“Team one in position.”
“We have a known bomber hold up in his house.”
“A man that was accumulating an arsenal in food stores to survive a siege. This is someone that’s willing to do mass murder.”
“We simply see him come down the mountain side.”
“What if he decides to engage them in a firefight?”
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This is law enforcement to the extreme.
This is FBI takedowns.
An anticipated crowd of over 2,000 marchers from all across Spokane are gathering for the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Unity parade.
“It was a very, very crisp. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day.”
“Hundreds of people are streaming into the area to head to the convention center in downtown Spokane.”
“People came to the march greeting old friends and people were getting excited. It’s a march about people helping people.”
“We have this history in our region with these violent racists and there’s a real desire for us to to want that to be passed, to want that to be over. And the community have rallied against that. they’ve uh galvanized and to really tamp down uh some of those strong anti-government white supremacist beliefs.”
“With any large public gathering these days, there’s always an effort to try and um you know identify any potential threats to see if anybody’s heard anything or seen anything. and and we had not heard anything.”
“There was no pre-warning. There was no chatter, if you will. There was no threat stream that indicated an attack would be launched on that day.”
“So, outside the convention center area where the parade is set to begin, a cleaning crew is calmly going about their work, prepping the area for today’s event.”
“We went out for maintenance, groundskeeping, picking up leaves and debris through the parking lot in the area. We had kind of gone out as a trio and out on the corner of Maine and Washington in front of the convention center. We found a backpack just sitting on the bench.”
“Sherman opens it up, pulls out some t-shirts. Something hit him. Face went totally blank. You could see a look of genuine shock and almost fear in his face.”
“Whoa. What do we do now?”
“911. What are you reporting?”
“I work for the city and right now I am at the convention center. I’m at Washington and I’m cleaning up in a parking lot. There’s a backpack here. It’s got wires in it and stuff.”
“It look like it could be a bomb. We’re going to let it sit right there till you guys get here. I know that Martin Luther King.”
“I’m letting them know. I want you to stay on the line with me though.”
“Copy.”
“As they wait, Brandon and his co-workers try to protect the growing parade crowd.”
“We didn’t know what to do, but naturally, we just kind of formed a triangle around the corner. We were telling people, hey, you know, you probably don’t want to come this way.”
“To their credit, they set up a basically a perimeter using just themselves to protect the hundreds of people that were still coming to get to the parade. They could have fled the scene. They could have backed up blocks away. They didn’t.”
“When Spokane police arrive,”
“69 radio, we have a confirmed explosive device on scene over here.”
“The squad’s first move is to protect the parade goers.”
“They did a wonderful job setting up a security perimeter so the people couldn’t get close to this device. The other thing they did that was extremely significant in this case was that they were able to determine an alternate route so that they could still have the march and without alarming all the participants.”
“Facing a terrorist threat in the heart of their city, Spokane police reach out to the world’s preeminent counterterrorism experts, the FBI.”
“We’re notified and I realized my life from this moment was going to change. the fact that the regional bomb squad called me. They don’t call me for just pipe bombs. They realize that they had something.”
“They’ve seen wires, batteries, uh things like that. Enough to make it suspicious.”
“My first thought is how far along was the bomb squad with what they had and then what did they have?”
“I was debriefed by the lieutenant. I talked with the robot operator there and then with the safety officer that was already deployed.”
“They know the risks. Still raw in everyone’s mind is a tragedy 3 years earlier. Certified hazardous device technician William Hawkam and Captain Tom Tenant of the Woodburn, Oregon Police Department approached a bomb when it suddenly detonated, killing them. Two heroes lost in the line of duty.”
“As agent Mchuan works with the local bomb squad on a plan to neutralize the device, each man shares a fear that this could be his last assignment.”
“How far away can someone be and push a button and really ruin your day? Um, so you’re really thinking, we got this one device. Are there other other devices that someone’s going to set up as you walk up to check and clear the the trash can, the uh the cars? And it’s downtown. There’s cars all over the place. There’s trash cans all over the place. There’s lots of places to hide other bombs. And was this the small one or was this the main one? Don’t know.”
“For that reason, the cars and the surroundings of the parade or of the attack site were secured until they could be swept by the FBI with our partners. And overseas, we’ve seen it many times where they have other devices to kill the bomb techs, to kill the command staff and to kill the first responders trying to protect people. So, yeah, we had to uh look around for other devices uh before we could even go up to it.”
“If you can think of anything, okay, if you seen anybody, maybe over at the bank, down at the church. So, we were just methodically going through car by car, person by person, witness by witness, and interviewing as many people as we can. Then, cuz once they leave the scene, they’re hard to find again.”
“See that?”
“Hey, can we get the dog in here to clear us?”
“Crucial minutes race by as agents scour the area and question everyone.”
“It’s very critical to to get information right away. The clock is ticking. Leads go cold. And it was our job to get on this as fast as we can because we have a bomber. And uh as long as they’re out there and we haven’t found them yet, no one’s really safe.”
“We’ve got a package over here and we’ve done a secondary sweep of the area.”
“After a thorough sweep fails to turn up a second bomb, Agent Mchuan and the Spokane bomb technicians focus on the backpack.”
“At that point, uh the way this uh device being in a backpack and then wrapped in several layers of uh t-shirts and duct tape, we really couldn’t get a good idea of what it was.”
“They blast the backpack with a high-press water cannon.”
“The impact rips it open, exposing the bomb’s inner workings. You then have to use the robot to start tearing this all apart. We saw a approximate 5 in metal tube and that gave us the idea that it was a a mortar type device. A backpack 30 lb of explosives uh is going to go, you know, several blocks of lethal range.”
“Once the robot does all it can, it’s time for the most dangerous assignment of the mission. and you’re always trying to do your job the safest you can, but at some point it takes a human walking down to do the final uh look and and confirm that it’s been safely separated.”
“Can you do this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No one’s sure. No one knows if it’ll still detonate. No one knows if the bad guy is still standing off 200 m with a remote control device to initiate it once the bomb tech gets downrange.”
“It’s been more than 4 hours since Spokane city workers first discovered a bomb along a downtown parade route. To disarm it, the FBI and the local bomb squad have dispatched an explosives technician. As he moves in, he knows the IED can detonate at any second.”
“The reality is at some point you do have to cut some wires. Uh hopefully you’re cutting the right ones and you’ve already disabled it so you can make it perfectly safe.”
“He was able to cut some wires that we thought may have been to the initiation system and safely separate the pieces of the mortar. To be safe, they send the bomb disposal robot back in to take pictures. It reveals the bomber packed the device with lead fishing weights for deadly shrapnel.”
“And that’s just the half of it. We actually had the robot pick up a few of those pieces of shrapnel and then the uh Spokane hazmat team was there because we saw a green substance on these lead weights. That was unusual. We had never seen that before. We didn’t know what it was. They dawned level A with full bioproction and respiratory protection.”
“Is that a poison? Is it a radological substance? Is it a bio substance? So, we’re always looking what’s the worst case scenario and how can we uh protect the public from it.”
“Then when the robot came back, uh, hazmat had the detector ticket and when it popped hot, then things got interesting.”
“Not just interesting, insidious. The hazmat crew collects samples of the green goo, then clears the way for Mchuan and his team to safely start their investigation. The rest of the shrapnel we decontaminated with a chlorine bleach solution to make sure that it didn’t have any biological substance on it.”
“Smell that?”
“Yeah. What does that smell?”
“Smells terrible.”
“Agents Clary and Butler soon figure out the ingredients of the bomber’s foul concoction.”
“The subject had taken rat poison which is anti-coagulant, mixed it with we believed to be the sicky substance was marshmallow cream and covered all that in fecal matter.”
“The rat poison would keep his victim’s wounds from clotting.”
“His plan was to have people bleed out from the rat poison.”
“Fecal matter on the shrapnel would cause dangerous infections for victims who survived long enough to get to a hospital.”
“He wanted to injure and kill as many people as he could. He didn’t care.”
“He aimed the mortar inside the bomb to blast the deadly shrapnel directly into the crowd like a shotgun, putting everyone within several hundred feet in lethal danger.”
“This is a very sophisticated device. This is a device that someone took a lot of care and interest in creating a device that will not only kill by explosives, but with shrapnel, chemicals, and biological substances. This is the worst device you can imagine.”
“The bomber packed one more trick into his death device. This one had um antenna and a package attached to some pretty strong batteries. Something that would be uh actuated by a car alarm or in this case it was a remote car starter would uh set it off.”
“He has a 200 m standoff that he can initiate the device. He’ll push the button on the key fob, the device would go off. He wants to watch the damage. He wants to watch the destruction.”
“The attacker would have been able to walk through the killing field he had created.”
“Mission accomplished in his mind. It was clear to us at the scene this device, although crude in appearance, was very sophisticated in its design, was very devious in its design, and it’s something that none of us had ever seen inside the United States.”
“The team caught a major break when the city workers found the bomb just in the nick of time. They hope their luck holds. They’ll need it to find the bomber fast. The worry is about can we catch this bomber before he learns from his mistake and does it again. He he or she is someone that’s willing to do mass murder and spent way too much time invested in this bomb to just let it go. Uh they’re not going to stop. They’re going to do it again and again until we catch them.”
“The universe of potential suspects was generally unlimited. And so what the FBI had to do was to take that universe of potential suspects and start to narrow it down and focus it.”
“A way to do that is by testing the feces on the shrapnel. It’s definitely human and might get them the bombers’s DNA, but that takes something they don’t have. Time. The FBI has no eyewitnesses, no reports of anyone suspicious, but buildings in the area are dotted with security cameras.”
“Priority at that time was to canvas businesses and other buildings in the area for surveillance footage that may be available. The one battle we ran into quickly was that we had no security footage of that immediate intersection area. So, you know, we weren’t clear if this individual or individuals happened to just get lucky or they had done some uh surveillance ahead of time to kind of figure that out.”
“Agent Butler and his team review every frame of video they can get their hands on and come up empty.”
“Meanwhile, the remnants of the bomb are sent to the FBI lab at Quantico. The world’s most state-of-the-art forensics facility has the tools for stopping terrorists. The pressures on supervisory special agent Richard Striker, who oversees the scientific investigation of the Spokane bomb.”
“It was a high-profile event at a very public event uh targeting a specific audience and so we knew it was coming in and we knew we had devote a lot of resources to work around the clock to get as much forensic information off the components as we could. DNA analysis, latent fingerprints, uh trace evidence, hairs and fibers, uh firearms tool marks.”
“When I saw it um in the condition that it was in, I knew that we would have, you know, a great chance.”
“The most harmless thing in the backpack gives agents their first lead.”
“The t-shirts that were used to uh protect the device and to provide a concealment in the backpack. The t-shirts pointed to a northern county, Stevens County.”
“Rural Washington doesn’t share the rest of the state’s liberal vibe.”
“Eastern Washington is is different than Western Washington where where Seattle is. East Washington, the culture over here is a little little different. We do have a uh very small fringe group and fringe individuals who are white separatists and white supremists.”
“This history goes back decades.”
“Today, the region’s white supremacist problem is smaller than it used to be. The Aryan nations, once based in nearby Idaho, had fostered violent offshoots near Spokane. In the early 80s, we had the the order and that group led by Bob Matthews went on to kill a Jewish DJ in Denver. They robbed banks. They robbed armored cars and they’re eventually captured and Bob Matthews was killed in a standoff. We’ve also had the Kho brothers. They started their own white supremist group and they proceeded to commit several robberies and uh kill three individuals in the furtherance of their white supremist activity.”
“A Martin Luther King Jr. parade seems a likely target for one of these violent racist groups. And though the bomb plot failed, the bombers about to get a second chance.”
“Some people felt fear as a concern about what might happen next and who else is out there planning to do this again. We in Spokane have several events coming up. the world’s largest time road race, which is Blooms Day, and also the largest threeon-ree basketball tournament. It’s called Hoopfest. It’s a young crowd. It’s multicultural, multi-racial, and it seems like everybody has a backpack. The downtown streets of of Spokane are literally packed with athletes and spectators. It’d be nearly impossible to stop someone from taking something down there.”
“One week after a bomber’s grotesque plot is foiled, he’s still out there somewhere in Eastern Washington, picking his next target. He’s no doubt hardened his resolve, upped his deadly game, and doing everything he can to make sure his next attack goes as planned.”
“This particular attacker was of great concern to us because clearly he had constructed a very deviously designed device and he had shown a willingness to kill indiscriminately obviously for a political purpose or for to send a message but he was he was prepared to kill men, women, and children.”
“The FBI agents disguised as a road crew keep Kevin Harpam under roundthe-clock surveillance. We have court orders or pen registers on his telephone so we can see the numbers he’s calling in and out. We also have a pen register on his IP on his internet protocol so we can see the websites he’s visiting.”
“We did not want to uh arrest Kevin Harpam at his cabin. It was clear from what we knew about Harpam, he had prepared for this day. He he prepared for a long siege and and history is is replete with loss of life from efforts to do that.”
“What you don’t want to do is take them where they feel safe. We want to get him out of that location. We want to get him on a ruse, maybe in his vehicle, parked somewhere, maybe walking to a store. Make it safe for us and safe for him.”
“Luring him out of his lair and into the open won’t be easy, but the agents must find a way.”
“Through our surveillance of Harpum, we determined that he was attempting to buy a vehicle that we believed he was going to use to leave the area for a while while things cooled down.”
“It was decided that uh we would essentially make up our own ad, see if Kevin would respond to it.”
“Playing every possible angle, the FBI makes a for sale ad for an SUV, a truck, and a station wagon.”
“And we know also from reading his Vanguard News Network posts that he’s very frugal. So, we we had the price point on those ads pretty low. And we posted the one for the station wagon at $1,500.”
“The agents set the perfect trap. And if he bites, they’ve enlisted the FBI’s most elite tactical unit, the hostage rescue team, to help spring it.”
“HRT had set up as construction workers, and they borrowed heavy equipment and uniforms and hard hats uh from Stevens County. There were about approximately 15 HRT operators posing as construction workers at a site.”
“A second group of fully armed HRT agents stays hidden and ready. Only one road leads out of the area. So when Harpam stops at the construction site, the agents will swarm in for the take down, but first they have to get him out of that house.”
“There’s a sense of urgency here. We have a known bomber pulled up in his house. We have HRT, our hostage rescue team, is now on scene.”
“All right, we’re in position.”
“There’s a huge footprint. Though they’re pretty subtle, still it’s a lot of people. The longer they’re out there, the more likely they’ll arouse Harpam’s suspicion.”
“With the tactical strike team lying in wait, FBI agents anxiously try to lure extremely dangerous bombing suspect Kevin Harpam from his armory of a house. But so far, he’s not biting on the fake ad they placed for a potential getaway car. The fear was that we’d have to go get him at his residence.”
“It took about 24 hours for for Harpam to respond to the advertisement and negotiate the sale of the vehicle.”
“Hello.”
“Hello. May I speak with Kevin, please?”
“Uh, this is him.”
“Hi, Kevin. This is Peggy. I got your email about my car.”
“We had an agent here who posed as Peggy, the owner of the vehicle, and she placed a call to Kevin in response to his his email expressing interest and and tape that conversation with him.”
“Would I be able to look at it tomorrow?”
“Uh, yeah, that would be great. Um, I work tomorrow, but I can slip out probably around 10ish. Would that be okay with you?”
“That would probably work.”
“I remember thinking that Peggy was doing a great job at at chatting Kevin up, and it was obvious that that he seemed interested in this car. Okay. And we also really got kind of a kick out of the fact that Kevin seemed to be a lonely guy. He wanted to talk to to Peggy for some time. He wanted to chat her up about this car and and so forth. And so, uh, we were all just pretty excited that it seemed to be working.”
“With Harpam on the hook, the hostage rescue team reviews the details of their takedown plan. The fake construction crew will block the road ahead of him, box him in from behind, and blow a small explosive to distract Harpam while an armed tactical unit swarms his car. Quick, clean, and if all goes right, safe.”
“The next morning, team members are in position and on high alert as Harpam emerges from his house.”
“What if he figures this out ahead of time? What if he decides that when he gets down to where he’s contacting HRT, he does have a weapon and decides to engage them in a firefight and that’s going to put FBI agents and Harpam at risk.”
“There’s a great deal of tension that morning. We don’t know if he’s going to be armed. We don’t know what preparations he’s going to make for this rendevous. We simply see him come down the mountain side into the waiting arms of HRT.”
“And when Kevin Harpin drove by that site, they had blocked the road with a vehicle. While that’s going on, one of the HRT operators driving a front loader had driven up behind Kevin in his vehicle to box him in.”
“Throw your window down, sir.”
“Hey, listen. It’s going to be a while if we can get this mess cleaned up right here. So, if you don’t mind, go ahead and turn the car off for me.”
“Out of the car. Let’s go. Back. Get your arm.”
“Give me the other arm now. Do not move. Do you understand? Pull up.”
“Asian Butler and I went up to his vehicle and found a loaded .38 handgun under his seat. Also, there was a loaded AR-15 in his trunk and several thousand in cash, which I believe he was going to use to purchase the station wagon.”
“Come on.”
“With the suspect in custody, agents search his home and uncover evidence conclusively linking him to the Unity parade bomb.”
“We found a pipe that he used in the device that matched. We found the wiring. We found the box for the remote car starter and the second key fob. We found books on white supremacy, including books on Adolf Hitler and other violent white extremists.”
“The search team found a a digital camera. So, uh, one of the agents was searching through the camera and realized that there was no digital photographs left. We sent that camera to the lab. Lab came back and said, ‘Listen, there are deleted photographs on Harpam’s camera, which we can retrieve.'”
“There photos of Harpam at the Unity Day parade. He’s his own eyewitness. We were ecstatic about that because even although we had Kevin’s DNA, we had him buying fishing weights and things like that, we still to that point had no evidence of him actually being down at at the march that day.”
“One image is particularly haunting.”
“One of the more siminal images that that is, I think, etched into all our memories is is an image of a African-American family of children arrayed before a statue of an astronaut. And in a perverse way, Harpam was taking a picture of his prey. He was taking a trophy picture of very likely or what could have been those that he would have killed with his device and and that captured the essence of the evilness of the individual.”
“Using the photos for reference, agents also discover Harpam on the surveillance footage they pulled from the march. The evidence keeps mounting.”
“Once we have Kevin Harpin in custody, his name is released to the press, uh we get a phone call from a farmer up in Callville who says, ‘I have a uh gravel pit which is about a mile as crow flies from where Kevin Harbin lives. I found uh looks like someone had tried to detonate a bomb there in the fall of 2010.’ So, our evidence response team from Seattle went up and processed the scene.”
“In that crab pit, they found several items of evidence, uh, including wiring, which matched our device, an egg timer, and a bottle of explosive fluid, which had Kevin Harpin’s name on it.”
“The FBI knows that it’s crucial to convince a jury just how lethal Harpam’s bomb could have been. Words won’t cut it. So, specialists at Quantico film a demo.”
“We built several of the devices uh to scale using the same components. When the uh initiator gave that spark of flame to the black powder, it launched those 128 fishing weights out at a great velocity uh towards the target material, a metal file cabinet and some military style targets. It went through and through a steel file cabinet that that it penetrated both sides. the human skin is not nearly as uh resilient as a steel file cabinet and you can figure out what would have happened.”
“I’ve watched the explosion of the device countless times and just watching that the destruction and I just am relieved because the carnage it would have done had that been detonated in the middle of a of a parade uh filled with innocent people uh is untold.”
“Harpam knows he can’t dodge the insurmountable evidence. To avoid a potential life sentence, he pleads guilty to hate crime and terrorism charges. He’s sentenced to 32 years in prison.”
“Catching Kevin Harpin, bringing him to justice, holding him accountable was, I think, for many of us the seinal point in our careers. It was an example of everything working as it should, flowing smoothly. It was a success story in the end for the good guys.”
“I think the real irony is is that Kevin Harpam tried to disrupt this march and maybe make it uh the participants so fearful that they wouldn’t participate again. But yet, I think it had the opposite effect. Uh every year since then, uh the march has gotten larger, more participants, and I can tell you I’m one of those participants.”
“The continued success of the Unity Parade is a point of pride for the agents who work so hard to bring Harpam to justice.”
“It’s a sense of accomplishment of getting Kevin Harpam off the street, uh, keeping this community safe. And though I didn’t march on 2011, I’ve marched every March since, uh, and I I’ve done so proudly, and it’s it’s been a great experience for myself and my family.”
