Terrorism in Utah? It happened here!

A picture of the damage to the Cedar Mountain, UT site. Pic source.

On May 28, 1961 there was a coordinated bombing attack on three Bell Telephone company microwave repeating stations. They were located in Knolls and Cedar Mountain in Utah, as well as a location in Wendover Nevada. A "group" (I use the term loosely) calling themselves the "American Republican Army" claimed responsibility for the attack, which left three towers and some support buildings destroyed. The resulting damage not only consisted of destroyed buildings and towers, but 2200+ telephone and telegraph circuits along with four television channels were interrupted/stopped.

The remains of the location at Knolls, UT. Source.

Larry Douglas, who was working in SLC at the time said that "The Explosion at Knolls K station was so strong, that the only thing that was left was the floor slab. The Emergency diesel engine was blown 50 to 60 yards out into the flat. The Towers were not just blown over, a charge was set on each of the tower legs about a third of the way up, and detonated at exactly the same instant. The result was the lower part of the legs spread open and let the upper part of the tower drop straight down inside the bottom section still standing upright. This dropped the antenna below the line of site signal. This also made it more difficult to erect a new tower, as the old one had to be unassembled and removed first." 

Thankfully, within hours Bell Systems had restored services and the FBI was on the scene to begin the investigation, and quickly found out the types of explosives used. Not much long afterwards, the site was cleared of debris, and new towers were being constructed with Bell Systems also now hiring guards to protect the previously unattended facilities. 

Remains of the Wendover location. Source.

What is odd about this story, is that there is a lot of documentation about the towers, locations, damage done, as well as recovery efforts, with plenty of pictures which are detailed on the Long Lines website I mentioned before, but there isn't much detail to find on the perpetrators of it. 

Bernard Jerome Brous (age 52) and Dale Christian Jensen (age 23) were the only official members of the group. They stated that they "advocated political overthrow of the United States" and that the Army was "similar in some respects to the militantly conservative John Birch Society, but more active". Brous also said they supported the nationalization of the United States utility companies. In reality, it seems he was just an emotionally unstable individual who was made jobless because of Bell contracting out some of it's maintenance and emergency services to a competitor of his.

Not long afterwards, both were arrested by the FBI on June 18, 1961, in Ensenada, Lower California, Mexico. They were found on a yacht named the Monsoon, while holed up with grenades, M2 rifles, .50 and .30 cal machineguns, along with other rifles and small arms. They were extradited to the US and held at a Reno NV prison and bail set at $300k (almost 3 million in today's money); certainly a massive amount for the time!

They were initially brought up on charges of sabotage (which would have been up to a 30 year sentence), but they were ultimately dropped, as his motive wasn't technically terrorism, but merely revenge. The final verdict after trial was ultimately a sentence to 8 years in a federal prison instead. 

Big thanks to Sam's Journal of Stuff site, as he did all the footwork in finding out about the perpetrators for the same reasons I had and he has a whole lot more detail about them and the effort to apprehend them. Go check it out as there is a lot more to the story.