Speaker 1: Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2: This is a story that begins and ends in bank
Speaker 2: parking lots, more or less in the way that stories
Speaker 2: can really begin or end.
Speaker 1: Our subject today was alive.
Speaker 2: Before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's
Speaker 2: still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll
Speaker 2: start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey,
Speaker 2: on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen
Speaker 2: year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested
Speaker 2: after skipping school to try to rob a bank with
Speaker 2: a toy gun, and will mark the beginning of the
Speaker 2: end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot
Speaker 2: in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when
Speaker 2: an elderly ex con was caught on security cam footage
Speaker 2: getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move
Speaker 2: forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the
Speaker 2: decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least
Speaker 2: half a day times bought as a foreign mercenary, got
Speaker 2: deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped
Speaker 2: spy of ade U S Marshals turned state's witness against
Speaker 2: a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,
Speaker 2: and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment
Speaker 2: against a woman who made a passing comment about how
Speaker 2: he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger,
Speaker 2: and this is brune, little guys, this.
Speaker 1: Is a strange one.
Speaker 2: The first few episodes of this show were stories I
Speaker 2: already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom
Speaker 2: was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades,
Speaker 2: and it was big local news here in Charlesville when
Speaker 2: he was arrested twenty years ago. The Gerald Drake case
Speaker 2: was something I read about when it happened. The cases
Speaker 2: against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story
Speaker 2: I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one
Speaker 2: court filing at a time as it wound its way
Speaker 2: through the system. But this one, this one is brand
Speaker 2: new to me, and I think he will be brand
Speaker 2: new to just about everybody, because for as many times
Speaker 2: as this man shows up in the newspaper over the
Speaker 2: last sixty years, I haven't found any one's source that's
Speaker 2: gathered together the threads of his life and tried to
Speaker 2: make sense of how one man's name could appear in
Speaker 2: so many other people's stories, because that's where I found him.
Speaker 2: In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of
Speaker 2: a particularly nasty little guy one will definitely get to
Speaker 2: eventually in another episode when my weird little guide detector
Speaker 2: went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing
Speaker 2: mention of a side character in the life of a
Speaker 2: serial killer was enough to get me to put that
Speaker 2: book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying
Speaker 2: to figure out Frank.
Speaker 1: And what I found was kind of.
Speaker 2: A bizarro world Forest Gump, one man whose life keeps
Speaker 2: intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out
Speaker 2: of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrated federal agents and
Speaker 2: the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets, just bumbling
Speaker 2: his way through history, but without any of Tom Hanks's charm.
Speaker 2: I know we don't really know each other yet. I
Speaker 2: haven't earned the trust it takes to know you'll believe
Speaker 2: me when I promise you a two parter is worth
Speaker 2: the weight in between.
Speaker 1: But I think you'll agree.
Speaker 2: Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes. Frank Abbott
Speaker 2: Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen forty three
Speaker 2: in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior, a realtor,
Speaker 2: and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught violin lessons
Speaker 2: and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a lifelong con artist,
Speaker 2: a lot of what he's told reporters about his own
Speaker 2: life is self serving fiction, which would sometimes get published
Speaker 2: without fact checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact.
Speaker 1: It was in the newspaper, after all.
Speaker 2: So I've taken great pains to verify what I can,
Speaker 2: debunk what I can, and take note of the things
Speaker 2: I can only offer you with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2: Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the
Speaker 2: resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter on it. He
Speaker 2: claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 2: at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have
Speaker 2: matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a
Speaker 2: senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two when
Speaker 2: he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and
Speaker 2: a half years. He never finished high school. His claim
Speaker 2: that has as Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden
Speaker 2: name also fails to hold up to scrutiny. His mother
Speaker 2: was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman, and
Speaker 2: Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago, and I was generous here.
Speaker 2: I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents.
Speaker 2: His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name.
Speaker 2: I went as far as to track his family treat
Speaker 2: all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit
Speaker 2: of the doubt that maybe there's a shell Hammer in
Speaker 2: there somewhere.
Speaker 1: I didn't find one.
Speaker 2: It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's,
Speaker 2: John's and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing
Speaker 2: marriage records from the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: But he probably just made it up.
Speaker 2: He does a lot of that and other aspects of
Speaker 2: Frank's story would require a trip to the National Archive
Speaker 2: to sift through dusty boxes of ancient court transcripts, and
Speaker 2: an unlikely degree of transparency from the Central Intelligence Agency
Speaker 2: or a deathbed confession from mobster, or a few tell
Speaker 2: all memoirs from US marshalls to ever hope to sort out.
Speaker 2: The rest is somewhere in between. But I'll stick with
Speaker 2: what we do know to be true. And I said
Speaker 2: this story begins outside of a bank. On February twenty third,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school. Shortly after nine am.
Speaker 2: He walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached
Speaker 2: the teller and slid a plastic toy gun that he'd
Speaker 2: painted black out of a Manila envelope. I'd like to
Speaker 2: make a withdrawal, he told the teller as he cocked
Speaker 2: the toy pistol. I don't know if the teller could
Speaker 2: tell the gun was fake, or if she just didn't
Speaker 2: think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it in him to
Speaker 2: shoot her, or maybe she just was having a bad
Speaker 2: day and didn't care anymore, because, according to local news reports,
Speaker 2: she sneered at him, got up and walked away, leading
Speaker 2: him standing there alone at the counter with his toy
Speaker 2: gun and bewildered by the teller's apparent disinterest in being
Speaker 2: held at gunpoint, he just put the plastic pistol back
Speaker 2: in his pocket, turned around and walked out the front door,
Speaker 2: and as he was leaving, an off duty policeman just
Speaker 2: happened to be walking into the bank. An employee told
Speaker 2: the officer what had just happened, and he turned right
Speaker 2: around and caught Frank just outside. He dragged him back
Speaker 2: inside the bank to be identified by the teller, and
Speaker 2: as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess it didn't work.
Speaker 2: Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers that his
Speaker 2: plan had been to support the movement to use the
Speaker 2: money from the bank robbery to support the activities of
Speaker 2: the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment,
Speaker 2: the judge asked, Frank, aren't you the fellow who's been
Speaker 2: painting swastikas on synagogues around here. Frank denied this, and
Speaker 2: he told the judge I never did anything illegal in
Speaker 2: my life, and then he pleaded guilty to the attempted
Speaker 2: bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection
Speaker 2: with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I
Speaker 2: did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort
Speaker 2: from the prior to years when Frank would have still
Speaker 2: been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage
Speaker 2: boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson,
Speaker 2: just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 2: someone hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the
Speaker 2: synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a
Speaker 2: similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A
Speaker 2: few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby.
Speaker 2: In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after
Speaker 2: two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into
Speaker 2: and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In
Speaker 2: all these incidents, police told the papers of the time
Speaker 2: that they had referred the cases to the juvenile Division.
Speaker 2: It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that
Speaker 2: I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here.
Speaker 2: In every nineteen sixties Bergen County News article about a swastika,
Speaker 2: I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same
Speaker 2: two years about a local man flying a Swastika flag
Speaker 2: outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and
Speaker 2: synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't
Speaker 2: fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism, and the
Speaker 2: comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had
Speaker 2: been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court
Speaker 2: as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name
Speaker 2: attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any
Speaker 2: information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, so
Speaker 2: forget figuring out what how about in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 2: But it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been
Speaker 2: a suspect in some of those incidents, because at the
Speaker 2: hearing where he pled guilty to the attempt at bank robbery,
Speaker 2: Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him
Speaker 2: on numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln
Speaker 2: Rockwell American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank
Speaker 2: was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory,
Speaker 2: and he was released on October of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: shortly after his twenty first birthday after serving About two
Speaker 2: and a half years after his first stint in jail,
Speaker 2: Frank returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He
Speaker 2: worked occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem
Speaker 2: like he was holding down a steady job. One afternoon
Speaker 2: in July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots
Speaker 2: in the woods. An officer drove by to check it
Speaker 2: out and saw a car parked on the side of
Speaker 2: the road. The car looked empty, so the officer kept
Speaker 2: driving without stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out
Speaker 2: behind him and tried to run the officer off the road.
Speaker 2: A brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the
Speaker 2: vehicle for about a mile before the driver. Frank parked
Speaker 2: outside of his parents' home, got out and walked toward
Speaker 2: the front door.
Speaker 1: The officer asked.
Speaker 2: Frank if he'd been shooting guns in the woods, to
Speaker 2: which Frank replied only no, and then warned the officer
Speaker 2: that he was on private property for walking away and
Speaker 2: into the house. But Frank left something on the front
Speaker 2: seat of the car, unfortunately, and it was a Thompson
Speaker 2: submachine gun that he'd been firing in the woods. The
Speaker 2: officer saw the gun and called for backup, and when
Speaker 2: they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home,
Speaker 2: kicking off a seventy five minute gun battle, with more
Speaker 2: than a dozen cops firing shots at the house. As
Speaker 2: Frank fired at them through the windows, Frank's father and
Speaker 2: brother pleaded with him to come out, or at least
Speaker 2: to send the family dog out. After police Captain Peter
Speaker 2: Zurla was shot in the arm, the officers lobbed four
Speaker 2: canisters of tear gas through the windows, finally driving Frank
Speaker 2: out into the front yard, where he was arrested without
Speaker 2: further incident. And as they put the handcuffs on him,
Speaker 2: he turned to Captain Zerla, who's still standing there in
Speaker 2: the front yard bleeding from a gun shot wound, and
Speaker 2: Frank says, some shot when I got you through the window.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: There's no follow up I can find about whether the
Speaker 2: dog was heard, or how missus Sweeney got the tear
Speaker 2: gas out of her upholstery. It was the sixties, so
Speaker 2: maybe her sofa was safely scotch guarded or wrapped up
Speaker 2: in one of those weird plastic covers. That were popular
Speaker 2: back then, but you have to figure she at least
Speaker 2: had to replace the curtains. Frank entered a not guilty
Speaker 2: plea and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the evidence of the
Speaker 2: gun found on the front seat of the car, with
Speaker 2: his attorney arguing that it was discovered in an illegal
Speaker 2: search because the cop didn't have probable cause to look
Speaker 2: through the window of the parked car. That's not how
Speaker 2: that works. At trial, the defense put on three psychiatrists
Speaker 2: to argue for insanity, and the state put on two
Speaker 2: of their own, who testified that Frank was certainly disturbed,
Speaker 2: but not legally insane. The jury deliberated for just three
Speaker 2: hours before finding Frank guilty of attempted homicide, assault with
Speaker 2: the intent to kill, possession of a machine gun, and
Speaker 2: something called atrocious assault that I've never heard of. We
Speaker 2: don't have that here in Virginia, but in New Jersey,
Speaker 2: atrocious assault is an assault and battery, savage and cruel
Speaker 2: in character which results in maiming or wounding.
Speaker 1: So that definitely qualifies.
Speaker 2: And he was sentenced to six years, which, honestly, that's
Speaker 2: kind of remarkable, right. I'm not going to bat for
Speaker 2: the corsoral state here. Far from it, you know more,
Speaker 2: jail time doesn't really fix anybody, and we'll come to
Speaker 2: see that jail never comes close to fixing Frank. But
Speaker 2: reading those sixties news stories about this event was fascinating.
Speaker 2: This cop who got shot by a Nazi with a
Speaker 2: Tommy gun is described in every article as quote lightly wounded.
Speaker 2: I mean, he does seem to have not been seriously injured.
Speaker 2: He was shot, you know, in the upper arm. I
Speaker 2: don't think it went through the bone, so it really
Speaker 2: he was lightly wounded. But that's not what they would
Speaker 2: put in the newspaper today, you know it. And the
Speaker 2: cops didn't drive a tank through the front of this
Speaker 2: suburban home or unload their guns into him when he
Speaker 2: came out. There's been such a massive culture shift over
Speaker 2: the years and the way we justify aggressive police response
Speaker 2: and the way that we talk about the risk to police.
Speaker 2: It's just interesting to see that it wasn't always that way.
Speaker 2: But there's another unanswered question in the story of this
Speaker 2: siege in this New York suburb. What was he doing
Speaker 2: that day? I mean shooting guns in the woods, obviously,
Speaker 2: but why did he panic when that cop drove by
Speaker 2: and why those woods in particular, We'll never really know.
Speaker 2: Even if he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar.
Speaker 2: But the newspaper articles at the time do say that
Speaker 2: the officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection
Speaker 2: of East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile
Speaker 2: from where Frank lived.
Speaker 1: At the time. They used to put everything in the newspaper.
Speaker 2: It's so beautiful, every detail, every boring little bit in
Speaker 2: which they.
Speaker 1: Still did that.
Speaker 2: And I'm eternally curious about details that probably won't end
Speaker 2: up mattering. But I pulled up a map of ten
Speaker 2: of Flying, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded
Speaker 2: area you could walk straight into if you parked your
Speaker 2: car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large
Speaker 2: building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the
Speaker 2: Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next
Speaker 2: phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being
Speaker 2: the most likely to be more or less true, it's
Speaker 2: still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't
Speaker 2: be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous
Speaker 2: recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers,
Speaker 2: and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the
Speaker 2: nearly fifty years since the event in question, but it
Speaker 2: does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about
Speaker 2: having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tight rope here
Speaker 2: of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia was
Speaker 2: very bad and white supremacists from other countries were obsessed
Speaker 2: with the idea that they could travel there to kill
Speaker 2: black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking
Speaker 2: us down the long road of the history and consequences
Speaker 2: of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area
Speaker 2: of expertise, and it's not why you're here.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Even if you're coming into this with a completely blank
Speaker 2: slate for some reason, you're probably thinking there's no country
Speaker 2: called Rhodesia, and you're right, there is. There never really was.
Speaker 2: Rhodesia was never recognized as a sovereign state. But we're
Speaker 2: calling Rhodesia here as the present day state of Zimbabwe
Speaker 2: in southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was
Speaker 2: a British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British
Speaker 2: South Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the
Speaker 2: company until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self
Speaker 2: governing colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: decolonization was happening all across the African continent. These fading
Speaker 2: European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to
Speaker 2: all the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble
Speaker 2: for Africa. In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
Speaker 2: gave his Wind of Change speech in an address to
Speaker 2: the South African Parliament about the political necessity of moving
Speaker 2: toward decolonization. The wind of change is blowing through this continent,
Speaker 2: whether we like it or not. This growth national consciousness
Speaker 2: is a political fact. We was all accepted as a fact.
Speaker 3: Our national policies must take a contribute.
Speaker 2: He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier
Speaker 2: in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the
Speaker 2: first time. And I think the whether we like it
Speaker 2: or not part of that statement matters a lot.
Speaker 1: Here. He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness
Speaker 1: of his heart.
Speaker 2: He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody political reality
Speaker 2: of trying to hold on to these colonies at any cost.
Speaker 2: He could see the Belgians and Congo, and the French
Speaker 2: in Algeria fighting these costly wars with Africans who wanted
Speaker 2: an end to European colonial rule, and as they worked
Speaker 2: towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, the British government
Speaker 2: adopted a policy called no independence before majority rule, meaning
Speaker 2: they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a colony still run
Speaker 2: exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, this is
Speaker 2: an immensely complicated bit of political history that I'm stripping
Speaker 2: down to the studs and explaining badly so we get
Speaker 2: through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving the British
Speaker 2: Empire any kind of credit here. This policy did not
Speaker 2: arise out of a genuine desire to undo the harms
Speaker 2: of colonialism and address racism or anything like that. That
Speaker 2: was not on their minds. But I think they knew
Speaker 2: what it would look like if their decolonization looked exactly
Speaker 2: like their colony. And we're not talking about a pr
Speaker 2: loss here.
Speaker 1: This is the Cold War.
Speaker 2: They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to
Speaker 2: come in behind them. But it was this policy, or
Speaker 2: rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under Ian Smith
Speaker 2: to make the unilateral declaration of independence in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 2: White colonists made up just five percent of the population
Speaker 2: of the territory, but they were unwilling to accept that
Speaker 2: the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence if they shared
Speaker 2: even a crumb of political power with the other ninety
Speaker 2: five percent of Rhodesia. And apologies again for these digressions.
Speaker 2: I just love the context. I think it's so important.
Speaker 2: But that brings us to where we were going. The
Speaker 2: Rhodesian Bush War a fifteen year period of civil conflict
Speaker 2: between the white minority led government and the African nationalist
Speaker 2: guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries who actually traveled
Speaker 2: to Rhodesia during the war remains up for debate. Most
Speaker 2: of the countries the mercenaries came from were embarrassed by
Speaker 2: the whole affair. International sanctions levied against the territory after
Speaker 2: the illegal declaration of independence made it illegal for citizens
Speaker 2: of many countries to participate in the conflict, even in
Speaker 2: countries that didn't have their own domestic laws banning mercenary activity.
Speaker 2: And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia too about this
Speaker 2: perception that they needed foreigners to help with what they
Speaker 2: saw as their war for independence. So, for deeply unflattering
Speaker 2: and regrettable reasons, no one was very investing and getting
Speaker 2: a thorough accounting of the situation, right, nobody benefits from
Speaker 2: knowing what happened here. But at the high end, it
Speaker 2: was really only a few thousand mercenaries over the total
Speaker 2: course of the conflict, with best estimates for the number
Speaker 2: of them who were Americans being somewhere in the low hundreds.
Speaker 2: So a lot of guys talked about it, but not
Speaker 2: very many of them actually did it. This idea of
Speaker 2: American extremists traveling to Africa to violently enforce white rule
Speaker 2: over black Africans is one that modern white supremacists still
Speaker 2: cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was welcomed with open
Speaker 2: arms at an evening Bible study at a manual African
Speaker 2: Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina registered the domain
Speaker 2: last Rhodesian dot com a few months before he murdered
Speaker 2: nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them
Speaker 2: for prayer that night. Rufe made his final edit to
Speaker 2: that site his digital manifesto, just out before carrying out
Speaker 2: that attack. In twenty fifteen. The cultural moment where magazines
Speaker 2: like Soldier of Fortune ran full page advertisements for opportunities
Speaker 2: to be a man among men in the African bush
Speaker 2: looms large in our memories, But the reality is there
Speaker 2: weren't many men who actually heeded the call, and their
Speaker 2: role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike many of
Speaker 2: those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in the seventies,
Speaker 2: Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune.
Speaker 2: That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American
Speaker 2: mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was already on his
Speaker 2: way home. According to Frank, which is a dangerous way
Speaker 2: to start an assertion of fact. He walked into the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: two and asked how to join up. The information center
Speaker 2: was not technical a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was not
Speaker 2: technically a country, the fact that would get them into
Speaker 2: some trouble in Australia, but they claimed that they were
Speaker 2: just offering information about tourism. Frank says he was offered
Speaker 2: the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht, the Rhodesian Army's
Speaker 2: chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for the Christian Science
Speaker 2: Monitor who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy five, wrote that
Speaker 2: he'd spoken to another recent visitor to that office. After
Speaker 2: talking to Frank, this visitor walked into the office and
Speaker 2: was given a brochure printed by the Rhodesian Department of
Speaker 2: Labor about careers in Rhodesia, And after a thirty minute
Speaker 2: presentation about Americans already fighting in the conflict and the
Speaker 2: pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, including paid airfare,
Speaker 2: all violations of international sanctions in US federal law, the
Speaker 2: visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information that recruiter Nick
Speaker 2: lamprect worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K.
Speaker 2: Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to
Speaker 2: convince more Americans to make the trip. In the latter
Speaker 2: years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even wrote an article
Speaker 2: for the magazine promising young American soldiers of fortune that
Speaker 2: it would be easy for them to find a beautiful
Speaker 2: white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew he was lying
Speaker 2: about how much fun you could have fighting in the
Speaker 2: Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had already fled to
Speaker 2: South Africa to avoid military service. In what you may
Speaker 2: be sensing as a theme here, the details of frank
Speaker 2: service in Rhodesia are a little murky.
Speaker 1: The details of.
Speaker 2: A lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during
Speaker 2: those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement
Speaker 2: far less so. He told reporter David Annibal in that
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five interview that as a corporal in the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but
Speaker 2: when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying
Speaker 2: we shot him right there in the bush when we
Speaker 2: were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that
Speaker 2: his unit had taken part in raids over the border
Speaker 2: into neighboring Mozambique.
Speaker 1: He claimed that.
Speaker 2: Sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops,
Speaker 2: and until late nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in
Speaker 2: Mozambique fighting to put down the Mozambique War of Independence,
Speaker 2: and Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to
Speaker 2: raide gorilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African
Speaker 2: National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the groups
Speaker 2: fighting for independence in Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the
Speaker 2: border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained sovereignty
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy five. But it's hard to pin down
Speaker 2: when Frank would have been doing this, if he even did,
Speaker 2: I can at least say that Frank was no longer
Speaker 2: in Rhodesia. During one of the war's worst atrocities, a
Speaker 2: Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over
Speaker 2: one thousand civilians. David Animal published a couple of articles
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy six about Rode,
Speaker 2: and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.
Speaker 1: After all, there weren't.
Speaker 2: Many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were
Speaker 2: easy to find, and Frank was easy to find. He
Speaker 2: was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After
Speaker 2: returning home in nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in
Speaker 2: magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read.
Speaker 3: The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know I've
Speaker 3: been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me
Speaker 3: for free. Details pertaining to recruiting Frank Abbott Sweeney seven
Speaker 3: to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six
Speaker 3: seven zero.
Speaker 2: When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit
Speaker 2: others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major
Speaker 2: Lampreckt and claimed that it was Lamprecked himself who instructed
Speaker 2: Frank to get in touch with as many white applicants
Speaker 2: as possible, which is honestly probably not true, but who knows.
Speaker 2: Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of
Speaker 2: white superiority, and of the need to defend both, and
Speaker 2: is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to
Speaker 2: preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it.
Speaker 2: Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in
Speaker 2: response to his ads and responded to all of them.
Speaker 2: But then again, he also told Annabel he was a
Speaker 2: college graduate, and we know that's not true. An Annibal
Speaker 2: claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian
Speaker 2: Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article,
Speaker 2: and showed three years of good service and a rank
Speaker 2: of corporal, and that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank
Speaker 2: did show Annibl something. He probably did show him papers
Speaker 2: that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for
Speaker 2: reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
Speaker 2: Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting rid
Speaker 2: recruited into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but
Speaker 2: he may have actually still been in prison in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two for shooting that cop. It's hard to pin
Speaker 2: down exactly when he was released. One newspaper article years
Speaker 2: later puts his parole date for that conviction at nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy four. But I have a bad feeling that was
Speaker 2: just a reporter on a deadline who did the math
Speaker 2: on a six year sentence and assumed Frank served all
Speaker 2: of it, which probably didn't. When Frank was later arrested
Speaker 2: for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy,
Speaker 2: an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three, so the truth is in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: Either way.
Speaker 2: He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really
Speaker 2: really wanted to go home. A war as hell for everybody.
Speaker 2: And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman. Hickman
Speaker 2: is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police,
Speaker 2: which no longer exists, and confusingly was neither British nor
Speaker 2: South African, and they weren't always really just police, but
Speaker 2: it bore that name because it grew out of the
Speaker 2: paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa
Speaker 2: Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular
Speaker 2: police force, but the line between regular policing and military
Speaker 2: operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were
Speaker 2: military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed
Speaker 2: counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering
Speaker 2: arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed
Speaker 2: hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into
Speaker 2: the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know
Speaker 2: exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war.
Speaker 2: Maybe he didn't do any of that. But these days
Speaker 2: he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models
Speaker 2: of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he
Speaker 2: was assigned to the homicide unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division,
Speaker 2: and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of
Speaker 2: Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
Speaker 2: Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be
Speaker 2: taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him
Speaker 2: and his own fading memory of the seventies.
Speaker 1: It's not perfect.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page.
Speaker 2: Who's off to a pretty bad start When the first
Speaker 2: paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 2: which would of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not
Speaker 2: have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls, the FBI,
Speaker 2: the DOJ, the CIA in the New York Times, Frank
Speaker 2: was hanging out with a Soviet spy in the exercise
Speaker 2: yard at a federal prison in Los Angeles in September
Speaker 2: of nineteen seventy seven. But I'll cut Hickman some slack
Speaker 2: here on that faltering start, because there's ample evidence within
Speaker 2: the story that puts these events somewhere in the springtime
Speaker 2: of nineteen seventy five, and the data side, there is
Speaker 2: enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation
Speaker 2: he provided that supports the idea that the story is
Speaker 2: more or less true. As a homicide detective, Hickman was
Speaker 2: involved in an investigation into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder
Speaker 2: at a Rhodesian military barracks. One evening sometime in early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five, probably Frank went to the bathroom at
Speaker 2: the barracks he was living in. Inside the shared facilities,
Speaker 2: two infantrymen who had been drinking were laughing and joking around.
Speaker 2: One was quite drunk, undressed and got into the shower
Speaker 2: to try to sober up a little bit. Three men
Speaker 2: were chatting pleasantly enough, but Frank was humorless and sober,
Speaker 2: and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower.
Speaker 1: Water on him.
Speaker 2: The men argued, and one of them called Frank a
Speaker 2: bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the
Speaker 2: other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So a
Speaker 2: little bit damp, and with his pride wounded, he runs
Speaker 2: back to his bunk and comes right back with a
Speaker 2: seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and
Speaker 2: stabs this naked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The
Speaker 2: other soldier ran for help, and Frank was quickly arrested,
Speaker 2: and while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived
Speaker 2: in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been
Speaker 2: mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer
Speaker 2: said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of
Speaker 2: the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.
Speaker 1: It was Hickman, our.
Speaker 2: Essayist, who first suspected that Frank may actually have written
Speaker 2: this letter himself. And when he pressed Frank for a
Speaker 2: handwriting sample to prove it, he cracked immediately. He'd sent
Speaker 2: the letter himself, hoping that it would be his ticket home,
Speaker 2: that they would kick him out and deport him when
Speaker 2: they found out he lied about not having a criminal
Speaker 2: history and that he would get a free flight back
Speaker 2: to New Jersey without having to finish his term of service.
Speaker 1: And if that letter had.
Speaker 2: Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have
Speaker 2: done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. The
Speaker 2: story Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but
Speaker 2: it's not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout
Speaker 2: at his parents' house had happened just the year prior,
Speaker 2: and that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced.
Speaker 2: So he's cutting out this six year period that he
Speaker 2: spent in prison for the shooting and pretending that he
Speaker 2: had just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events
Speaker 2: that we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 2: And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in
Speaker 2: this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes,
Speaker 2: not over an hour, and he had decided to end
Speaker 2: the incident on his own terms when he saw that
Speaker 2: his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was
Speaker 2: that he argued with his distraught father for an hour
Speaker 2: while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was
Speaker 2: smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in
Speaker 2: this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns
Speaker 2: in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and
Speaker 2: the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed
Speaker 2: the gun he was shooting in the woods was one
Speaker 2: he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine,
Speaker 2: which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe he was just updating the story so it would
Speaker 2: sound more current. But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy
Speaker 2: gun from the magazine, but it was missing some parts.
Speaker 2: It didn't have a firing pin in something else, so
Speaker 2: it didn't work. He manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but
Speaker 2: he was concerned that in his modification of the weapon
Speaker 2: maybe things weren't one hundred percent, and he was worried
Speaker 2: that it would explode when fired, so he lashed it
Speaker 2: to a tree and set it to fully automatic and
Speaker 2: rigged a string to the trigger and hid behind another
Speaker 2: tree for cover.
Speaker 1: This sounds so Looney Tunes to me.
Speaker 2: Like of literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right, this is this
Speaker 2: is daffy duck behavior.
Speaker 1: But he tells this story to.
Speaker 2: Hickman, and in his essay Hickman writes true or false,
Speaker 2: impossible to believe Sweeney had the uncanny ability to sound
Speaker 2: totally convincing. But it is significant to note that a
Speaker 2: search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint records revealed no such incident,
Speaker 2: which doesn't say much for the state of Rhodesian intelligence. Because, yeah,
Speaker 2: Frank's taking a little creative license here. The story he's
Speaker 2: telling is not one hundred percent, but he is admitting
Speaker 2: to almost all of the real details for the real
Speaker 2: crime he really did go to prison for. So you
Speaker 2: probably should have figured that out before he told you,
Speaker 2: and you definitely should have been able to figure it
Speaker 2: out after he told you. They could have contacted a
Speaker 2: police department or a courthouse in New Jersey and just asked, Hell.
Speaker 2: They probably could have called any resident of ten tofly
Speaker 2: New Jersey at random and just asked, do you remember
Speaker 2: the teenage Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in
Speaker 2: his mom's front yard. It's kind of a small town.
Speaker 2: I bet everybody remembered, but I guess they didn't do that.
Speaker 2: They weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't
Speaker 2: have a guy who knew how to do a background check.
Speaker 2: The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and
Speaker 2: while he was waiting to find out if they were
Speaker 2: going to try him for attempted murder, got some mail
Speaker 2: an envelope containing two United States pasports and three hundred
Speaker 2: dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's
Speaker 2: birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.
Speaker 2: The other was for Francis August Schellhammer, a man who
Speaker 2: doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was
Speaker 2: quite good at making such things and even offered to
Speaker 2: forge a pair of US passports. Were Hickman and the
Speaker 2: other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably,
Speaker 2: the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just
Speaker 2: send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary? I
Speaker 2: don't That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about.
Speaker 2: I don't know really what the options were here, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home.
Speaker 2: So sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank
Speaker 2: Sweeney was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and
Speaker 2: deported from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all,
Speaker 2: and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.
Speaker 2: Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote
Speaker 2: a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some
Speaker 2: more cash before all this trouble got started, and it
Speaker 2: arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he
Speaker 2: wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him.
Speaker 2: His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all
Speaker 2: these years, is dated August twenty second, nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing,
Speaker 2: and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that
Speaker 2: all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Five, you get it.
Speaker 2: In addition to asking Hickman to mail back the money
Speaker 2: from his mother, Frank tells the investigator that life in
Speaker 2: America is loathsome compared to the time he spent in Rhodesia.
Speaker 3: It's one big racial cesspool where the worst elements looked
Speaker 3: on and held in high esteem. With my RLI training
Speaker 3: to back me up, I've seriously thought of forming my
Speaker 3: own anti terrorism unit here in the land of the Red, White,
Speaker 3: and Blue. The real problem is finding enough devoted men
Speaker 3: to form a small cadre. If you ever do visit America,
Speaker 3: I would genuinely enjoy meeting with you again, and I'm
Speaker 3: sure my family would like to meet you too. Even
Speaker 3: though my service in the military was cut short, my
Speaker 3: loyalty to Rhodesia remains as strong as ever.
Speaker 2: So now he's back in the United States, and this
Speaker 2: is during the same time period that he's placing those
Speaker 2: ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's
Speaker 2: also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in
Speaker 2: this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries using his own
Speaker 2: legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem.
Speaker 2: The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing
Speaker 2: these statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army.
Speaker 2: But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser
Speaker 2: submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.
Speaker 2: He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from
Speaker 2: the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in
Speaker 2: Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had
Speaker 2: these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money
Speaker 2: sent by many interested collectors who thought they were buying
Speaker 2: these imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to
Speaker 2: make free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud.
Speaker 2: So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed
Speaker 2: by a reporter from the La Times and he's telling
Speaker 2: this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much
Speaker 2: that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa.
Speaker 1: In just a few weeks. Notice he's moving to South.
Speaker 2: Africa, not Rhodesia, because he is not allowed in Rhodesia.
Speaker 2: But he's planning this big move. He's telling this reporter
Speaker 2: about it. He's bragging about his time in Rhodesia. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, in March of nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 2: he's also entering a guilty plead to that federal mail
Speaker 2: fraud charge. The La Times article, which doesn't make any
Speaker 2: mention of his former or current criminal charges, does say
Speaker 2: that Frank said that he'd recently been visited by the FBI,
Speaker 2: and Frank says they came to his house to try
Speaker 2: to pressure him to provide information about other mercenaries. It
Speaker 2: seems a little more likely that he's a compulsive liar
Speaker 2: who got a thrill out of working in this kernel
Speaker 2: of truth because the FBI had just been to his house,
Speaker 2: That part's true, but they were there to arrest him
Speaker 2: for mail fraud, but he wasn't lying about his plans
Speaker 2: for an upcoming move. After pleading guilty to the mail
Speaker 2: fraud charge, he skipped out on his sentencing hearing. He
Speaker 2: packed his bags and he caught a flight to Johannesburg,
Speaker 2: but South Africa sent him right back and he was
Speaker 2: arrested by US marshals as he was getting off the
Speaker 2: plane at JFK in June of nineteen seventy six. And
Speaker 2: while marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off
Speaker 2: the plane and it went through customs without him. Customs
Speaker 2: officials seized a nine millimeters lugar pistol because he lacked
Speaker 2: the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the US
Speaker 2: from a foreign country, and inexplicably there were no additional
Speaker 2: charges brought for any of that. He wasn't supposed to
Speaker 2: have a gun at all, and he certainly wasn't supposed
Speaker 2: to try to flee the continent while awaiting sentencing for
Speaker 2: a federal crime. I know the seventies were a different
Speaker 2: time and it wasn't a big deal to bring a
Speaker 2: gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid
Speaker 2: going to prison is always been illegal, I'm pretty.
Speaker 1: Sure of it.
Speaker 2: I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a
Speaker 2: few years later about how the government ended up accidentally
Speaker 2: giving him that gun back. It was seized by accustoms
Speaker 2: and put into storage while he was in prison, and
Speaker 2: when he got out of prison, he wrote to the
Speaker 2: Customs office in New York to inquire about it, and
Speaker 2: they told him they'd return his property if he paid
Speaker 2: a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I
Speaker 2: don't know what that comes out to per month for
Speaker 2: the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep,
Speaker 2: and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs
Speaker 2: office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave
Speaker 2: him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs
Speaker 2: Service said they had no way of knowing he was
Speaker 2: a felon. Frank said it was all just a half
Speaker 2: hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to
Speaker 2: do was test the gun laws to show there really
Speaker 2: is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are
Speaker 2: giving criminals like me our guns back in New York
Speaker 2: City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical.
Speaker 2: You know, he's not a great guy, but he does
Speaker 2: have some quips.
Speaker 1: You know, he's just out there doing bits.
Speaker 2: And he ended up handing the gun back over to
Speaker 2: the ATF without incident a few months later, but back
Speaker 2: to the mail fraud. He got the four years for
Speaker 2: the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And
Speaker 2: it was in prison this time around that Frank would
Speaker 2: meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been
Speaker 2: convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one
Speaker 2: year old college dropout in Christopher Boyce got a job
Speaker 2: at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts.
Speaker 2: He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked
Speaker 2: in an office before, but he started as a low
Speaker 2: level clerk. It helped that his retired FBI agent father
Speaker 2: was the head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace
Speaker 2: and defense contracting company, and he had connections at TRW.
Speaker 2: But TRW didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In
Speaker 2: his own later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described
Speaker 2: the company as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no
Speaker 2: idea about. For his promotion to a highly sensitive position
Speaker 2: working on special projects from inside the company's black vault
Speaker 2: and with a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access
Speaker 2: to the company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at
Speaker 2: least a dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault
Speaker 2: and photographed them. On at least six occasions he photographed
Speaker 2: documents inside the vault. He later told Congress. Obviously, neither
Speaker 2: the government's clearance procedures nor the company's security procedures worked
Speaker 2: very well, I'll say. In his new position inside the vault,
Speaker 2: Boyce monitored satellite communications between the CIA, his employer TRW
Speaker 2: and other CIA contacts around the world. In his congressional testimony,
Speaker 2: Boyce describes a shockingly lax approach to security for this
Speaker 2: alleged super secure black vault. He would come back to
Speaker 2: work late at night to return the documents he'd stolen,
Speaker 2: and no one questioned why a junior employee was opening
Speaker 2: the vault at four am. He made deliveries to secure
Speaker 2: CIA sites without having the proper clearance to enter them,
Speaker 2: and on one occasion, he wandered into a CIA code room,
Speaker 2: picked up a clipboard and was flipping through the pages
Speaker 2: before someone politely asked him to leave. Employees in the
Speaker 2: vault were supposed to destroy the code cards used in
Speaker 2: the teletype machine at.
Speaker 1: The end of each workday.
Speaker 2: Boyce says they just tossed the cards in a canvas
Speaker 2: bag in the corner, and they used the document destruction
Speaker 2: blender to make my ties with the Bacardi that they
Speaker 2: kept hidden behind the cryptography machines. He claims it was
Speaker 2: common for the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that
Speaker 2: weren't actually meant for them, misdirected communications. These CIA cables
Speaker 2: that had nothing to do with trw or their work
Speaker 2: with the agency, but no one really cared, and there
Speaker 2: was no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top
Speaker 2: secret CAIA documents that had been sent to them by
Speaker 2: mistake were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that
Speaker 2: Boyce stole. Okay, I know Frank's not even in this part,
Speaker 2: but I have to tell you just a little bit
Speaker 2: about the nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know,
Speaker 2: I know, this is an even more egregious digression than
Speaker 2: the history of Rhodesia. But look at the show art.
Speaker 2: It's not just cool to look at. We are living
Speaker 2: on my red string board and I've got to put
Speaker 2: this pushpin in somewhere. Now. I know even less about
Speaker 2: Australia that I know about the decolonization of Africa in
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, which is to say, like not very much.
Speaker 1: I think they still have the Queen. I guess it's
Speaker 1: the king. Now.
Speaker 2: Did they have to print new money after the Queen died?
Speaker 2: A matter?
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: But I was delighted to discover that CIA meddling in
Speaker 2: an Australian political crisis was even a possibility.
Speaker 1: How intriguing you know.
Speaker 2: I know they like to keep it south of the equator,
Speaker 2: but I thought that was just a Western Hemisphere thing.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that
Speaker 2: the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF
Speaker 2: Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher
Speaker 2: Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF
Speaker 2: Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and
Speaker 2: his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering
Speaker 2: closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in
Speaker 2: central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 2: the Opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage
Speaker 2: of an appropriations bill.
Speaker 1: I don't know and.
Speaker 2: Am not going to find out the Australian government functions,
Speaker 2: but this sounds like the silly little crisis we seem
Speaker 2: to have every year where someone refuses to pass the
Speaker 2: bill that keeps the lights on at the government. And
Speaker 2: Australia's Governor General, John Kerr used the fallout of this
Speaker 2: crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister,
Speaker 2: which is apparently the thing he had the power to do.
Speaker 2: It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just thought my business what happens in Australia. And
Speaker 2: at the time Whitlam dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying
Speaker 2: Kerr didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him,
Speaker 2: But in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher,
Speaker 2: the Deputy Secretary of State, to Australia to meet with Whitlam,
Speaker 2: and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would
Speaker 2: never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again.
Speaker 2: And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the
Speaker 2: use of the word again. But I'll reiterate. The CIA
Speaker 2: says they were not involved.
Speaker 1: They said they didn't do it. All that to say, though.
Speaker 2: Our pot smoking, disaffected college dropout who was getting drunk
Speaker 2: at lunch most days and making paper airplanes out of
Speaker 2: CIA encryption code cards, probably didn't know anything about the
Speaker 2: Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill. But by his account.
Speaker 2: He did sometimes read those misdirected CIA cables that he
Speaker 2: was supposed to destroy, and some of those messages were
Speaker 2: about a growing desire within the CIA to have Whitlam
Speaker 2: removed from office, referring to the Australian Governor General as
Speaker 2: our man cur So he stole them, and instead of
Speaker 2: going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a
Speaker 2: cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to sell the documents
Speaker 2: to the Soviets. Lee would take the documents down to
Speaker 2: Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet embassy and return
Speaker 2: with cash which they split. And maybe it would have worked,
Speaker 2: Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while,
Speaker 2: if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act
Speaker 2: in an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was
Speaker 2: arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet Embassy.
Speaker 1: In Mexico City.
Speaker 2: He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking, two things
Speaker 2: he was definitely doing. He was arrested by Mexican police
Speaker 2: for littering, but under interrogation about the drugs and documents
Speaker 2: they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything. Christopher Boyce
Speaker 2: was arrested by authorities in the US just ten days later,
Speaker 2: and accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee
Speaker 2: gave Boys up. In that initial interview, he says he
Speaker 2: didn't and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would
Speaker 2: have arrived at the conclusion that it was Boyce who
Speaker 2: had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee gave him up
Speaker 2: or not. So you know, we'll never know. But this
Speaker 2: is where Frank comes back. This is where Frank reappears
Speaker 2: in his own story. I haven't forgotten him because while
Speaker 2: all this CIA skullduggery and Cold War espionage is going on,
Speaker 2: Frank is sitting in a jail cell on Terminal Island,
Speaker 2: a low security federal corrections facility in Los Angeles. I
Speaker 2: can't find a good reason for why he would have
Speaker 2: been transported to a prison in California after being arrested
Speaker 2: in New York, but government inefficiency is as likely an
Speaker 2: explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was ultimately convicted of
Speaker 2: eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy seven and sentenced
Speaker 2: to forty years in prison, and for several months in
Speaker 2: late seventy seven to early seventy eight, the two men
Speaker 2: were on the same cell block at Terminal Island. Much
Speaker 2: has been made of the apparent in congruity of Frank,
Speaker 2: a man who fought as a mercenary against Communist gorillas,
Speaker 2: befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: But I don't think either of them had a fully
Speaker 2: formed set of political beliefs at the time. Boyce's mother
Speaker 2: would later say that the two became quite close in
Speaker 2: those months. Frank was, for reasons I spent way too
Speaker 2: long unsuccessfully trying to figure out, transferred to a prison
Speaker 2: in Maine sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce would
Speaker 2: eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours
Speaker 2: north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the
Speaker 2: missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because
Speaker 2: Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California
Speaker 2: to lead investigators in the long direction.
Speaker 1: And that's where I have to leave you today.
Speaker 2: I do hope I'll come back next week for the
Speaker 2: second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a
Speaker 2: mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend, Frank
Speaker 2: Stabs another guy and for Resince, I'm still not a
Speaker 2: hundle On. There're a bunch of snakes.
Speaker 1: Weird little guys.
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