S2 THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 2: You Must Form Your Militia Units
33:43 Share

On the Media is supported by the New York Community Trust. These days, it's hard to know what the future will hold. Thankfully, there is a powerful way to ensure the causes you care about are supported for decades to come. Join the New York Community Trust to support affordable housing, provide opportunity, improve education, nurture the environment, and more. A team of experts can connect your generosity with nonprofits making a lasting difference.

You can turn retirement funds, appreciated securities, real estate, and other assets into a force for good. Amplify your impact with community-powered giving. Contact the New York Community Trust at giveto.nyc. That's giveto.nyc.

Hey, you're listening to the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Olinger. A few years back, I did a series of stories about a walkie-talkie app called Zello, which I discovered had become an organizing hub for far-right militia groups.

I spent hundreds of hours listening in on their recruitment interviews and planning meetings, and I even recorded an Oath Keeper's leader discussing their group's secret plans to storm the Capitol as they were breaking in on January 6th. What I didn't know until recently is that long before Zillow or the internet, journalists monitored the rise of the militia movement on shortwave radio.

That's the subject of the second episode of The Divided Dial, Season 2, hosted by Katie Thornton. Here's Katie. It took a lot of digging to put this series together. Digging through informal archives people had made of old shortwave radio shows. Digitizing tapes.

flipping through old broadcast schedules and super niche industry magazines. And as I dug and flipped and digitized and listened, there was one station that jumped out at me. Broadcast from the studios of Radio for Peace International. Radio for Peace International.

It isn't around anymore, but it started in the 80s. And it stood out because, unlike most shortwave stations at the time, it wasn't run by a government. It was a small, not-for-profit outlet, broadcasting from Costa Rica, mostly to the Americas and the Caribbean. On a little patch of land in the jungle, station founder James Latham and his wife Debra built their own transmitters piece by piece, with parts brought into the country in suitcases. ♪

Their station hosted a Spanish-language feminist program and some progressive talk shows that got mailed to them from the U.S. on cassette.

Just like the shortwave dreamers of the early 20th century, they believed deeply in the power of the medium. Shortwave radio can be beamed across political and geographic boundaries. I mean, they ran programs about shortwave on shortwave. Equipped with a simple radio, listeners can tune in to perspectives and insights not available to them locally. In his free time, James, the guy who started it all, tuned in to other international radio stations.

And he noticed something. He explained to me in just my first few weeks there that

The fact that recently a new type of program had started to pop up. This is Brad Hefner. He worked with James at the station in the 90s. And they were racist and hateful and violent. I'm a racist. I make no fun of it. I'm not ashamed of it. Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nations for a whiter, brighter America. They hate Americans. They hate white Americans.

It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International. We believed in, you know, living peaceful spiritual lives. And so it was really shocking to us. There was no way for Brad and James to know it at the time. But the broadcasts they were hearing would fundamentally change shortwave radio and help fuel a movement that would change the U.S. forever.

Good evening. Dozens are dead. Hundreds are missing after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. A car bomb exploded in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, blowing off the entire... This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton.

This season is all about shortwave radio. How it went from a utopian experiment in global communication to a hollowed-out backwater haunted by extremist preachers and cult leaders. And how a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves today might say a lot about how we regard our public airwaves. Last week, we learned how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war.

This week, the untold story of how it became a propaganda tool for American anti-government militias. So let's back up. It turns out a lot of the broadcasts Brad and James were hearing, they started in earnest around the beginning of the 90s at a small family-run radio station on the outskirts of Nashville. On Worldwide Christian Radio, WWCR. ♪

WWCR was one of several new privately run shortwave stations broadcasting from the U.S. that got on the air in the 1980s.

Shortwave stations are expensive to run. Launching a radio signal into the sky so it can come back to Earth thousands of miles away takes a lot of electricity. Plus, advertising is kind of a bust on shortwave. While some dry cleaner or regional bank might want to advertise on their local AM station, no one wants to promote their discounted duvets or high-yield savings accounts to random listeners from Michigan to Morocco. But in the 1980s, two things happened to give shortwave a boost —

A shift in regulatory oversight allowed more people access to broadcast licenses. And new technology made the actual receivers smaller and easier to tune, which sent radio sets flying off the shelves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. So some enterprising station owners in the U.S. decided it was worth a shot to get on shortwave.

And they survived mostly thanks to evangelists. The station owners sold airtime — an hour a week, an hour a day — to American preachers who wanted to build a global congregation. WWCR was no exception. Lots of preachers paid to play their sermons there.

But nothing was stopping other people from buying airtime. And not long after WWCR launched, a guy who wasn't preaching at all got on the air. It's Radio Free America, the talk show for intelligent Americans, with your host, Tom Valentine. I'm Tom Valentine. This is Radio Free America.

The general consensus is that this guy, Tom Valentine, was the first really far-right guy to consistently run his show on shortwave. And at first blush, he just sounded like the other shock jocks of the era. Your run-of-the-mill Rush Limbaugh wannabe. But he was financed by a newspaper called The Spotlight.

First time caller just started listening a little bit and I'm going to order that spotlight. And the spotlight was the flagship publication of the far right, white nationalist and Holocaust denying think tank, the Liberty Lobby. It's the best newspaper in America and you're going to find it fascinating after you find out that the spotlight's everything I say it is.

You'll become a distributor, and that'll help, because other people will get the word. He called his show Radio Free America, a riff on the government service Radio Free Europe. But Valentine's brand of patriotism was increasingly mistrustful, even disdainful, of America's institutions. ♪

Tom Valentine's show spawned others like it on shortwave. There was one guy, a regular caller, named Mark Kornke, who was a dorm room janitor at the University of Michigan. He called in so often, he came to be known by the nickname Mark from Michigan.

His takedowns of the government were even more vitriolic than Valentine's. And with airtime so cheap on WWCR, Mark from Michigan decided to get his own show. Now, I did some basic math the other day, not New World Order math. I found that using the old style math, you can get about four politicians for 120 foot of rope. Always try and find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer.

He had wild theories that the UN had stationed thousands of Gurkhas who were

these specialized British soldiers from Nepal and Burma, you know, in Michigan to take over the U.S. This is J.R. Lind. Years ago, he wrote a story for Nashville's Alt Weekly about WWCR and its reputation for having a wide open door when it came to who could get on the air. That attracted some more conspiracists, if for no other reason than this was a place where they could broadcast, right? They weren't going on CBS News.

The fact that anyone could get their opinions broadcast far and wide without a fat radio or TV contract was a big deal in the pre-internet era. And Shortwave became the perfect platform for guys with something to say. Within a couple years, there was enough demand from far-right hosts that WWCR started adding new frequencies to air them all.

That's another thing that makes shortwave different from, say, AM radio. One shortwave station can have multiple signals, usually aimed at different parts of the world, and they can put different programming on each of them, like stations within a station. Other shortwave stations in the U.S. wanted to cash in, too. So they started selling airtime to many of the same right-wing hosts who'd been getting on WWCR. Shortwave was converting from evangelism to right-wing rhetoric.

According to the FCC, shortwave stations broadcasting from the U.S. are supposed to serve a mostly international audience. That's the law. But the feds didn't seem to be paying much attention. So without meaningful oversight, a lot of these newer stations were beaming their broadcasts first and foremost at U.S. citizens.

While the FCC might not have been monitoring the rise of the right on shortwave, Brad Hefner and James Latham, all the way down in the Costa Rican jungle, were. They heard Tom Valentine. They heard Mark from Michigan. And they kept listening as more and more hateful new shortwave shows filled the airwaves in the first half of the 90s. Some shows were hosted by leaders of big neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance and the National Vanguard.

As Brad and James listened, they caught wind of a new movement that was brewing, an army gathering and making violent plans. You must form your militia units.

Shortwave host Bill Cooper was a Navy veteran who claimed to have high-level government intel and urged people to rebel. "You must prepare on a local level to defend your communities, cities, and states. Identify targets on a local level. Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government."

Host Linda Thompson, a former lawyer turned conspiracy theory peddler and one of the rare women on the shore waves, called for an armed militia to attack Washington and put public officials on trial. There's a lot of people that are holding back saying, well, you know, if there's not enough people, I don't want to be there because I don't want to be the one to get shot. I mean, I've heard this couch potato patriot. I've heard from enough of them.

Most people didn't know what the militia movement was, but they had started organizing and they were readying themselves for an armed confrontation with the government. There was another host Brad heard a lot. A guy who helped unite the Christian right, the white supremacist right, and the growing anti-government right, all together on Shortwave. His name was Pastor Pete Peters. They hate Christ, they hate America, and they hate our people.

Peter's flock was Colorado's LaPorte Church of Christ, a leading church in the so-called Christian identity movement. And we had never heard of that before and looked into it.

And what they were espousing was that Jewish people are directly descended from Satan. And it is the God-given obligation of Aryan people to eliminate Satan from the earth. And it's a race war. They're trying to provoke a race war.

When you see a black man and a white woman, or vice versa, waltz down the aisle in a wedding ceremony, something inside your gut says, that's not right. Peters preached openly against interracial marriage. It's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong. He told his followers that the Bible sanctioned the murder of gays and lesbians. And all this hate, it wasn't just hot air.

Remember the story of Alan Berg from season one of The Divided Dial? Alan Berg on KOA 370 in the afternoon. Leaving us about 10 minutes in the show. Let's go to line one. He was the lefty Jewish talk radio host whose AM show was popular in the early 80s. In 1984, Berg sparred with two white supremacist preachers who had called into his show —

One of those preachers was Pete Peters. After that skirmish, a member of Peters' flock called in to Berg's show to berate him. Then later, that very caller drove the getaway car.

1039 KOA time. That sped away from Allenberg's home. Someone passing in a vehicle using a semi-automatic weapon or an automatic weapon, I'm not sure. Fired upon Allenberg when he was exiting his vehicle in front of his home. And Allenberg has, in fact, passed on. He is no longer with us.

Allenberg was murdered by members of the white supremacist group The Order. At least two members of The Order, including that getaway driver, regularly attended Peters' church. This violent act sent shockwaves through the radio world. But there weren't obvious signs of a bigger, growing threat, because back then, the far right was fractured. That was the problem that these people

these neo-Nazis the Aryan nations had, nobody was buying the message because this message of hate wasn't selling. That's Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, speaking at the National Press Club in 1996. He explained that there wasn't a ton of overlap between the racists, the ultra-conservative Christians, and the anti-government guys. Until... On August 21st, 1992, shots rang out in the remote hills of northern Idaho.

The 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Federal marshals killed the wife and son of a Christian identity worshiper, Randy Weaver. The marshals came to Weaver's cabin after he failed to show up to court for illegally selling weapons to an informant embedded with the Aryan Nations. Pastor Pete Peters understood that the government's actions at Ruby Ridge had the potential to unite these previously disconnected right-wing factions.

He called a three-day gathering at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado, not far from his hometown. You know who I'm talking about? Randy Weaver. And I'm talking about the incident that took place up near Naples, Idaho, and the shooting that went on there. I want to tell you how I got involved and why we're having this meeting. More than 150 men came from all over the country. They represented everything from more mainstream churches and gun rights groups to the Aryan Brotherhood.

Louis Beam, perhaps the most notorious figure of the more recent KKK, was a keynote speaker. And leveraging the government's bungled response at Ruby Ridge, Peters implored them to unite. We might not be able to agree on his name. We might not be able to agree on a Bible translation. We might not be able to agree on a day we set aside to rest, but by the God of Abraham, we agree you don't murder our wives and our children. And that's why we're here.

If there's one thing I prayed for is that we could come together as one. They were able to pull under that tent a lot of people, disparate groups, who had never joined together before. Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees again. In fact, at the Estes Park meeting, one of the arguments was, well, look, I don't want to be here with these people over here because I don't believe in their philosophy. And someone stood up and said, look, we can argue about that later once we win this war.

Peter's meeting came to be known as the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. It was a watershed moment in the anti-government militia movement. We have come a long way at this meeting this weekend towards unity among the various thoughts, the various factions, within not only our own identity movement, but also our own identity movement.

but within the constitutionalist movement, the patriot movement, other denominations. In the name of our master, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords who died for our sins, we offer this prayer. Amen. We are adjourned. Pastor Pete Peters hosted this gathering right around the time he started his show on shortwave radio. The message was clear. Shortwave would be the movement's medium of choice. And that would have big consequences.

That's coming up after the break. I'm Katie Thornton, and this is The Divided Dial, season two from On The Media.

On the Media is supported by the New York Community Trust. These days, it's hard to know what the future will hold. Thankfully, there is a powerful way to ensure the causes you care about are supported for decades to come. Join the New York Community Trust to support affordable housing, provide opportunity, improve education, nurture the environment, and more. A team of experts can connect your generosity with nonprofits making a lasting difference.

I'm Katie Thornton, and this is On the Media. We're in the middle of our second episode of Season 2 of The Divided Dial. ♪

Before the break, I explained how shortwave was quickly becoming the medium of choice for an increasingly unified group of anti-government activists, white nationalists, and ultra-conservative evangelicals. And back in Costa Rica, Brad Hefner and James Latham were following the breadcrumbs. Neo-Nazi William Pierce had a regular shortwave show. He wrote The Turner Diaries, a sacred text of the militia movement.

In it, a fictitious character named Earl Turner joins a white supremacist militia and overthrows the U.S. government, in part by bombing a federal building. And there were others. At one point, there was one program from a man named Kurt Saxon, and...

One day we were listening and he, on the radio program, he gave explicit directions on how to get away with murder. Well, you could just have your regular shotgun. Don't worry about the barrel length. All you got to do is point it in the general area and whoever comes through that door is dead.

On another broadcast, Kurt Saxon just read instructions on how to make a fertilizer bomb. And that was the last straw, and we decided that we had to respond very directly. Brad and James took to the airwaves themselves. And hello, everyone. Welcome to the Far Right Radio Review. I'm James Latham. I'm Brad Hefner.

The Far Right Radio Review is a program that takes a critical look at the far right, its use of shortwave, AM, FM... We would record it, edit it down, pull out the snippets, play the snippets on the air and talk about them...

We got all the information we could about who these people were, their background, the organizations. We subscribed to all their newsletters. We've been monitoring them for the last couple weeks. Well, we'll let you, the listener, decide are they a racist, anti-Semitic organization or not. Here's some clips. We're hostages to a bunch of criminal groups that robbed this country. I want to make a deal with you. You pray for them and I'll

If you listen from abroad, you would think that most of America consists of these, you know, militia patriots. They exposed the hate and the aspirations.

A real known racist, anti-Semitic individual. Said there he's hoping to get to Congress, eh? Right. And they followed the money. We've long wondered how do the far-right support themselves so well with so many programs on shortwave, for example. This is one individual here that has a lot of money in capital. Speaking of swindlers sponsoring shortwave programs, we have... They added a call-in component where listeners could try to make sense of it all.

That's correct, yeah. Yeah.

Don't have enough information. Like, I'm kind of confused about it. I don't really know what kind of people are in it. Sure. Certainly a lot of militia supporters and members are good folks that just like to be well-trained in self-defense. I think by and large the militia leadership are pulling people towards these wild conspiracy theories sort of to advance their own agenda. You know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The right-wing broadcasters did not appreciate the scrutiny. There were very clear statements made on the other programs about us, and some of them saying, let's get some guns and go get them. These two Bolsheviks down there in Costa Rica have got the just... Those yahoos in Costa Rica are on the air, but they... They wouldn't have the guts to call up. Ah, they're snipping a little coward down there. Yeah.

Brad and James cataloged over two dozen far-right hosts with regularly scheduled shows on shortwave. Some were broadcasting every day. To most Americans, though, shortwave radio and the movement it was platforming were still under the radar. Until April 19th, 1995. ♪

We're looking right now at some of the first pictures that we got of the Murrah building downtown. It's a federal office. The attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols remains the country's most deadly domestic attack. Fire chief or one of the fire chiefs for Oklahoma City has said that there are people trapped inside. They're having to get to them one by one. I don't know, Chris, if you can just see that line of ambulances just waiting to head back down to the federal building.

You know, you hope and you pray that every time you turn a stone, there'll be a survivor somewhere. It hurts deep down as to why someone would do something of this magnitude. Of course, everyone assumed it was some foreign terrorist. But within a couple of days, it was reported that Timothy McVeigh was the prime suspect. And he came from this world of the militia movement.

And mainstream media in the U.S. all said, what's the militia movement? Thankfully for the media, there were a couple of guys down in Costa Rica who had a lot of intel.

It turns out Timothy McVeigh was an avid shortwave listener, allegedly even serving as a bodyguard for Mark Kornke. And so we did interviews with major media outlets all over the U.S., all over the world, explaining what the militia movement was and who Timothy McVeigh was.

The hosts of the Far Right Radio Review were featured in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Japan's state broadcaster, and NPR. James Latham does his monitoring for a group called Radio Peace International, based in Costa Rica.

He says these nightly broadcasts offer an alternative worldview with a steady diet of hate speech, recipes for making homemade bombs, assassination techniques, conspiracy theories. The media just chased down everything they could find.

J.R. Lind again. And that led them to Mark Kornke. From there, reporters found out about Kurt Saxon giving pretty straightforward directions about bomb building that bared a pretty striking resemblance to the type of bomb that was used in Oklahoma City. Suddenly, all eyes were on shortwave. Even President Clinton referenced it in a speech. I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves today.

And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, it is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior. The bombing and the scrutiny that followed sent WWCR into a tailspin. In the words of the station's then-manager, they decided to get the gasoline off the fires by canceling Mark Kornke's show.

Which, of course, fed right into some people's suspicions. Kornke and the others said, we're being silenced, and this was all pressure from the government to keep the truth away from you. But that wasn't why he was taken off the air. If you read the contemporaneous accounts of it, the FBI never pressured the station at all, from what we understand. As the attention grew, the station was being overwhelmed by calls from particularly young mothers,

Because one of the great tragedies of the Murrah bombing was that there was a daycare center for federal workers. And, you know, so many children were killed. And the mothers would call the station and say, why are you letting these people who helped kill children broadcast on your air? In time, the media moved on from the shortwave story.

But some people who learned about shortwave through the Oklahoma City bombing coverage stuck around. They weren't the critics, but the curious. The militia curious. Not long after the attack, in an interview with 60 Minutes, a militia leader had a shortwave radio on display behind him like a calling card.

WWCR put Mark from Michigan's show back on the air within a month, and another slew of right-wing hosts got on the short waves. WWCR was so busy after the bombing that they had to add a fourth super high-powered transmitter to keep up with demand. One of their new hosts was someone you're probably familiar with. "I guess it's read that God's gonna destroy the earth next time by fire."

Before Alex Jones was the InfoWars guy, he was a shortwave guy. In fact, he only got off shortwave after going bankrupt as a result of the Sandy Hook lawsuit. In the six years after Oklahoma City, the number of hours devoted to far-right shows on shortwave doubled.

So even if you were a moderate voice, now you're sucked out, right? J.R. Lind. Because now what is associated in the public's mind with shortwave, it's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.

But even as the right-wing extremists and militia leaders made the short waves their home, the medium was in trouble by the time the new millennium rolled around. For one, it turns out that conspiracy-addled Nazis don't make for the most sustainable business partners. One big-time host was killed in a shootout with Arizona sheriffs after he shot a trooper twice in the head.

Mark Kornke spent time behind bars, once for attacking police officers, and also after two of his former bodyguards turned on a third and killed him. Kornke was subpoenaed in that case, but he fled, broadcasting from a, quote, secret location, and asking his listeners to wage a war of retribution against the police. ♪

Eventually, he was caught hiding in a pond with his hair dyed red and a fake Irish accent. His truck, full of illegal military-grade weapons, sat nearby. But the main reason Shortwave was in trouble was the elephant in the room. A new technology that could instantly connect people across vast distances. The internet. And online, militia leaders and right-wing zealots could do for free what they were paying by the hour to do on Shortwave —

A lot of hosts dropped their shortwave broadcasts in favor of the web, and shortwave audiences in the U.S. dwindled. But for the extreme right, all those hours and dollars spent on the air weren't wasted. The years of practice that they had in honing their message of hate on shortwave radio gave them a head start on the early internet.

From the beginning, they created bulletin boards and forums. They set up websites where people could engage with one another anonymously. And they made online communities where established leaders, many of whom had built their platform on shortwave, could enlist new recruits.

Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica shut down in the early 2000s. And over the last couple of decades, as the extreme right has moved into the mainstream, Brad Hefner has thought a lot about why the right found such fertile ground on shortwave. ♪

People promoting peace can have a forum at the library and can spread their message and grow their organizations in many ways out in the open. If you're trying to provoke a race war, you can't have a forum at the public library. So this is a medium where they could spread their message and get the word out to their followers.

Shortwave hosts appealed to those followers by exploiting the qualities of the medium itself. They took the promise of radio, that feeling I described at the beginning of the first episode, like I had joined a club. They took that excitement, that potential, and perverted it, created a twisted community, a fraternity of radio guys who were united in their vision for America. Clearly, they took over and they dominated.

The rights time on shortwave prepared them for their rise on the internet. But not everyone was ready to give it all up and move online. For some hangers-on, the shortwaves offered a few things the internet couldn't. For one, listening was totally anonymous. It couldn't be tracked, like your search history. And there aren't easy firewalls for the shortwaves. For the hosts, there was another perk.

Thanks to the exodus to the internet, shortwave airtime was now really cheap. Some stations offered big discounts to people who wanted to buy time in bulk. We're talking many hours a day, sometimes 24 hours a day. And if dirt cheap airtime and hosts who primed their audience for paranoia sounds to you like a recipe for exploitation, you're right.

Next time on The Divided Dial, shortwave in the age of the internet. Today, the shortwaves are home to extremist preachers and cult leaders, some of whom preach and recruit from beyond the grave. Many of these voices can be heard on one station in particular.

It's a ramshackle outfit that recently got a facelift thanks to an international end times ministry that helped it rewire a town in northern Maine and build one of the most high-powered antennas in the world. Turn right onto Britton Road. I had to go see for myself. Holy shit. Well, he was not lying when he said you can't miss it.

That's next week on the third episode of The Divided Dial, season two. I'm Katie Thornton.

The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Heysha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Special thanks this week to Brad Hefner for sharing his RFPI cassettes with us, and to Will Olson, who helped us digitize them.

And an enormous thank you to Chris Haxell and Lisa Hagan, who reported the great NPR podcast, No Compromise, and who generously shared their audio from the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous with us. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to episode two of the new season of The Divided Dial. The series is going to continue to air on the show over the next couple of weeks, so tune in for more tales from the short waves. In the meantime, follow OTM on Blue Sky, TikTok, and Instagram, where we've been posting video clips of the interviews you hear on the show. Just search On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.