- I declare open the games of Atlanta.
- Everybody thought it was the safest place in the world
and nothing's going to happen.
- All of a sudden, boom!
- People began to scream. They were crying.
People were hurt.
- Then there's another bombing.
- The abortion clinic, where a police officer was killed
and a nurse was seriously wounded.
- We clearly believe that we are dealing with a deranged killer.
- Someone notices someone walking away from the scene.
- Now we have a suspect.
That launched probably one of the most extensive manhunts
and fugitive investigations in the FBI's history.
- Even as he was on the run, he hadn't given up
trying to kill people.
He was planning to bomb the FBI command post.
- Time is of the essence. People are dying.
And we don't know where the next bomb is going to go off.
[distant blast]
[Narrator]: In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI!
[Narrator]: 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.
July 27, 1996. What was your assignment?
[Narrator]: Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children
as well as human and drug trafficking.
- I was a special agent bomb technician.
And I was dispatched to the Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.
[Narrator]: Frank Brostrom served for 28 years in the FBI,
working as a special agent bomb technician
and was a joint terrorism task force leader.
I was assigned to lead a diagnostic team
like the other special agent bomb technicians.
When someone called in a suspicious package,
we might do an X-ray or a physical examination.
Then we were to contact the command post
and they would send a bomb squad out.
- And Bill, how about you?
- I also was working as a special agent bomb technician.
[Narrator]: Bill Forsyth is a retired
FBI special agent bomb technician,
serving on several high profile cases,
including the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bombing.
- We were assigned that night
to be in the Olympic Centennial Park.
There was a concert going on. Jack Mack and the Heart Attack.
- Atlanta, you gotta make some noise!
- The beer vendors were doing very well, you could tell.
Think of 40,000 people
crammed into about 20 acres, drunk...
And the loud music. It was hot, very hot.
So it's a few minutes before 1 AM.
and we get a call to respond to the base of the NBC tower
regarding a unattended backpack.
We met up with the security officers that had called it in.
They went on to say that there was these five young men
that were obviously overserved
with their beverages that night.
And they got up and started to leave.
The security people asked them, is that your backpack?
And they indicated that it was not.
And they walked on.
So the security personnel called into the command post.
My partner and I walk up to the to the pack.
I'm not at all concerned about it
because this is a very routine call for us.
And my intention was to pick it up
and to put it on the bench where I could sort of open it
and examine the insides more easily.
As I did...
That law enforcement sixth sense came upon me.
Words came to my mind that were almost audible
that said, stop.
You weren't trained like that.
I was just within inches of it,
and it was just this very sickening feeling
in my, you know, in my gut.
I realized that I needed to get my head in the game.
Got down on the ground and tried to look to see if I could see
any kind of wires, if I could see if I could hear ticking,
which I couldn't.
- Why couldn't you hear anything?
You were down right on top of it.
- It was because of how loud the music was
and there was people all around me.
[crowd cheering]
I reach up and I carefully and very gingerly,
squeeze the pack to kind of see if I can feel
if it squishes at all.
I can feel that it was extremely firm
and definitely wasn't someone's lunch or somebody's clothes.
As I flipped the flap back,
now I can see three large pipes.
And through the center of each of the of each of the pipes
were wires coming out.
I can smell it. I can almost taste it.
And now I'm close enough
that I can hear the ticking of a clock.
- It's a bomb. - Oh, my God.
- Ready to explode.
This is what I refer to as my BABE.
A big angry bomb almost ready to explode.
The real scary thing is I don't know if it's the next second,
you know, if it's going to be the next tick
or if we have 30 minutes left on the timer,
and with each tick, I'm getting more unnerved.
I'm in absolute shock. I'm scared.
Is this going to be the end?
I was on my hands and knees.
People were tripping over my feet.
It's just hard to understand
just how crowded and loud it was.
[crowd cheering]
I jump up, I talk to my partner,
I asked him to call the command center,
tell them that we need the bomb squad here as soon as possible.
I went over and met with the security people
and I told them we don't know how much time we have.
And we need to get everybody as far away from that device
as we can and get them out.
There must have been, you know, 10,000 people within 50 yards.
- So when you're moving 10,000 people
from a festival where people are cocktailed up.
Are people still stumbling
and meandering into the area you just cleared?
- It was a mess. Yeah. It's like herding cats.
You know, only they're drunken cats.
And that process of trying to move people back
as far as we can, our backs are to the device.
All of a sudden.
- Right about now we have
the privilege of working with this...
[loud blast, then ringing]
- We were approximately 43 feet from the device.
- Wait a minute. What?
- We have the privilege of working with this...
[loud blast]
- What pushed us to the ground was the blast wave.
At first I was just in absolute shock.
And what was surreal about it
is that time almost stood still.
- Nobody's bothered you, right? - Well...
[nearby blast]
- And everything in that park
for about three or four seconds went quiet.
- During that quiet time, were you like, am I still here?
- Well, yeah. I'm not sure if I had, you know...
Had crossed over to the other side or not.
Or, um...
People began to scream. They were crying.
People were hurt.
I was dazed and everybody around me was dazed.
There was officers beside me who were bleeding.
And I wasn't sure if I was hurt or not.
[sirens]
- Do you have any idea how many are hurt?
- Well, there are people hurt, that's all I can say.
There have been some injuries.
[reporter]: We talked to one man who gave an account
of what appeared to him be shrapnel wounds.
- This thing came down, hit me in the leg,
I heard a couple pieces of metal land on the ground.
- This is a piece of shrapnel, it was hot four minutes ago.
It hit me in the head.
- There was steel hitting people
and we were rushing people to medical.
And we came out here and this lady just fell over.
- Now we have this huge crime scene.
There's officers and other agents
that are picking stuff up.
Pandemonium is going on.
People are tramping through our crime scene.
I was walking around trying to look for, you know,
used napkins, just anything that we could use
to maybe help control bleeding.
And that's when I came across
Alice Hawthorne.
- Tell me about Alice Hawthorne.
- Alice Hawthorne was there at the park that night
with her daughter.
They were enjoying the concert.
She was actually sitting about another 45 feet
from where we were at, just over my shoulder and to the left.
And her daughter was sitting right next to her.
Kristy, there was at least 10,000 people
that was between her and where we were trying to
move people back.
There was at least two large pieces of pipe that hit her.
And somehow they missed all of us.
All of us and all of the other people in between.
And she didn't survive this.
[reporter]: One person was killed.
She's been identified as Alice Hawthorne of Albany, Georgia.
- I'm still having trouble now
really believing that she's not here.
- We must not let these attacks stop us from going forward.
We cannot let terror win.
The Olympics will continue. The games will go on.
The Olympic spirit will prevail.
[trumpet playing]
- It's the next day after the carnage.
- Now we're on high alert.
I just remember running from incident to incident,
call to call to call.
- Is this because it was not just security
and law enforcement calling it in,
but citizens were now more aware
and were feeling a little bit panicked?
Absolutely, kind of like when you have a major crime,
they put out an 800 number, and you just get 1000 calls.
Anybody that saw anything.
Our first call was a briefcase sitting under a tree.
Who's gonna leave a briefcase sitting under a tree?
We're thinking this is the next bomb, right?
Your heart rate's up, you're thinking, you know,
I can be Bill, we might be facing this next threat.
And you can't call the bomb squad to every call,
'cause there are so many.
And you want to just say, let's bring the bomb squad first,
but you can't, we're a diagnostic team.
So we had to try to minimize that
and see if we could clear it ourselves.
We were able to get an X-ray really quick and determined
that this briefcase was not an IED.
- So Bill, what's the next thing you remember?
- Well, it was about 11 AM when I found out that
there was a 911 call the night before,
presumably by the bomber in relation to the pack.
The 911 call that came in at the Centennial Park
it had a male voice and it warned that the bomb
would go off in 30 minutes,
when in fact it was more like 20 minutes.
That means one of two things.
He meant to harm somebody, to war that you had 30 minutes
to catch people off guard.
Or something happened in the timing
with the initiation of the bomb.
- Bill's on top of it, and had no idea there was a 911 call.
- Correct.
[Bill]: Between bad phone connections and jammed lines
at the police command center, the 911 call
didn't get passed on to us in time.
I had worked all through the night
and into the afternoon of the of that same day.
- Oh my God, so you've almost been up now for 24 hours.
- Yeah, yeah.
And so I was emotionally spent.
But I couldn't get to sleep.
And so I turn on the TV, and I see one of the security guards.
- I am a person that did the job that I was supposed to do.
- So you turn on the TV and you see the security guard
that you recognized from the night before.
And this is where you learned his name?
- Richard Jewell.
- I was in the right place at the right time.
And used my training in the way I was taught.
- I remember the only time that I had talked to him or saw him
was after we determined that this was a bomb for sure
and we need to get people away.
So obviously, it sparked my attention
with what he was trying to communicate and convey.
- What was he saying that surprised you?
First of all, he was taking credit
for finding the bomb.
- I spotted the bag laying on the ground under the bench.
[reporter]: And what did it look like?
- It looked like a green bag.
I can't really get much more detail than that.
Once we identified it as a suspicious package,
we, neither one of us got too much closer to it.
- They noticed that there was a backpack on the ground,
we didn't know it was a bomb until I opened the pack
and looked inside.
- I feel for the victims and their families.
And I just hope we catch the people that did it.
Because, I just, we did everything we could.
- Is that the only time you saw him on TV?
- No, he was on a lot.
He was became quite a celebrity for a while.
[Jewell]: I just happened to be at the right place
at the right time
and did the job that I was trained to do.
- And there was a myriad of other things that started
going through my mind, one of which was
the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles,
where we had a law enforcement officer make,
place, discover and dismantle
a device that was to get credit
and to bolster a struggling career.
[Kristy]: Richard Jewell had some indicators.
He had been arrested and prosecuted
for impersonating a police officer,
where he arrested an individual.
[Bill]: And Mr. Jewell was not assigned
to work that night in the park.
And he traded with someone that was there closer
to the tower and to the stage.
We had to consider him as a person of interest.
[Bill]: Richard Jewell was a person
that we could not overlook.
There was just a lot of unusual things,
coupled with his background that we found out about.
[man]: FBI has suspect bomber.
[reporter]: Richard Jewell has gone from a hero
to a man under siege.
- Can you stop for a second please?
- Can you categorically say that you did not do this?
- I did not do it.
- The FBI invited Richard Jewell to come in and talk about
first responders under the guise of,
hey, look, this is a training video.
And he was all happy to come in and talk about that
and was willing.
[Bill]: We had to figure out a way to read him his rights
without scaring him away.
[FBI agent]: I'd like to preset you with this form,
I'd like you to kind of read it over,
tell me if you understand everything that's on that form.
- I don't know if I should call an attorney now or not,
cause I don't know if this video is for...
I don't know if I'm being investigated for this,
or if this is for what you have told me it is for.
- Richard Jewell answered every question
the agents asked him during the interview.
- Did they read him his Miranda Rights?
- No, they did not.
- This was a noncustodial interview
and you read someone their rights
when they're in a custody situation, and he was not.
He was invited to the office, he came voluntarily.
- Often we offer main subjects in matters
to come in and talk to us.
And surprisingly a lot of them do.
- Regardless, he requested an attorney
and he ended the interview.
And that's how it's supposed to work.
- This is to advise you that based on the evidence
developed to date, your client, Richard Jewell,
is not considered a target of the federal
criminal investigation into the bombing
on July 27th, 1996,
at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta.
- Frank, so, what else is happening
during the investigations in Atlanta?
What else is going on that you guys learned?
- So, the Atlanta Olympics ends.
We're working every lead that we have,
but we don't have anything solid to go on.
Then, six months later,
we get information about the Sandy Springs bombing
of the women's clinic near Atlanta.
So in the women's clinic, the bomb goes off.
Nobody's killed.
I don't even think it was open at the time.
And so you got first responders coming,
and while they're standing there with the cameras rolling
in the parking lot between the cars and the garbage bin,
boom, a dynamite bomb goes off.
[reporter]: Where were you in the building
and where was the explosion?
[explosion]
Oh my God!
[sirens]
- Back off the street!
- The secondary devices are intended
to target first responders.
[blast]
[man]: Get back, get back, let's go!
[reporter]: That blast, felt for miles,
tore through a dumpster on the other side of the building.
- Whoa, we had a bomb just go off.
- Our whole ER room and our recovery room is gone.
Our whole clinic is gone.
- Then there's another bomb that goes off.
Right, the lesbian bar called the Other Side Lounge.
There's a bombing there.
Again, no one's injured or killed.
But when the first responders arrive,
a secondary device is located.
And again, the secondary device is planted far enough back
and to the side of the parking lot where people are pulling in,
that's going to detonate and harm or kill first responders.
After getting everybody to a safe distance, they use a robot.
They want to try to preserve the evidence.
So they use the robot arm to try to take this
and get photographs as they're opening the pack.
And as it slowly kind of with its hook arm,
you know, pulling it apart
and something happens and the bomb goes off.
- What ties the three bombings together now
is the metal plate.
[Kristy]: So we're talking about the Centennial Park bombing,
the women's clinic bombing
and the lesbian bar bombing are tied together.
And how we know this?
[Bill]: The first bomb in Olympic Centennial Park
was three 14 inch pipes.
They were large pipes with cement nails
and wood screws glued to the outside of the pipe
to add more shrapnel so that more people can be injured.
I also saw a steel plate the bomb was resting on.
The plate was used to directionalize
the blast spray as it goes off.
The connection is they all have the steel plate
and they're used to directionalize the force,
almost like a shaped charge.
Forensically, we were able to find out
that all three metal pieces
came from the same sheet of steel.
- Probably the same person made them?
- Yes.
- Then the investigative team received a letter
that was claiming credit for the two most recent bombings,
at the gay nightclub and the women's health clinic.
And it contained statements that expressed
really extreme ideology.
The letter was signed "Army of God."
As our investigation progressed,
we learned that he targeted the Olympics to protest abortion
and because he thought the games promoted global socialism.
- We clearly believe that we are dealing with a deranged killer.
[Frank]: Time is of the essence. People are dying.
And we don't know where the next bomb is going to go off.
- Then there's another bomb that goes off.
- The Birmingham abortion clinic bomb.
The bad guys actually waited for the proper moment
to cause as much harm and death as he could when it detonated.
- He pulls the switch.
- He's willing to kill. He's committed.
- Someone notices someone is walking away from the scene.
- Now we have a suspect.
- That launched probably one of most extensive manhunts
and fugitive investigations in the FBI's history.
Even as he was on the run,
he hadn't given up trying to kill people.
He was planning to bomb the FBI command post.