Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the centennial Olympic Games. And then a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others, forever rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020. In a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them, except one, a woman known as deer whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Deers family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events. Hear the story on where's dear? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Previously on Snafu.

FBI records stolen from the media Pennsylvania office showed that one goal of the bureau was to spread that very impression among left wing organizations that there was an agent behind every mailbox.

We just knew that Hoover washing beside himself, that this had happened. He dispatched 200 agents to flood the Philadelphia area to find us.

We decided we're not getting together as a group ever again. We really parted ways.

I knew that the only way that they could find us was through somebody talking.

It had been three and a half months since the media burglary, and the FBI hunt for the burglars was going nowhere. They'd interviewed hundreds of suspects, but failed to turn up anything useful. All the fingerprints they could identify from the crime scene turned out to belong to FBI agents. The G men even hired a quote unquote staple expert to examine the packets of stolen documents distributed by the burglars. But shockingly, his conclusion that at least five different types of staples had been used did not lead to a major breakthrough. The FBI was grasping at Staples. But all that changed on June 25, 1971, three and a half months after the media burglary. On that day, a contractor named Bob Hardy walked into an FBI office in Camden, New Jersey, just a stone's throw from media, Pennsylvania, and handed the FBI exactly the break they'd been looking for. Hardy was fair haired, with a square jaw and big ears. He told the agents that he knew some people who were planning on burglarizing the local draft board office in Camden. Here's Betty Medzker.

He had just learned that some friends were planning on raiding a draft board, the Camden draft board, and that he liked them and he would like to help protect them from doing that. But they thought the FBI ought to know that some people were thinking of.

This, and not just any random people. The leaders of, wait for it, the catholic peace movement. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the Medberg investigation had a promising lead. Though they hadn't found an ounce of evidence to prove it. The FBI had been assuming, literally since day one, that those dastardly pastors and parishioners in the catholic peace movement were responsible for the media burglary.

The FBI agents were thrilled, absolutely thrilled, because they just assumed that people in this group might be related to the media burglary. And so, on the spot, he was hired as an informer.

Hardy's FBI handlers instructed him to infiltrate the group planning the draft board raid and to do everything he could to keep the plot moving forward. Hoover monitored the situation closely, maybe even obsessively. He poured agents and resources into Camden, totally convinced that the media burglars were influential members of the catholic peace movement. This was his chance to catch the people who'd embarrassed him red handed in the middle of another break in. Here's the thing. The catholic peace movement and the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI were not the same thing. Bill Davidon, architect of the media break in, had nothing to do with the Camden draft board raid. In fact, he purposely excluded one of the Camden leaders from his plans and media because he knew the FBI was keeping close tabs on the guy. Hoover was taking a big swing based entirely on a hunch. But even a presumptuous, conniving, paranoid, racist, old broken clock is right twice a day. Because as it turns out, two of the media burglars were involved in Camden. And that's how Keith Forsyth and Bob Williamson fell right into the clutches of J. Edgar Hoover. I'm Ed Helms, and this is Snafu, a show about history's greatest screw ups.

Season two, Medburg. The story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI snafu it exposed this week. A failed raid, a triple cross, and the trial of the Camden 28. In the wake of the media burglary, most of the participants laid low. John and Bonnie rains swore off criminal activity for good. Judy Feingold left the east coast altogether and started a new life out west. But Bob Williamson wasn't quite ready to stop. Just a few months after the media action, he got a call from a friend telling him the usual suspects from the catholic peace movement were planning a draft board raid in Camden, New Jersey. Bob wanted in.

I said, oh, Camden, that's my draft board. That was the draft board that I was registered in. I had gone to high school in Camden. I knew the city pretty well. There were large numbers of minority people, and they were the ones that were getting drafted and sent to fight.

Keith, fresh off his heroic pry barring of the media, FBI office door, also got involved. He was determined to strike another blow against the war machine, even though he had some reservations about the size of the team.

It just seemed like to me, there was, like, too many people and an awful lot of brand new people that I wasn't quite sure exactly what they were doing.

Keith had a point. The Camden crew was more than three times the size of the media group. There's a direct correlation between the number of people involved in your criminal plot and the chances of getting busted. In other words, there's a reason it was oceans eleven and not oceans 38.

Ten ought to do it, don't you think? Do you think we need one more? All right, we'll get one more.

But then again, this was a much more complex job than the media break in.

In order to get up on the fire escape, you had to pull down this ladder, and it had some kind of alarm on it. So we cut the wire to that. There were a couple of tools that we needed to be able to get into the building, and maybe that's why.

The team was so quick to welcome a friendly neighborhood contractor named Bob Hardy.

And walkie talkies was one of them.

They were a little expensive, but Hardy always managed to come up with the tools the team needed and gave us.

The impression that he'd paid for it with his own money.

Hardee's handiness and extensive tool collection apparently made up for his lack of anti war credentials.

Bob Hardy was not a pacifist. There wasn't anything about him that seemed that way. So in that sense, he just didn't seem to fit.

Somebody had to go out and make a grocery run, and somehow or other, it ended up being me and Hardy in his van. And he said, well, if there is a problem with the guard, I got something for you. And he said, it's in the glove compartment. So I opened the glove compartment, and there's a revolver in there. And I'm like, are you nuts? You think I'm going to shoot a minimum wage guard to keep from going to jail for breaking into a draft war? What the hell is wrong with you? And I really should have told everybody about that.

What Keith didn't know was that the van's radio was bugged and the entire conversation was being broadcast directly to the FBI. The feds had been watching the entire operation like hawks in their minds. This had to be the same group that embarrassed them in media just a few months earlier. And this time the FBI was going to catch them in the act. As Bob, Keith and the others prepared to break into the federal building, at least 80 g men and dozens of other federal agents took up positions nearby. Many waited within the building itself, but others had to hide inside a local funeral home, spending the evening in eerie silence with corpses for company. In Washington, Hoover was up all night with Attorney General John Mitchell monitoring the situation in Camden. Throughout the evening they exchanged calls with President Nixon who was following along closely from his house in Orange County, California. Forget Ali versus Frazier. For the president and his highest law enforcement officials, this was the fight of the century. After a delay of roughly 2 hours, they forgot their ladder and had to go back for it. The burglars entered the Camden Federal building, home of the Camden draft board.

This was an enormous and well guarded office building equipped with an alarm system and located right in the middle of the city. Precisely the kind of target bill Davidon wouldn't have touched with a ten foot pole.

It was on one of the top floors, 8th floor, something like that of that federal building.

Bob and a few others scaled the fire escape and disconnected the alarm. Using a glass cutter, they made a hole in the office window. Now that they were in, the inside crew removed draft files and placed them in sacks, passing them out the window to Bob. For about 2 hours they quietly went about their work. Then just after 430 in the morning, the feds swooped in.

And then I hear this guy yell, freeze. I look around and he's got a gun pointed at me.

Keith was at a secondary location with a few other members of the team. As soon as he heard a car pull up outside, it all clicked. Bob Hardy had sold them out.

I mean, I realized it as soon as I heard those tires screech. I'm like, I was right. I'm a dumbass. I should have said something. They came through the doors, guns drawn, and put us up against the wall. One of them had a shotgun. So he pushes my face back up against the wall with a business end of the shotgun, which really pissed me off.

And the FBI agents. Everybody's in a good mood among the FBI agents.

And even though the feds have just gotten one over on him, Bob can't resist the opportunity to wipe the smiles off their faces.

And they had a cheer that went like this. Am I allowed to say four letter words?

Go for it, man.

Okay. So I said, what do we eat? And they all yelled back eagle meat. And I said, what do they eat? And they said, shit.

What do we eat? Eagle meat.

What do they eat?

Chef. What do we eat?

Eagle meat.

What do they eat? Soon a young Dan rather was announcing the dramatic arrests on CB's.

The FBI arrested 20 persons in Camden.

New Jersey, early today and charged them.

With trying to steal draft records from the federal building there.

The following morning, Hoover took a victory lap. He and Attorney General John Mitchell held a triumphant press conference to announce the arrests. This was a highly unorthodox, one might even say petty thing to do. But, hey, Hoover was feeling himself. The FBI was about to turn a huge embarrassment into a massive victory. Hoover even wrote a letter to Henry Kissinger bragging about his success. He'd just caught the media burglars. It was only a matter of time before one of them confessed.

I was in that room by myself with handcuffed to the desk until about noon the next day.

One of the FBI agents has a copy of, I don't know, time or Newsweek or one of those. The COVID story. The headline on the COVID story was, america's prisons. How bad are they really? So the FBI agents going like this with the COVID over, like, pretending to read it, making sure we all see it, you know, I'm like, geez, you guys are lame.

Out of the group that came to be known as the Camden 28, Bob and Keith were the only ones with any knowledge of what happened in media.

I wasn't worried because I knew Bob wasn't going to talk, and I knew I wasn't going to talk, you know, like, okay, send me to jail.

Internal FBI memos, which Betty Medzer later unearthed, show that Hoover and his cronies were very pleased with the press coverage of the arrests, but increasingly concerned as the days wore on and nobody confessed to the media burglary, hit them hard and turn the spotlight of public opinion against them. Now, one of Hoover's deputies recommended in a memo. Heavy pressure, he wrote, will likely serve as the means to obtain admissions regarding the FBI media burglary. That pressure came when the charges against the Camden 28 were announced. Seven felonies per person, meaning the possibility of decades in prison.

47 years would have been the maximum. And that was true for, I think most of us in the 28 were facing 47. There were a few that were facing a little bit less.

Eventually, the Camden 28 made bail and convened to strategize. They knew they had an easy way out. Plead guilty, and they'd avoid the maximum sentence, maybe even avoid prison altogether. But as they conferred, they reached a surprising conclusion.

We wanted the trial. By that time, we had time to get over the shock of the arrest. And I was, for one, I was. I was ready. I wanted to do it.

I think it started with Father Doyle. And, you know, he said that he thought that part of our witness against Vietnam was our willingness to suffer for our beliefs, and he thought it was important. The suffering was important. Just like Jesus, suffering was important to him in religious terms. And so we should try to put the war on trial. That was also, you know, everybody agreed with that. That was unanimous.

It was virtually inevitable that you were going to get caught. That was not the end of the opportunity to further the cause of ending the war. That was another opportunity to persuade people that the war was wrong.

They wanted a jury to hear their case, not just what they did, but why they did it.

What we wanted was to persuade the jury that the war was wrong and that it had to be stopped, and that our action was an attempt to find a jury who would set us free and end the war.

The Camden 28 was going to put the war on trial.

Our idea was what's called a jury nullification, where the jury says, yeah, you broke the law, but we think you did the right thing.

Jury nullification means a jury can find a defendant not guilty. Even if they totally did the crime in question. The jury can rule that the law deserved to be broken. In other words, the morality of the situation trumps the legality. But jury nullification is a long shot, to say the least. It basically never happens. For this to work, the Camden 28 would need a hard break. With traditional courtroom strategy, they'd have to connect with the jury on a human level. So, contrary to what any reasonable defense attorney would advise, they decided they'd testify and explain in their own words why they broke the law. Some of them, Bob included, even chose to represent themselves in a typical criminal trial. This is a terrible idea because, well, you're not a lawyer. But then again, this was not shaping up to be a typical criminal trial. And before it even began, there was one more tragic twist.

We slowly began to realize that Bob Hardy, who had been working with us, had indeed been an informer.

This is Father Michael Doyle in an old interview. He was Bob Hardy's priest and one of the camden 28.

I had known him for some years, and his family and I felt had been helpful to him, and indeed, he to me.

Father Doyle, an irish immigrant, had recently guided Hardy through his conversion to Catholicism. After that, he'd been the one to invite Hardy into the group planning the Camden raid.

So realizing that he had been the informer all along was hard for me, and I felt angry and upset and basically betrayed.

A few weeks after the arrests, Bob Hardy was inside his house talking to a reporter. He told his son Billy to go play outside.

Billy, who was nine years old, went out and, having nothing better to do, climbed a tree. But he fell, and he fell on a fence and tragically was impaled on the fence. And he was a wonderful boy, and I knew him very well. I remember particularly going down to see him in Cooper Hospital. And sitting in the waiting room was Bob Hardy and Michael Reimer, I FBI agent, who was the Hardy contact for the Camden 28. And I remember the three of us sitting on a couch. Somehow my mind was twisting in some kind of unreality. There was only one thing that was real, and that was the child was dying. And I remember driving out of that hospital that day and banging on my, you know, the front of my car and just Taiwan to feel the feel of something that was there and real. And he died. On the 3 October 1971.

Father Doyle conducted the funeral mass at his church in Camden.

It was an extraordinary funeral in the sense that the family was there and the Camden 28 was there, and some of its more active supporters were there, all of them supporting Bob Hardy and sympathizing with the family and their tragedy.

So even facing decades in prison from Hardy's betrayal, the Camden 28 showed up anyway to support Hardy in his darkest hour. Meanwhile, just across the aisle sat a crowd of clean cut federal agents, some of whom Hardy had never even seen before.

It would be hard to believe that a host of FBI agents who really didn't know Bob Hardy were there. I out of genuine human sympathy, he just had the feeling they were there to make sure of their man, that he held up for their real agenda, which was to convict the Camden 28th for J. Edgar Hoover.

In the aftermath of the funeral, Hardy talked to his wife about the upcoming trial.

I think he just had an attack of conscience, and he, I think, was touched by Michael's christian like behavior.

Hardy decided he had to tell the truth, the whole truth, that he hadn't just been an informant, but also a provocateur helping the FBI make the break in happen. Hardy was still going to testify, but not as a witness for the prosecution. He was going to testify as a witness for the Camden 28.

It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, a backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story, one that I've become entangled with.

I saw as soon as I turned.

The corner, basically someone bleeding out.

The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death, their once ordinary lives. And mine changed forever.

It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom.

And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat far right, homegrown religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Edelweild, California, five women disappeared in the span of just a few months. Eventually, I found out what happened to the women. All except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as DEA. Her friends and family ran through endless theories. Was she hurt hiking? Did she run away? Had she been kidnapped? I'm Lucy Sherriff. I've been reporting this story for four years, and I've uncovered a tangled web of manipulation, estranged families, and greed. Everyone, it seems, has a different version of events. Hear the story on where's DEA, my new podcast from Pushkin industries. And iheart podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Well, Bowen, the Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present, it's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast, two guides. Five rings is a phenomenon. And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two guys, five rings, Matt Bowen, and the Olympics. Who are we watching this Olympic games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles. I'm watching her go higher and higher and higher with every bounce. Sha'carry's about to run faster than you or I or anyone has ever seen. I'm reading for the girls and the boys and everybody under the Seine. River, under the sand over the Seine, within the waters of the Seine. All of them. Follow the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or your favorite podcast platform. And watch and listen to every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, now through August 11 on NBC and Peacock. And for the first time ever, on the I heart radio app.

On February 5, 1973, the trial of the Camden 28 began in the same federal building where they'd been arrested. Betty Medzker, the journalist who had published the contents of the files stolen from media, was assigned to cover it. The lead prosecutor was John Berry.

My principal concern going in was that it was going to be a disruptive trial.

Was it a frustrating situation?

No, not at all. Not at all. I really didn't care because the one thing we had in this case was substantial evidence. It was not right.

On the surface, Barry's task looked pretty straightforward. After all, the defendants weren't even pretending they hadn't done the crime. Plus the judge, the honorable Clarkson S. Fisher, was conservative, an army veteran who'd been appointed by Richard Nixon. In the defense's opening statement, Father Doyle asked the jury who had really gone too far, the military that had waged a brutal war in Vietnam for twelve years, or the civilians simply trying to end it. He painted a vivid, shocking picture of the brutality of war, referencing the violence, bombs and bodies, torn apartheid. But then it was time for the prosecution to call its witnesses. John Barry asked a long line of FBI agents the same questions. Did you see people break into the office? Yes. Did they destroy draft board files? Yep. Are the perpetrators in this room? You betcha. There's a couple dozen of them right there. Agent after agent testified to the same basic facts. This went on for weeks, so it must have been a nice break in the monotony. Whenever Bob Williamson got up to cross examine the very agents who'd arrested him. This was Bob's chance. He stood in front of the court holding copies of the stolen media files.

We weren't allowed to admit those documents as evidence because it couldn't be established, you know, what their provenance was.

But he could still use them. As he questioned the FBI agents. We dont have an exact record of what he asked, but you can probably imagine what the questions were like. Why was the bureau spying on college kids? Why were they tapping the phones of the local black Panther office? Oh, and why did the FBI want Americans to feel like there was, quote, an agent behind every mailbox?

The jury was paying attention to the questions that I was asking, and they were noting that the FBI agents were claiming that they had never seen or heard of that anywhere. Those FBI agents must have been exposed to some mysterious agent that destroys memories because they couldn't recall anything.

The point of this wasnt to force some kind of confession out of the FBI agents. The point was to undermine them by reminding the jury of the abuses of power described in the files. Abuses of power that violated the constitutional right of american citizens to protest a war, they felt, was unjust. So compared to what the FBI had done, how bad was it really to tear up some draft files?

It made our whole case of what the FBI was up to. That they wanted to enhance the paranoia of the civil rights movement and the anti war movement.

After more than two months of testimony from the prosecution's witnesses, it was time for the defense to call theirs. Now, in order to really make their case, they were going to need judge Fisher to agree to some unusual motions. The defense was planning to call a number of people who technically had nothing at all to do with the Camden case. They weren't really there to testify about Camden. They were there to testify about Vietnam. This is from a private letter which Bob wrote to Judge Fisher two months into the trial.

All of us need courage now. You, the defendants, the prosecutors, the jury. But perhaps right now, you do most of all.

He framed the trial and the judge's role in it as a matter of personal courage. He told the judge that he was undertaking a fast, a tactic he'd learned from Gandhi. But Bob's fast wasn't a public spectacle. It was intended as a personal message to the judge, a demonstration of courage which he hoped the judge would reciprocate.

I would not have undertaken this if I did not believe that you are capable of demonstrating this kind of courage. I will continue to fast until my sisters and brothers and I are free.

Bob says the judge checked in with him frequently throughout the trial. That he seemed genuinely concerned for his well being. And while we'll never really know exactly what the judge was thinking, his actions were encouraging to Bob and the Camden 28.

As the case moved forward, he started ruling more in favor of them. And as it turned out, he started reading books about the Vietnam War. He became genuinely interested in what was happening.

It helped that the defendants presented themselves as respectable, conscientious citizens. If the judge had been expecting a rabble of pot smoking, foul mouthed hippies. What he got instead was a group of normal people expressing reasonable, principled opposition to the Vietnam War. Even John Barry, whose job was to put the Camden 28 in prison, seems to have liked them on a personal level.

These people were very hard to really dislike. And I think that carried a lot of ways with the jury.

But Barry had a job to do. He needed to convict the Camden 28. And the federal government needed him to prove the link between Camden and the media burglary. Soon hed have his chance. It came when Bob Williamson called himself to the stand. He wanted to tell the jury his story, but his decision to do this came with enormous risk.

We all knew that this would at least potentially open the door for the prosecution to start asking me, as they had with other defendants who had taken the stand, ask questions about my prior involvement in other illegal activities.

Bob told his story, how Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior had inspired him to work with the poor and to oppose all forms of violence. It was inspiring stuff. But then, of course, came the cross examination. And John Barry wasn't interested in Gandhi. He was interested in media.

So John Barry started immediately in asking me questions about other actions. And I said, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna talk about that. I'm not gonna help you prosecute my friends. So then all the lawyers are standing up, you know, trying to get the judge's attention.

At this point, Judge Fisher had every right to tell Bob, answer the question, or you'll be held in contempt of court. If he did, Bob would have three choices. He could tell the truth. He could commit perjury. Or he could refuse to answer and spend the rest of the trial in jail. But Judge Fisher didn't do that. Instead, he addressed John Barry.

And the judge just looks at the prosecutor, John Barry, and says, mister Barry, it's clear he's not going to answer the question. Move on.

Bob was off the hook, at least for now. Soon it was time for the other Bob. Bob Hardy, the handyman turned criminal turned FBI informant, turned tool supplier, turned witness for the defense. Initially, the Camden 28 had considered an entrapment defense, arguing that the government had essentially baited them into their crime. The problem with that was, of course, they hadn't needed much baiting. They totally wanted to commit this crime.

Entrapment would not have applied in our case because none of us were reluctant to break into that draft board. But certainly they did everything they could to make sure that that action, you know, happened.

Nevertheless, the government had done just about everything in its power to make sure the Camden 28 broke the law. In fact, there had been two occasions when the team had seriously considered calling it off. Until Bob Hardy came through with the tools they needed to keep going. Hardy had also given them crucial advice, like teaching them how to use a glass cutter. That glass cutter and other tools that Hardy supplied had all been entered as evidence. So the Camden 28 brought them into the courtroom to prove that the FBI had been instrumental to the break in. One by one, defense attorney David Karras picked up the tools and asked Hardy where they came from.

They made a pile of all of the stuff that the government had paid for. That we used in the break in. And then another pile of the stuff that we had brought to our own.

One pair of bolt cutters. FBI pile one hammer. FBI. One roll. Duct tape. Well, actually, that came from Hardy's personal toolbox. But the walkie talkies the team used during the break in, those had been supplied by the FBI.

I think they bought a ladder so that we could practice ladder climbing, which cracked me up. They thought we needed to practice how to climb a ladder when the crew.

Needed a portable drill. One FBI agent had actually gone to his own house, gotten his own drill, and given it to Hardy. It was starting to look like the FBI had been the driving force behind the whole operation.

The government's pile was way bigger. It was a nice visual point.

The defendant's pile ultimately consisted of just four. Two drill bits, a small, flat piece of metal, and a single can of v eight juice. I have to assume that they threw that in there for comedic effect. Next to that, in the middle of the courtroom, for all to see was the proverbial mountain of evidence that the FBI had facilitated a federal crime. In a trial this long, you have to do something to break the monotony. The Camden 28 often began the morning by asking to commemorate some unusual event or anniversary with a moment of silence. On March 8, 1973, they asked the judge if they could begin the day by observing the second anniversary of the media burglary.

I said, your honor, right now, respectfully persist on this one. I said, somehow it seems to me to be totally inappropriate for a federal court to be commemorating the anniversary of an unsolved federal crime. Judge looked at me, and he goes, strike those reports. And the defendants, like, go, like, yeah, you finally won one.

One thing was clear. Things were happening in this courtroom that don't usually happen in courtrooms.

A woman who was testifying, and basically she said, well, I can't express. I can't express my views and words. I have to do with music. And he allows her to play this guitar for about ten minutes.

Yeah, that one might have been a little overboard. Putting aside the occasional guitar player, other unconventional witnesses were much more substantive. A psychiatric specialist testified about the effects of war on the people, experiencing it firsthand. The defense also called Major Clement St. Martin a former draft board administrator, which may seem like an odd choice, but.

He'D actually seen enough to realize that the system was racist, because he could see the people getting drafted were poor and of color and disproportionate to their, you know, their. Their percentage of the population wildly disproportionate. In some cases, and so he quit. Somebody asked him, you know, what he thought of people breaking into draft boards. He says, if they do it again, I think I might join them.

Another witness for the defense was Tran Hong Toyet, a woman who had immigrated from Vietnam. She took the stand and described life in her homeland before the american invasion and after. In the name of liberty, she told a silent courtroom, you have destroyed my country. Then came the defense's star witness, Howard Zinn. Zinn hadn't yet written his famous people's history of the United States, but he had helped publish the Pentagon papers, newly leaked documents which showed the american government's true rationale for the war. That made him the perfect person to explain to a Camden, New Jersey, jury that the us war machine was guilty and the Camden 28 were innocent.

He went into a lot of significant detail and just hammered home the point that while the government was telling. Our government was telling us, the american people, that this war was being fought to fight communism and to keep Vietnam, Southeast Asia free. The actual motivation for the war and the reason why it was being continued at such great cost had to do with the natural resources of the region, primarily tin, rubber and oil.

By this point, the Vietnam war's toll was staggering. More than 58,000 Americans had lost their lives between the armies of the north and the south. A million vietnamese soldiers had died. We'll never know exactly how many civilians were killed, but by 1973, the total was almost certainly higher than 1 million. In Zin's mind, there was no doubt millions of lives had been cut short, and a nation burned for the sake of tin, rubber, and oil.

And he kept saying that over and over again. Tin, rubber, and oil. It made a big impact on the, on the jury.

Betty Good, mother of one of the defendants, was in the audience that day. Even though she didn't approve of what the Camden 28 had done, misses Goode had lost her younger son, Paul, when he was killed in action on June 19, 1967. He was three months shy of his 20th birthday.

She went out into the hallway, and the other women were there supporting her. She was just bawling her eyes out because it had just dawned on her that the government had been lying to her, too, about why we were there. And she just felt so betrayed. She lost a son over tin, rubber and oil.

Zins testimony concluded on a Friday. Over the weekend, Misses Goode asked her son if she could testify. She didn't tell him what she planned to say. So on Monday, her son called her to the stand and simply asked her about her life. Misses Goode described herself as a conservative, someone who'd supported the war even after it claimed the life of her son. But that had finally changed. The following is an excerpt from Betty Goode's testimony at the Camden trial, read by Betty Metzger.

And I still, even until last Friday, I still tried to hang on to the theory that my boy died for his country. I realized, you know, it was pretty stupid of us. It was pretty stupid of us to swallow all that business about America being over in South Vietnam to save it from the communists. I really feel guilty. I feel guilty that we have sat aside and let them take our boys. Mister Zinn said it so beautifully when he said that they were kidnapped, literally, and taken 10,000 miles away from home. Why should these lives be cut down for tin, rubber, and oil?

To his credit, John Barry decided there was really no benefit in the prosecution. Cross examining misses.

Good.

She returned to the gallery. It was time for closing arguments.

It started with a backpack at the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games, a backpack that contained a bomb. While the authorities focused on the wrong suspect, a serial bomber planned his next attacks, two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. But this isn't his story. It's a human story, one that I've become entangled with.

I saw as soon as I turned the corner, basically someone bleeding out.

The victims of these brutal attacks were left to pick up the pieces, forced to explore the gray areas between right and wrong, life and death, their once ordinary lives and mine change forever.

It kind of gave me a feeling of pending doom.

And all the while, our country found itself facing down a long and ugly reckoning with a growing threat far right, homegrown religious terrorism. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the summer of 2020, in the small mountain town of Edelweild, California, five women disappeared in the span of just a few months. Eventually, I found out what happened to the women. All except one, a woman named Lydia Abrams, known as DEA. Her friends and family ran through endless theories. Was she hurt hiking? Did she run away? Had she been kidnapped? I'm Lucy Sherrith. I've been reporting this story for four years, and I've uncovered a tangled web of manipulation, estranged families, and greed. Everyone, it seems, has a different version of events. Hear the story on where's DEA, my new podcast from Pushkin industries and iHeart podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Well, Bowen, the Olympics are underway. It's useless to talk about it as a thing that's happening in the future when it's happening in the present. It's happening now. And what's happening now is our podcast. Two guides by rings is a phenomenon. And while real medals are being handed out in Paris, we're giving out our fake medals here. Two guys, five. Matt Bowen and the Olympics. Who are we watching this Olympic games? I mean, I'm watching Simone Biles. I'm watching her go higher and higher and higher with every bounce. Sha'carry's about to run faster than you or I or anyone has ever seen. I'm rooting for the girls and the boys and everybody under the Seine river, under the sand over the sand within the waters of the Seine. All of them. Follow the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or your favorite podcast platform, and watch and listen to every moment of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, now through August 11 on NBC and Peacock. And for the first time ever on the iHeartRadio app.

In his closing statement, Bob Williamson asked the jury what had more significance. Pieces of paper torn up in a draft board office were the bodies of soldiers and civilians torn to pieces, and the countless families torn apart by the Vietnam war. And what was more offensive, the Camden 20 eight's nonviolent crime or the government's tireless work behind the scenes to make it happen? In other words, Bob was simply asking, whose motives offend you more, ours or theirs? Judge Fisher told the jurors that if they decided there had been a, quote, intolerable degree of overreaching government participation, they could find the defendants not guilty. The trial had already lasted over 100 days by the time the jury began its deliberations.

I was probably, more than anything else, numb, you know, because it had been such an exhausting experience. The jury was out deliberating for, I think, two, three days. Seemed like it took forever. Nobody else wanted to say, hey, I think they're going to find us not guilty. I didn't say it either, but I know that I felt hopeful. And then we get a phone call to go to the courtroom because the jury had reached a verdict.

It was on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The word went out through a telephone tree that a verdict was about to come in. And so we all started driving to the Camden courthouse. The courthouse was starting to fill up by the time I got there, and certainly all the defendants had arrived. Some of them had their children there, and the children were walking along the railings. I'm talking about very small children. As we waited.

200 supporters of the Camden 28 packed the courtroom. Every seat was taken. People even stood shoulder to shoulder along the perimeter of the room. Judge Fisher entered and addressed the audience.

He was concerned. He was concerned how the audience might react. He saw how big it was. And he said, we have to go through a lot of defendants and ask the jury foreman about each one.

On each count, Judge Fisher asked that there be no interruptions or outbursts. As the verdicts were ready, he called the jurors in. They took their seats.

They looked very, very tired. And so he called on the jury foreman and said, do you have verdicts? And he said he did.

The accused sat shoulder to shoulder at long tables near the front of the room. They were two floors below the very draft board offices they had raided 21 months earlier.

So, of course, we're all very nervous and everything, but of course, the adrenaline was just going crazy in my body.

The judge began alphabetically with defendant Terry Buccalou, and he asked the jury foreman what the verdict was on count one for Terry Buckalew. And he said, not guilty. There was this sort of stunned feeling. And then the judge went through each of the counts and asked him the same question. And each time the jury foreman said, not guilty.

There was a kind of a murmur in the courtroom. And the judge says to the foreperson, do you have any other verdicts on any of the other defendants that are different on any of these counts? And the foreman said, no, your honor. So at that point, it was bedlam.

First. It was like people were sort of gasping, almost. The defendants were looking at each other in these at first puzzled ways, and then very happy, very grateful. I'm sorry. And they started embracing each other. And the people in the audience were also stunned. And they started singing amazing grace. And it was a little difficult for them because many of them, the tears were streaming down their faces as they were trying to sing.

And it just sounded beautiful. I mean, it was just. It was just such the perfect thought of the perfect way to show our appreciation for what had just happened.

The judge was smiling as he left the room. I was standing right behind the prosecutors. And then I realized that the chief prosecutor, John Barry, had walked from his position at the prosecutor's table over to the defendants. Everybody had that look of, what do I do? On their faces? And he put out his hand to one of them, and as he shook hands, hands, the handshake turned into an embrace of the defendant. And then he just kept moving from defendant to defendant. And then he walked back to his seat, and he turned around and he said to me, it ended the way it should have ended. I certainly don't think that any prosecutor in any anti war trial and perhaps any case that I've ever known of has said such a thing.

I had to go to the bathroom, and so I went into the men's room, and there was a. There was like four stalls, and three of them were occupied, and one in the center was. Was open. So I went to that one, and on either side of me was an FBI agent. And after we all finished our business, they both shook my hand and congratulated me and wished me luck.

The defendants started to gather in the halls outside the courtroom, where they were welcomed by singing supporters and a throng of tv cameras.

This was the scene in the courthouse lobby minutes after the not guilty verdicts were announced, more than 100 relatives and friends were present as the defendant's two year ordeal ended.

Betty Goode, the mother who had lost one son in Vietnam and had another son amongst the Camden 28, couldn't believe the outcome. She was practically giddy with relief.

I thought it would be a hung.

Jury, but I didn't know any of the people except my son, and they're the most beautiful people in the world. I had to go back and convert my husband. Not only my husband, but my family. My husband's a good fellow, but, you know, he was so. He was too afraid to come today because he was afraid, you know, the verdict would be bad, so he didn't come.

It was clear to anyone watching. This wasn't just a victory for the Camden 28. It was a victory for every American who had fought to end the war in Vietnam.

We did it. After five years, we finally made sense to them. We've been having guilty, guilty, guilty for five years for proposing this war, and we finally got not guilty. The people understood.

I was surprised, pleasantly, but still surprised. It was. It was really intense. This group of twelve regular people were saying that we were right and the government was wrong. As far as I knew, none of these people had ever participated. Even, you know, they hadn't even written a letter to the editor against Vietnam, let alone done anything else. And I'm like, damn, we are getting somewhere. It was a great victory for the movement.

I remember turning around and seeing John and Bonnie Raines, and they were all smiles, and they were just very, very happy. There were some tears on their faces.

John Rains would later say that at that very moment, he decided he needed to go on a diethouse. He wanted to look good in a suit in case he was eventually arrested for the media burglary and went to trial. Because the Camden verdict gave him hope that a potential trial might not send him straight to prison, but rather give him a platform to tell the world that his cause had been just and that the FBI's was not. The Camden 28 were free. And it wasn't just a victory for the defendants. It was also a massive embarrassment for the FBI. When the trial began, the bureau thought not only was this a slam dunk, but it would also be an end to the media saga. A satisfying conclusion where the G men put a whole bunch of bad guys behind bars just like they did on that corny FBI tv show. Instead, the cracks originally exposed in the media burglary had only split wider, and the story still wasn't over. The whole damn dam was about to burst. Next week on snafu, and flipping through the pages, I noticed one. It's. It said, cointelpro. New list.

As for the records at FBI headquarters.

They were put in a special file called the do not file file. Subsequently, we learned to find a lot of those people where, in fact, not only agent provocateurs, but undercover officers. It's a very sad spectacle and that's.

Just, you know, one of probably 2000 or so cases like that throughout the country.

There has never been a full public accounting of FBI domestic intelligence operations. Therefore, this committee has undertaken such an investigation.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio film Nation entertainment and Pacific Electricity picture company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of Snafu is based on the book the the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chugg, Dylan Fagan and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is Steven Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen, Sarah Joyner and Stephen Wood. With additional writing and story editing from Alyssa Martino and Ed Helms. Tori Smith is our associate producer, Nevan Kalapalli is our production assistant. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Bret Harris. Sensitivity consult from Olowakemi Ala Dasui. Editing, sound design and original music by Ben Chugg. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia Caney and Gemma Castelli Foley. Theme music. Bye, Dan Rosado. Special thanks to Allison Cohen, Daniel Welch and Ben Rezak. Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary 1971. Finally our deepest gratitude to the Courageous Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI.

Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Feingold, Heath Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Reigns, Sarah Schumer and Bob Williamson.

Back in 96, Atlanta was booming with excitement around hosting the centennial Olympic Games. And then a deranged zealot willing to kill for a cause lit a fuse that would change my life and so many others, forever rippling out for generations. Listen to Flashpoint on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020. In a small California mountain town, five women disappeared. I found out what happened to all of them except one, a woman known as deer whose estate is worth millions of dollars. I'm Lucy Sheriff. Over the past four years, I've spoken with Deers family and friends, and I've discovered that everyone has a different version of events. Hear the story on where's Deer? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.