Original subtitles

- We are gearing up for a military campaign.

- They wanted society to collapse.

- The base advocated to violently

target Jewish-Americans, African-Americans.

- War-- that's what our aim is.

- What made them different was they're talking about training.

- Mathews may have illegally crossed into the U.S.

He was prior military.

He wanted to engage in violence.

- They start honing in on this

Second Amendment rally in Virginia.

We can shoot into the crowd and see what's going to happen.

- This was something that we needed to look at immediately.

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Tell me a little bit about the property

that this hate camp is on.

- Luke Lane had this property.

He was the Georgia cell leader, per se.

It was a large property they could do all kinds of things

on, and it was private.

Base members could conduct their training.

So that is why our Maryland subjects

continued to travel down there, because they had

that private place to go to.

They made a point to go through the woods

into the property to evade any kind of detection

or law enforcement.

- When they're at the hate camp, are they having bonfires?

I mean, so they're shooting?

- They're doing defensive tactics,

weapons tactics, close order battle.

You name it, they were doing it.

They were just so focused on using the violence.

You hear folks talk about this.

It's always, oh, I will.

And they sound like they're braggarts.

- Right.

- These folks talked about the violence in a way

that it was clear they wanted to use it.

They were very focused on developing real skills

to do something really bad.

We're talking about people from all

over the country with weapons engaging

in training for violence.

They have real weapons.

They have long guns.

They have military-style weapons and equipment that they

use in their training.

They, by and large, would stay there for a few days.

They're out in the woods.

You put an undercover involved in this,

that's a safety of an agent.

'Cause these are literally lives we're talking about.

Unless you live through that and are seeing that every day,

it's hard to understand what that-- really

the pressure is on everybody.

To go up 24/7 in the woods on multiple subjects,

and they all have guns-- - Yeah.

- --we also knew there were more people out there

and that we didn't know who they were.

How are we gonna watch this?

What's the signal if it goes wrong?

And so if something goes wrong,

we now have a dozen, 20 people armed

who want to fight us anyway.

And now we've gotta go in there?

What does that look like?

We always wanna oversaturate it.

And so you're talking about hundreds

of people that have to be ready at a moment's notice

to get in there to stop whatever

that potential thing might be.

- Did they have guards at night that patrolled

and circled the camp, or was it like,

when it's bedtime, we can all snuggle up and--

- Yeah, some of them would have guards.

And the professionalism of those

guards at 2:00 a.m. would vary.

- And the FBI always banks on that.

- I hope you're not implying that they took a nap.

I-- absolutely.

- Yeah.

- The UC did a great job of bringing back good detail.

- At this point, we are starting to see crimes.

And we now believe Mathews,

who has illegally crossed the border, probably has weapons--

right there, that's a crime.

Should we continue to watch them,

or is now the time that we need to arrest them?

- Mathews ends up staying down in Georgia.

They thought it was the best place

for him to be to hide out.

He stayed there for about a month.

So Lemley comes back to Maryland.

Mathews stays down in Georgia.

As far as we know, he never left the property,

until Lemley comes back down to Georgia

in the end of October 2019.

They spend a weekend down at the Georgia property.

- Mathews is still at the hate camp property.

Lemley comes down.

It's Halloween weekend.

And Halloween hate camp starts.

- They conducted some type of Odin ritual,

is what they called it.

They stole a ram from a nearby property, a nearby farm--

--brought it onto the Georgia property

that they were training at.

They're about to conduct this Odin ritual.

And one of the base members comes out with a knife.

And they attempted to kill it with a knife.

And they had trouble doing that,

and they ended up shooting it.

- The UC was there, right?

So he had to witness all this.

It was pretty-- - Horrible.

- It's horrible, right?

And as they're doing this, they behead the ram.

- Ugh.

- And they take photographs with it.

And then they took the blood,

and they perform some kind of ritual

where they drink the blood.

The UC had to-- obviously, he wasn't going

to drink the blood, right?

So I think he did something to the effect

where he dipped his finger and pretended he did.

But-- - Yeah.

- --yeah, it's awful.

They took propaganda photos holding the ram,

you know, with their masks on and their faces covered.

And they named it Gar.

And they put that out there on social media.

So the Georgia cell was planning to murder a couple

down in the Georgia area.

And the UC was privy to some of that information.

- What did this couple do that made them think that they

were that much of a threat?

- Thankfully, I'm not in their minds.

I couldn't tell you the real logic behind it.

All we knew is that they had this belief,

and they appeared to be starting to act on it.

- So this plot that they uncovered

went from just talking about it to conducting

surveillance on the victim--

potential victims' house, trying to gather information

on them, maybe mapping out what and how

they were going to do it?

- Absolutely.

So at this point, Mathews and the property owner,

they didn't see eye to eye.

He may have worn out his welcome.

Lemley took a liking to Mathews,

almost like kind of a brotherly kind of aspect

between them.

Let me look out for him, obviously, right?

- Yeah. - And went and got him.

- Absolutely.

- So we surveil him all the way from Georgia.

During that surveillance, we confirmed

that Lemley and Mathews were on the vehicle.

- We've got these multiple subjects of the FBI

that were just in a training camp

to learn how to do more violence,

probably had weapons in the car.

And now we're gonna allow them to travel

from Georgia all the way up, we think gonna

be Maryland, maybe Virginia.

Where are they gonna go? We don't necessarily know that.

What if they weren't going to stop in North Carolina

to do an attack?

Those are the kind of things that we have to look at.

- Atlanta handing off to WFO, WFO handing off to Baltimore.

Again, hundreds of people were involved in this.

- And the complexity of that also is radio channels

as you do the pass-off.

Making sure you're on the same frequency

is actually more complex than people think, you know?

- Yeah, make sure your cars don't look the same.

Can we-- if he's got Georgia plates,

how far can you follow him in Georgia plates

until you start noticing Georgia plates?

Hey, now I've got to talk to a special agent in charge

in another state who knew nothing about this case.

It's a pass-through case.

What do we do if they get stopped for speeding?

They're confronted in that car.

What does that look like?

- Lemley takes Mathews to a motel, which was conveniently

located right next to a Waffle House

right at the border of Maryland and Delaware.

The next morning, Mathews goes to the Waffle House,

and then he sits in the woods next to

the Waffle House for the entire day until Lemley gets off work.

And it was kind of a weird moment, right?

We were like, what is happening?

- Absolutely. - Well, Lemley was working.

So Mathews hung out in the woods,

and that's when they start figuring out how

they're gonna live together.

- Lemley picked him up, and they end up

getting a residence in Delaware,

just over the border, five minutes

from that Waffle House.

And that's the first day they end

up moving into the apartment.

They get a one-bedroom apartment.

Mathews actually lives in the living room of that apartment.

Lemley's got the bedroom.

And they kind of have, like, a dining area where they

hang out most of the time.

- How do we know that?

- We're doing a lot of search warrants, right?

The fact that you have two base members moving in together,

where, you know, we have a ton of evidence

on them talking about committing violent acts--

when they moved into that apartment,

we saw them carrying in rifle bags.

We didn't know what was in there.

Obviously, we assumed probably rifles,

but we didn't know exactly what they had.

- Weapons training. - Exactly.

That was very concerning.

But it was also a great opportunity for us

to carry out some more techniques to kind of figure

out what they're actually going to plan.

We draft a search warrant for the residence,

a covert search warrant.

Mathews ends up getting a job as a painter off the books,

using an alias.

So we find a day that we can get in there

and find out what they have, right?

That search was huge.

We actually tried to do it the day prior,

and they never left for work.

- Oh.

- And the amount of resources a search like that

creates, as we talked about-- - It's lot.

- --it's a lot.

It requires a lot of planning.

We held all those resources another day,

hoping they would go to work the following day,

which they did.

Yeah, it is very stressful.

- Mm-hmm.

- It's a big risk.

- Let's talk-- so the covert search warrant allows us to go

in there and look and potentially take things,

take photos of things and leave things.

That's a big bar that we just don't do every day.

This is one of the most meticulous things that we do--

- Absolutely.

- --because you're not just worried

about those two people or whoever

else is in the occupants.

You're worried about all the neighbors.

You're worried about the street traffic.

What happens if we're found out?

It's easy to say, oh, we've got teams around there.

They're going to find out, and they can respond quickly.

But do you wanna have police officers to respond

to be that first buffer?

What happens if this is blown and they have phones?

So now we not just have this site,

we've got sites in Atlanta,

we've got sites in other states

that we've got to have contingency

plans if this gets blown.

- We go in there.

We found base propaganda,

the flyers that we mentioned earlier--

- Save the race; join the base. - Exactly.

We found devices, electronics, and computers,

and on those devices kind of held

some very concerning behavior, including the video

of Mathews in the gas mask--

- --talking about, you know, derailing trains,

killing people, poisoning the water supply.

- We find out that they have all

the parts necessary to construct

a rifle, an AR platform rifle.

All of those parts were bought in a way

that we could not track the weapon, right?

So it didn't have a serial number.

It went as smooth as it could go.

- And validating everything that your investigation

was learning.

- Absolutely.

- So as part of this sneak and peek,

we also have a Title III warrant in addition.

Tell me about that Title III warrant as it applies

to this sneak and peek.

- So during the sneak and peek, we install

a microphone and a camera.

We got authorization to install those devices.

We were only able to turn on the camera first.

We had to show that they were in the apartment,

talking to each other. - Mm-hmm.

- And once we were able to show that,

we got further authorization to flip the switch for the T3.

The first time we flipped the switch,

Mathews, he's talking about the killing of African-Americans.

- So you guys flipped the switch, and the first thing out

of his mouth that you grab.

- It is shocking to hear for the first audio session.

And he's by himself, talking to himself.

- That's disconcerting right there.

That's actually kind of horrifying.

- It was very concerning, but also validating in the sense

that we're on the right path.

You know, I used to work drugs, and when you go up

in Title IIIs, typically, your sessions are, you know,

anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.

In drug cases, like, sometimes some of it's pertinent,

some of it's not.

- Yep.

- You know, in this case, this was

not like they talked about it for five minutes

and then moved on.

This was constant talk about their activities.

- You have to kind of verbatim write down

exactly what they're saying. - Mm-hmm.

- The difficulty with this T3 was you had sessions that were

hours long, 30 minutes long.

- You'd go away and you'd come back,

and, like, there'd be a whole new batch sitting there.

And they were all getting worse and worse

as you read through them.

It's as if they were playing for the cameras,

and they weren't.

That was the scary part.

- And again, they start honing in on this

Second Amendment rally in Virginia.

- The businesses around the Capitol, some of them

have considered closing for Monday because they're worried

the back and forth between gun safety and gun rights

could get out of hand.

- They had all kinds of discussion

about violence that could take place at that rally.

- They thought they could create some

violence that might accelerate

some of that conflict.

- So December 23, right before the Christmas holiday,

we're listening to this live feed from the Title III.

And they are talking about what they

could do to a state trooper.

Lemley had acquired a sniper rifle,

and he outfitted it with all kinds of scopes

and infrared and all this expensive stuff, right?

We don't know what they're going to do,

what they're gonna decide to do in the middle

of the night, right?

They can decide on a whim that they're gonna go do something,

and how are we gonna react to that?

You know, these guys would sometimes leave the residence

and go to get food, or-- - Mm-hmm.

- --a couple of times, they went out to the range

to shoot the weapon they made.

What would happen if somebody pulled them over?

What would they decide to do last minute

that could cause harm to somebody we're not tracking?

Mathews was constructing the rifle by watching YouTube.

He's very familiar with weapons.

This wasn't his first time dealing with a firearm.

And it did work.

They're excited about zeroing it in, making sure it works,

making sure it's functional.

The good thing about having that Title III going

is we knew when they were gonna go to the range.

We knew which range they were gonna go to.

So we had time to prepare and set up

that range to where we could capture their activities.

They ended up going to a range to test that rifle out.

We captured all of that.

They're buying ammunition.

They're getting their tactical gear set up.

Days before, they got all their comms gear set up.

They're starting to talk about this Virginia

rally consistently.

- They appear to be getting fixated on this.

And so now that's getting us closer and closer

to having to do something.

- From our perspective, there was no doubt they were

going to leave that residence.

And regardless of what they were eventually going to do,

it was at that point we had to make a decision.

We could not allow them to leave with all

of their weapons, all of their gear, and do anything,

regardless of what their plan was.

Come to find out, January 16th was their time they were

gonna leave the residence.

So the undercover was very privy to the information

and the activities that the Georgia cell were

partaking in, which included scoping out a residence,

doing some pre-surveillance of the targets

they were planning to murder.

So the UC had some good coverage on that.

And up here in Baltimore,

we needed to allow time for Atlanta

to kind of develop that plot, right?

Because of the violence that Lemley and Mathews

discussed all the time, right?

And they even talked about targeting law enforcement

if they ever came after them.

- We have made a conscious decision to layer

how we are gonna, first of all, get there,

how we're gonna engage the people we're trying to arrest,

and then what happens next.

It's all designed to have them comply.

We're not there to get in a firefight.

We're there to get them into custody.

We are prepared for every circumstance that may happen

when we go to that door.

And part of that is we're prepared to deal with whatever

comes out of that door.

- So what SWAT did was they surrounded the apartment.

And negotiators actually called Lemley's cell phone

and gave instructions for them to turn themselves in.

- And how did that go? Because you can see--

you're watching inside the apartment

while that call is being made.

So the phone rings, and Lemley picks up the phone.

- So I'm actually sitting in the Bearcat, the SWAT vehicle,

with the feed from the apartment

and listening to what's going on.

It was a tense few moments.

Lemley was asleep, so it took him a minute to realize

his phone was ringing.

Second or third phone call that he finally picked up on.

Once he realized what was happening,

you could start to hear Mathews come into play,

and he was freaking out.

Mathews can be overheard talking about

what should we do, what should we do,

what should we do?

Mathews was very unsure of what to do.

You could tell he was amping up,

hyperventilating maybe a little bit.

Lemley smashed his phone.

He told Mathews to do the same.

They put their phones in the toilet, in the tank.

This took minutes, which is a long time--

- Yes.

- --when you're conducting an arrest

operation to not know what these guys are going to do.

And Lemley very clearly tells Mathews,

put your hands up and go outside.

They both walk out, you know, with their hands up.

A search warrant commences quickly after that,

and you can see, you know, a sniper rifle laying out.

The rifle they constructed was laying out,

all their comms gear, their bags.

Everything was packed, ready for their travel.

- The Canadian Army reservist accused

of recruiting for a violent neo-Nazi terrorist

group has been arrested.

- They were put in the car, and they're brought into jail

and have their initial appearance.

And then they go into the system awaiting their trial.

- The next day, agents from the Atlanta field office

arrested Luke Lane and two other base members

for a murder plot.

- Knowing what you learned from this investigation,

what are your thoughts, if we hadn't found out about them

and stopped this cell?

- Ask yourself how many mass shootings

are going on in this country every week, if not every month.

- A gunman opened fire in the historically Black church

Wednesday night as parishioners gathered for

their weekly prayer service.

- Hundreds of people running for their lives

when a terrorist opened fire inside a crowded nightclub.

49 people were killed.

- Shots rang out just before 10:00 a.m.

- We're under fire.

We're under fire.

- The chaos unfolding at the Tree of Life

Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

- A total of 13 people were shot in what they're calling

a racially motivated attack.

- We didn't stop those.

It's something that I personally

am upset about in my FBI career,

is that we didn't get in front of those earlier.

We didn't stop those.

We stopped this one.

- No doubt in my mind that, you know,

the Bureau as a whole came together

and stopped a mass casualty event.

- Over the past several years,

have you seen a rise in these extremists cells

and individuals?

- All of us can see that there has been an increase

in the level of hate speech

in this country over the last few years.

all: Liberty!

Victory!

- We do want to see whites rise and have

our own state here in this country.

- I wish we had the ability to sit back and wait.

We don't.

Our job is to protect the American people.

And in order to do that,

we've gotta take all of these seriously.

The majority of Americans still believe in us.

And that is so important to what we do.

But you make a promise to them to make sure

that they and their families remain safe.

People believe that, and they still value that.

And that's what a career in the FBI is.