Capitol Bombers: America's Forgotten Domestic Terror Campaign

November 1983, Washington DC. A bomb rips through the Republican cloakroom of the United States Capitol, shattering the illusion of security at America's seat of power. No casualties, just destruction - a pattern that would repeat again and again as federal buildings fell target to a series of precisely placed explosives.

Through a dramatized narrative following fictional FBI Special Agent Jack Connors, we unravel the forgotten story of a domestic bombing campaign that struck the National War College, Navy Yards, military installations, and government buildings throughout the mid-1980s. Behind these attacks stood a group of radical communist revolutionaries - Linda Sue Evans, Marilyn Jean Buck, Susan Rosenberg, and Laura Whitehorn - former anti-war activists who had gone underground to wage their own war against what they viewed as American imperialism.

What makes this chapter of American history so remarkable isn't just the audacity of bombing the heart of government, but how thoroughly it's vanished from our collective memory. These weren't random acts of violence but calculated strikes designed to damage institutions while avoiding casualties - revolution by demolition. After years of meticulous investigation, the FBI finally closed in with synchronized raids across the country in May 1985, ending a bombing spree that had mystified authorities for years.

Though fictionalized for dramatic effect, this episode explores the real events, organizations, and revolutionary figures behind a domestic terror campaign that targeted the symbols of American power at the height of the Cold War. What drives idealists to violence? How does a nation forget attacks on its most sacred institutions? And where is the line between political action and terrorism? Email your thoughts to paulg@paulgnewton.com.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Capitol Bombing: November 1983
• 4:00 Agent Jack's Investigation Begins
• 5:15 Second Strike: National War College
• 7:10 The Pattern Emerges
• 8:35 Key Suspects Identified
• 11:00 The Raid and Arrests
• 14:50 Dramatization Disclaimer

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Brought to you ad-free by FMS Studios. This is a special presentation in coordination with Things I Want to Know and Paul G's Corner. Washington DC in November of 1983 moves like clockwork. Routine dictates every hour. Us armed forces, fresh from Grenada, stand as a reminder of America's reach. Beirut burns in a distant fire, but there within the capital, everything is predictable until 10.58pm. The moment the illusion shatters. The Republican cloakroom is the first to go. A wall of pressure surges outward, hurling debris through the hall. Plaster splits, glass shatters. History itself is torn from the walls. As Daniel Webster's portrait crumbles in a storm of fire and dust, the air turns toxic smoke curling through the wreckage like a living thing. A security guard stumbles, his radio crackling uselessly in his grip. He coughs, blinking against the acrid fog. Bombs aren't supposed to go off in the US Capitol. Across the city a phone rings.

Speaker 1: 1:35

Fbi Special Agent Jack Connors wakes with a start Half dreaming, half dazed. His office couch is still stiff beneath him, his suit wrinkled from another night of chasing ghosts. The glow of his desk lamp barely cuts through the shadows and he rubs his face as he reaches for the receiver. Special Agent Jack Connor. We have an emergency at the Capitol. The voice on the phone is almost in a panic. Jack grabs his gun, car keys and credentials.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Jack isn't real. There is no record of Jack Connors. He is a creation, a theatrical device, a stand-in for every agency tangled in the case FBI, atf, cia, nsa. Their priorities intersect, their jurisdictions blur. He is the faceless hunter Washington deploys when ghosts need tracking. He moves fast and practiced, yanking on his jacket as he strides out the door.

Speaker 1: 2:34

The chase has begun. The drive it's a blur. Tires skidding through rain-slick streets, sirens wailing in the distance. When he arrives, the Capitol is a smoking ruin of shattered glass and crumbling marble. The acrid scent of burning upholstery hangs heavy in the air. Security lights flicker, casting jagged shadows across the floor. A massive section of the Republican cloakroom is simply just gone. Nothing but a jagged wound of exposed beams and torn fabric where history used to hang.

Speaker 1: 3:11

He steps forward, crunching over broken plaster and charred debris. The security guard stands nearby, his hands still shaking his face pale. It just blew up. The man whispered. One second it was quiet. The next, jack kneels, running his fingers over the splintered remains of a wooden desk.

Speaker 1: 3:38

The explosion had been precise, calculated. Whoever did this knew exactly where to place it. He exhales, scanning the destruction. Thank God there's no bodies, no one's dead, just devastation left behind like a signature. He takes one last look at the wreckage before turning away and knows that the hunt has begun. And knows that the hunt has begun For three months. The FBI chases ghosts. Thousands of threats, each leading to nothing. The investigation drags every promising lead, dissolving into another dead end. The damage fades from the headlines, washington barely stirs. No casualties, no lasting scars, another political debate, another round of rhetoric and then another bomb.

Speaker 1: 4:37

It's a February night in 1984. The National War College doesn't expect company at 3 am. Its walls are lined with portraits of dead generals, windows blacked out, paper trails locked behind steel drawers. Security here is quiet, not because nothing ever happens, but because it's the kind of place where people believe nothing ever will. And then the floor rips open. The blast starts low, a pressure swell, a rumble through concrete, and then it cracks the eastern wing like a rifle shot. Fire follows smoke, smoke follows silence and silence follows everything. No alarms, no warning, just sudden sharp ruin. No one dies, but that wasn't a guarantee. A surprise meeting, an off-schedule cleaning crew, a birthday party that got moved to the wrong room Any of it could have turned this from a statement into a massacre. And yet it wasn't. And that's what scared Jack the most. Not the planning, not the precision, but the blind luck. By morning the building is still standing, but barely. Burn marks claw through the floor like roots, looking for something else to destroy. A junior officer walks out of the smoke looking like he was dragged through the end of a war, and Jack watches the security footage later, no casualties, once again, just a message written in smoke and silence.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Jack leans against the frame of his office window watching fog rise off of Potomac. It's 1984, and the war room behind him glows, the walls covered with maps, pins signifying leads. Just as the trail starts to go cold, there's more, another and another August 1983, the Navy Yards Computer Center, then April in 84, the Officers Club, then the South African Consulate in New York City. Each strike more confident, more precise. Jack traces them with a red pen, circles tightening around something he can't yet name. This isn't noise, it's doctrine. They're all federal sites, military posts, power, targeted like a pressure point. And always afterwards, the communiques, hand-delivered, cold, not threats but explanations, justifications Wrapped in revolution, speak, written in the language of someone already convinced that history has vindicated them. But the city forgets fast and Jack brings it up in a briefing Blank stares. Even some in his own unit look confused. The War College blast is already a ghost. The files fade, but he remembers. So he stays up, builds the room piece by piece, threads, photos, timelines scratched into drywall. He plays back to security tapes, the intercepted chatter, the muffled voices from old bugs, fragments mailed in from safe houses that are already burned. It's static, it's nothing, but it's starting to sound like it may be breathing.

Speaker 1: 8:36

By 1984, jack has built patterns. There was a wiretap in Chicago that mirrors a communique mailed to the DC paper. A van near the Capitol turns up with chemical traces. Nothing definitive, but not nothing either. Somewhere in a DA report, a rental address crossed paths with a forgotten name from a 1971 protest list. Not anything that can hold up in court just yet. But the threads keep tightening. Jack works until the soles of his shoes begin to wear thin. It's not yet clean, but damn it, it's something.

Speaker 1: 9:12

After months of digging deep into the paper and a long fruitless steakhouse, a voice begins to surface, and then another. The names start to line up and find their way to the top of Jack's suspect board. Linda Sue Evans, an SDS member, vanished years ago. Her name, half erased, whispered through a bugged phone line. Then Marilyn Jean Buck, sharp, methodical and quietly dangerous. A former anti-war activist turned underground operative. Her links to weapons caches and support operations for military groups start to bring things into clarity. And Susan Rosenberg, a courier known for her role in moving materials and people across the underground network. Her alias is numerous and behind all of it, the one name that surfaces later in the investigation, but without ambiguity as it rises to the top, a radical communist forged in the unrest of the 1960s Laura Whitehorn. She came of age when the protests filled the streets and revolution felt like a destination, not just an idea. Her convictions weren't born in theory, they were formed in conflict, tear gas. To her, that was the sound of home. While she's not completely front and center, her presence seems to always be the one everyone else orbits.

Speaker 1: 10:41

Then a break comes. Jack orders a raid on a suspected location outside Boston. Everything lines up Phone taps, car rentals, chemical trace but the house is empty, space heater, still warm, like someone had just left. Despite this, jack keeps working the files and keeps working the case. He's sure that he'll find his answer. And then Jack gets it A real solid lead.

Speaker 1: 11:13

On May 11th 1985, jack stands outside a weathered and worn duplex, breath fogging in the cold. The sky still dark, not a hint of dawn on the horizon. The wind cuts low through the alley, biting through his coat. Then the quiet sounds of muffled boots shifting behind him, the static buzz of a radio turned low. Jack starts to wear. Thin from the waiting, every second, feel like it's daring someone to move first. He pauses. Thin from the waiting, every second, feel like it's daring someone to move first. He pauses, considers the moment. Then he gives the signal, just a nod.

Speaker 1: 11:51

The team stacks tight against the outside frame of the duplex, shoulders aligned, boots anchored, eyes locked. The ram swings, adult thwack, then again the frame splits, wood shears and the latch snaps in with a final screech. The door swings open like a wound. Flashlights cut through the dark like blades. Shouts tear through the silence. Fbi Hands Show me your hands. Boots slam across the warped floorboards, the kitchen flashes past. Hallway, closet, bedroom. Each corner swept with precision, each moment, rigid, with purpose. Plaster dust hangs in the air. Every breath, tight. The sound of someone running down a hallway is replaced by stillness, controlled, suspicious, ready to turn violent if the air shifts wrong. Each second presses like a trigger, half-full.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Inside, laura Whitehorn is waiting at a second-hand 1970s metal kitchen table, black coffee cooling in the cup. She doesn't flinch, she doesn't speak, but she watches, still and unbleeking, as Jack enters last. Here he is in the moment, the weight of seven years hanging between them, the arrests, the bombs, the warnings scrawled in fire and silence. None of it spoken, but all of it understood. The entire room holds its breath. Jack steps forward, his hands move with the steadiness of muscle memory, but his eyes don't leave hers. She doesn't resist, she just watches, unblinking, as he reaches for the cuffs. The cold click of metal fills the room like a punctuation. At the same time, across the country, they take down everyone at once.

Speaker 1: 14:03

The others fall Evans in a quiet Philadelphia suburb, buck in the river town of Dobbs Ferry, just north of Manhattan. Rosenberg, somewhere off the Golden State Parkway. None resist, none give any speeches, just doors cracked open, wrists bound and names scratched off, a list that Jack had memorized by heart. Seven minutes, seven years, and all of it folded shut in the same feeling of quiet that comes after a detonation. The press called it a victory, but there were no parades, no celebrations, just sealed evidence bags and silent reports that have still yet to see the light of day. Linda Sue Evans was sentenced to 40 years, rosenberg received 58. Buck was given 80 because of a bank robbery gone wrong where two guards were killed, and Whitehorn would be sentenced to 20 years. After serving the majority of their sentences, most of them eventually walked out.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Jack doesn't talk about the raids, though the case files what exists are thin, sparse notes, incomplete records, some details never making it into the public domain. Others were lost in the bureaucratic fog. There's more redaction and recollection, and even now trying to piece together who did what and when is like assembling a map with most countries missing. Still, though, these people really weren't revolutionaries. To him, they were arsonists with a manifesto. The fact that no one died was actually an accident, the kind of accident that doesn't change the charge. It only changes the body count. This story is actually a dramatization. While many events, names and organizations are actually real, the characters and dialogue are fictionalized for dramatic effect. Jack Connors does not exist. His investigation is a composite of many. This is not a documentary. It's more like a thriller Brought to you ad-free by FML Studios in collaboration with Things I Want to Know, and Paul G's Corner. If you want to respond, debate or dig deeper or just complain, just email me, paulg at paulgnewtoncom. Thanks for listening.