SSI Exclusive: FBI put pressure on Newsweek to keep details of PATCON Brown's Ferry Nuclear conspiracy quiet. Radioactive 302s & black bag jobs.

Brown's Ferry Nuclear Plant on the Tennessee River, north Alabama.

(NOTE: There were a lot of problems getting the documents to load properly both here and at Scribd but those problems should now be solved. If anyone has any further problem seeing the documents, please drop us a comment or an email. -- MBV)

Sources tell Sispey Street that the home of John Matthews' daughter was broken into over the weekend and although a television, an X-box and a small steel lockbox containing papers and a handgun were stolen, the burglars left behind prescription pain medicine, cash, and other valuable items. It wasn't because the burglars didn't find them, for "the entire place was completely trashed, they even tore apart the beds and bedding," said one source. "It was as if they were searching for something they didn't find it," the source said.

Other sources tell Sipsey Street that private email files belonging to Matthews and people who have corresponded with him have literally disappeared from folders on home computers without explanation.

When I informed another DC source of mine of these developments, he commented, "Well, they're either looking for more documents they think Matthews has hidden or they are just trying to send a message that they can get to his daughter so he'd better shut up." The source then added, rhetorically, "Do you really think that the FBI ever gave up the black bag job as a tool of enforcement?" He paused, and added, "And I don't mean law enforcement."

Speculation as to what documents the FBI may be looking for has centered on unredacted FBI invesitigative reports, called FD-302s, having to do with the plot Matthews reported that dealt with the Browns' Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama. Sources tell Sipsey Street that the FBI put pressure on Newseek reporters and editors not to print details of this portion of Matthews story. Said one, "These allegations didn't even make it into the rough draft of the Newsweek story because the FBI asked them not to print (details) about Browns' Ferry."

Copies of those unredacted FD-302s have now been obtained by Sipsey Street and may be found here as well as embedded at the end of this story.

Readers will recall these paragraphs deleted from the Newsweek story that seemed to suggest that Tom Posey was a federal asset and that the Browns' Ferry case allegatios were deep-sixed by the prosecution in order to protect him:

1. The missing paragraphs that presented evidence that Tom Posey, the supposed chief conspirator whose crazy talk about using weapons of mass destruction first prompted Matthews to go to the FBI, may himself have been a government asset. From the original story as written, before Tina Brown's felt tip marker excised it:

After Posey’s arrest, the FBI had Matthews Social Security number changed, and paid for him and his family to move to Stockton , California . Yet the trial in Alabama proved frustrating for him. Despite hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, as well as video and personal surveillance, the Justice Department only chose to prosecute Posey and his cohorts for buying and selling the stolen night vision goggles. And in the end, Posey was sentenced to just two years in prison.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department in Birmingham said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Posey for the Brown’s Ferry plot. Yet curiously, the TVA denied that the plot or the weapons cache even existed. Meanwhile, several of the men involved in the planned robbery were never arrested. At the time, two of the men, Matthews says, were planning to blow up a federal building in Birmingham .

“They were gonna take a truck filled with fertilizer,” says Matthews. “You look at what Timothy McVeigh done, it’s basically the same thing. “What happened in Oklahoma could have happened a couple of years earlier.”

One possible explanation for how Posey’s trial played out: In 1996, the year he was released from prison, Posey appears to have been issued a new Social Security number, according to a Lexis-Nexus search conducted by Newsweek. Tony Gooch, a friend and Posey’s and a former CMA member, said that Posey was innocent of any wrongdoing, and that the whole Brown’s Ferry plot had been cooked up by Matthews. “Tom was a good man,” he says. “John did not endear himself to us with that story.” Yet Gooch said that Posey may have felt forced to cut a deal with the Justice Department, and provide them with information on other groups in the movement, or agreed not to reveal what he knew about Iran Contra.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Gooch said. “Tom knew some people who were real hardcore.”

If it is indeed these documents that the burglars of John Matthews' daughter's home were looking for, Sipsey Street is more than happy to post them here and save them further trouble. And the FBI, I'm sure, must be wondering what else besides these 302s are still out there.

Mind you, I am speaking from mere experienced speculation here, but I do recall that after the unsuccessful assassination attempt of Pete Langan behind the Columbus, Ohio ARA safe house when the raid team unexpectedly pulled his living body out of the riddled van as alley neighbors watched from second-story balconies, Langan was able to keep from sharing the fate of his co-conspirator in the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery gang, "Wild Bill" Guthrie, who ended up at the end of a dirty bedsheet at a jail in Covington, Kentucky, two days after he told an LA Times reporter that he knew more than a little about the Oklahoma City bombing.

Langan, J.D. Cash told me, had an "open in the event of my death" file that has so far kept him alive in the Bureau of Prisons, although he remains held incommunicado from the media. Even 60 Minutes couldn't get in to see him. As long as the file exists where the FBI cannot find it, J.D. said, Langan's life is secure.

I suppose if I were the FBI, I would be wondering what else is in a similar file owned by friends of Mr. Matthews. For the record, Mr. Matthews would have no comment to Sipsey Street on any of these matters.

But still, if you're the FBI, you'd have to wonder.


Browns Ferry


Blows of truth against the Empire.