that.

JAD: A lot of people to thank for this story. Of course, Greg Warner first and foremost, NPR's East Africa correspondent. And also ...

ROBERT: Thanks very much to Jason Straziuso ...

JAD: ... blogger Robert Alai ...

ROBERT: ... Heidi Voigt, NPR international editor Didi Schanche ...

JAD: ... and senior international editor Edith Chapin for allowing us to borrow Greg on our show. Up next, a confusing story about some confusing terrorist suspects.

ROBERT: It's so confusing, in fact, I think it's hard to tell whether this threat is real or just confusing.

JAD: [laughs] Exactly. That is coming up, so stay tuned.

[LISTENER: Hello. This is Ryan Jones and I'm calling from my dorm room in Seattle, Washington. Radiolab is supported in part 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.]

JAD: All right, we're back. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab.

JAD: So in the last segment we were talking about the aftermath of the Westgate terror attacks, and the—the trouble that journalists sometimes have trying to figure out what actually happened.

ROBERT: For the next story, we're gonna go in the other direction. We're gonna look at what happens prior to a terrorist attack. And this is a story that draws a murky line between a threat that might be empty and a threat you should take very seriously.

JAD: 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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