The Shoe Bomber with Miles Klee

This week, writer Miles Klee tells us why we have to take our shoes off at the airport.

Read Miles Klee at Rolling Stone.

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Transcript

Sarah: Al Qaeda is not famous for being like, “What are your ideas? What have you been, any pet projects? There are no bad ideas in brainstorming.”

I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are joined by Miles Klee to talk about why we all have to take our shoes off at the airport. Unless it's a day where they're like, no, keep your shoes on you idiots. 

I was excited to do this topic, first of all, because it's great to have Miles on the show. He's a wonderful writer. And second of all, because I've long wanted to do episodes that talk more about America's alleged war on terror in the early 2000s, the time when millennials were growing up and Gen Z was being born. And our government was up to a lot of things that it really felt like they weren't telling the truth about. 

It's a big story. It's hard to find a finite point of entry. But the story of the quote unquote “shoe bomber” and the state of heightened fear that seemingly everybody was in the period immediately after September 11th, is one of them. And it turns out that this is a true You’re Wrong About, and that much of what we think we remember is wrong. And what we don't remember is the best part of the story. 

We have a bonus episode for you up right now where our January guest, Megan Burbank, talks with me about the new movie May December. And coming out soon we have a new bonus, the first of a multi-parter with our friend Eve Lindley talking about the Britney Spears memoir, The Woman in Me. And we're really exploring both Britney and all of our Britney feelings. Thank you so much for being here with us. We got a flight to catch.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where you learn why you haven't been able to correctly go through airport security in 20 years, I think. And with me today is Miles Klee. 

Miles: Hi, Sarah, how's it going?

Sarah: It's so good to have you here. And we're starting off the new year, fresh and funky. I guess by the time this comes out, it'll be February.

But this is one of the first You’re Wrongs About’s that I'm recording in 2024. And I feel really excited that we're doing an episode that, to me, feels like it's about the height of the war on terror. Which is something I've always wanted the show to me more about, but don't have the intestinal fortitude to research myself.

Miles: Yeah, it gets pretty gnarly. This is the beginning of the war on terror in a forgotten era, I would say. So we're talking about a man named Richard Reid, better known as the shoe bomber ,currently spending the rest of his life in Colorado Supermax Prison for unsuccessfully trying to blow up a jetliner a couple months after 9/11 with, as the story goes, explosives packed in the heels of his shoes. Do you remember this? 

Sarah: I do, and I feel like this is one of the most remembered pieces of American history in a sense, because we're all forced to remember it every time we fly anywhere. And my favorite thing about airport security is that each airport has their own special individual way of doing it, that they change every three months. So they'll be like, “Take your shoes off, you idiot”, “No, leave your shoes on, take your laptop out”, “No, leave it in, put your suitcase in a bin, no, don't.” And you're just like… I just feel like I'm in a version of hell where I can never figure out what the social norm is. 

Miles: Yeah, the TSA really does, even among other kind of law enforcement agencies, just feels like the most power tripping group of people that you can encounter. Maybe because they have so little power, that it's just these very kind of niche, inane sort of procedures that they care about. And they do it all day, every day for work. So the idea that nobody else knows how to do it is insane to them. I think it just totally breaks their brains. 

Sarah: Yeah, which is fascinating. Because it's new people every day that they're seeing. Although I'll also say that big city, busy airport TSA, the worst experience. Small town, small airport TSA, like I'm looking at you Green Bay Airport, the best.

Miles: Give me Sacramento Airport any day. 

Sarah: Ah, and when those TSA agents are all friends and you're walking through a sitcom they're having, that's the best.

Miles: Yeah, it could be better. It could be a lot better. 

Sarah: Yeah, sometimes it's good. It's really all an implication of power, but yeah, this feels like something that we think we intimately understand, but I was so excited to get the real story on this.

Miles: Yeah, you know it is funny you said yes, we remember him every time we go through airport security. But he's also really just a footnote. He's almost an afterthought, even though he had this huge ripple effect. There's not a book on the Shoe Bomber. We don't have a punk band named The Shoe Bombers or anything.

Sarah: There's no Shoe Bomber miniseries going straight to Max. Although as I'm saying that, someone is getting the idea to write it. 

Miles: Yeah, they'll have to come to me as a consultant. 

Sarah: Yeah, Ryan Murphy is going to have to come crawling to you. 

Miles: Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of younger people don't even realize that little, miserable moment on the stupid bench after you get through the screening, that it's all because of this one guy.

I think it's both very present in our day to day lives, but totally overlooked as a historical event, I think. So I think the question we have here is, how did we forget what happened here? And I think it's because a lot of stuff happened really fast. So 9/11, I think, needs no introduction.

Sarah: Famously, an event that really happened. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I don't know why this is in debate. 

Miles: Yeah, I think the pod should take a stance. It's really time. The 9/11 Commission is an accurate accounting of the events. So then a lot of narratives of the war on terror pick up in 2002. But there's a few more months left of 2001. 

So for one, the US invades Afghanistan and starts a 20 year war. That's a big deal. And at home, we're totally steeped in fear and paranoia. Islamophobic hate crimes skyrocketed. I always love when people remember this as a period of when we all came together. 

Sarah: Oh my god.

Miles: When it's actually the period that gave us the slogan, “If you see something, say something”. 

Sarah: God, yeah. That's so true. 

Miles: And I'm not joking when I tell you an advertising executive came up with that line on September 12th. And then he gave it to the New York MTA, it got adopted by all these national agencies. But that was the day after some ad guy was just like, “I've got a plan to make us all spy on each other.”

Sarah: They're like, let's not think this through even slightly. First thought, best thought.

Miles: So the first huge post 9/11 scare was anthrax. 

Sarah: And when was that like, right? Was that October or something?

Miles: Yes. Yeah. So actually just a week after the attacks. September going through October, someone began mailing letters laced with the powder form of anthrax, potentially fatal bacteria, to a number of media outlets in New York and Florida.

The big TV channels. One gets sent to Tom Brokaw, which is just weird. I don't know why you're trying to kill Tom Brokaw. Later, a couple were mailed to two different senators, which makes more sense to me. This is one of those incidents that would need its own episode of You're Wrong About, if not a season long podcast or miniseries.

Sarah: Oh gosh, yeah, with some moody music.

Miles: But what's important here is that the letters specifically mention the date of September 11th, 2001, along with some jihadist phrases like, “death to America”, “death to Israel”, and the one to Brokaw, in particular, begins with the ominous phrase, quote, “this is next”.

Sarah: And the thing that's funny to me about September 11th, and we don't have to get too into reminiscing about where we were when. But I will just say that most of my memories of news of this period are densely intertwined with my memories of watching Farscape on the sci-fi channel, because I was very into that show. And then I would walk out into the kitchen and hear the news on NPR and be like, “What a drag”, and go back in to watch the exciting conclusion to Farscape. 

And I was in eighth grade. And I think one of the aspects of aging is that, you know I'm 35, which is a very big chill age. And you're like, I'm not young, I'm not old. I'm just in the creamy middle. But I came of age in a time that people who are young adults today have no memory of. And that's really fascinating. And the moment of 9/11 and the moment after, it feels exciting to share in the stewardship of helping to explain what those moments felt like and why we behaved the way that we did, or some of us.

And I'm curious how you would describe it, but my memory of that fall is that September 11th occurred. It seems as if, in retrospect, we are going through this project of considering is this going to be something that keeps happening on a continual basis to us.

Miles: I grew up in New Jersey, pretty close to New York. At the end of the school day, my dad actually took me up to a place in New Jersey where you can see across the river. And so I got a firsthand look. Which I'm reminded of only because I recently met someone at a poetry reading who asked where I was from, and I said, “New Jersey.” And her second question was, “Did you see 9/11?”

My dad was on his way to work in the city at the time. I was, early in the day, I was very concerned for him. And I do remember in my high school, even though I think a couple of parents did die, even by lunchtime that day, people were making their edgy jokes. 

Sarah: Teens. 

Miles:  Real shithead teen hours. And I guess the thing felt like it could be ongoing, of course. And then the way that manifested for me, was somebody at my school figured out you could always get out of sixth period if you just called in a bomb threat every single day. So for the rest of that year we were evacuating the school pretty regularly. We got to be very blasé about it, of course. Because the first couple times, you know it's only two years after Columbine too, so you don't know if it's a shooter or what. It got to the point where I wouldn't even change for gym class because I knew we were going to get evacuated, and then we would just go ditch and get pizza.

Sarah: Nice. Bomb threat pizza. There's your building's roman.

Miles: And we had a bomb threat section of the yearbook that year, actually. Because there were so many photos taken. My education suffered, there's no doubt. 

Sarah: I do think that probably there is a lot of correspondence to the nostalgia people have, the funny kind of twingy nostalgia for the first two weeks of the pandemic, where you're like, this is great, normal life has been disrupted. And then after that, you're like, normal life has been disrupted. 

Miles: Yep. Yep. I'm ready to go back. 

Sarah: I don't know. Something I think is funny about my response to this, was that my family had lived in Honolulu for five years, and we just moved back to Oregon that summer. So I actually did not have as good of a sense as I could have that this wasn't something that had happened before. 

So I had the sense of, there's a lot of war and bombs and scary stuff in the world. So surely it happens in America. And there had been a lot of news about the Oklahoma City bombing throughout the late nineties, because Timothy McVeigh was in what seemed like a never ending legal something, and had a very highly, he had an execution that the news covered a lot.

So I think I had the sense that there was more of a history of terrorism than there was, somehow. I just didn't know what the context for history was really, and the exceptionalness of kind of having this gigantic symbol of American power and access destroyed in a way where so many people could literally see it. And then people could feel like they had been there for it through technology. 

To the point where I remember on the day of, kids at my middle school in Oregon being like, “I'm scared. What will happen to us?” And I was like, “Nothing's going to happen to us. Nothing ever happens to Oregon.” Although that's not true. We did get some weird kind of bomb weather balloon thing carried over the Pacific during World War II. But aside from that, nothing happens to Oregon. 

And so we had this real sense of threat, I think, for a lot of people. And then for a lot of other people, I think either consciously or not, it was to some degree fun to take part in a charade of acting like you were scared for your life. And part of it is just that I was a really dumb 13-year-old, but I was never scared. And I think a lot of other people in Arkansas had no reason to be scared and knew it. 

Miles: Yeah, you can look at 9/11 and say, my small town is not a target for this kind of attack, which is all about spectacle and scale, right? But anthrax, meanwhile, it's just envelopes. It can go anywhere.

The FBI ends up investigating thousands of reports of suspicious letters, because everyone is freaked out. And it concludes in the end that almost all of them are false alarms or hoaxes and pranks. If you pulled an anthrax prank around this time, not cool. 

They don't catch a suspect until 2008. He was a scientist at a government biodefense lab who allegedly had access to this particular strain of anthrax, but he takes his own life before they're able to charge him.

For the authorities, it's case closed after that. Though the evidence is contested and there's a lot of questions about whether this guy was the perpetrator, and if so, whether he acted alone. So that's still mysterious, but the investigation is huge and sweeping. We didn't know that the last of those tainted letters had already been sent by early October of 2001.

Five people die, including some postal employees. Only about 22 people are infected in total, but the scope seems so much bigger and ongoing, because the letters go to various locations. There's false reports. The deaths are random. Nobody with their name on an envelope got infected. It's a couple of NBC assistants, instead of Brokaw, who fall seriously ill. So it creates this impression that everybody is vulnerable. 

The New York Times calls it a ‘medical mystery’. There's a run on a particular antibiotic, even though doctors point out it can't cure Anthrax. A bit of a COVID preview there. So we're just getting no clarity on this. People are freaking out. They're asking Congress for billions of dollars. And we don't know whether it's Al Qaeda, or a related terrorist group, or a rogue madman. So you can choose your own worst-case scenario. It's perfect for America. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it's so interesting to me. It's been borne out at this point that what we were witnessing the escalation of and should have been more afraid of is actually something that was helped along by the response we had to the threat or the idea of Islamic terrorism, which was the lone, white, male active shooter type.

Miles: Yeah, this is what the FBI had been occupied with for the entire 90s, was white, domestic, right-wing men who were extremists, Timothy McVeigh, or, Koresh, or the militia movement was huge in the 90s. And it's only basically toward the late 1990s when Al Qaeda starts pulling off the embassy bombings in Africa.

There's the USS Cole attack on the Navy. And then 9/11 is the thing that comes right after that. So it totally reorients, obviously, the FBI's focus. And then they got way too focused on Islamic extremism and completely forgot about the domestic guys, and they came back with a vengeance under Trump.

Sarah: Of course, it's almost like strains of bacteria. It feels like when you zoom out enough. But I don't know. I want to, within this conversation, to talk about the dynamics that we can see in retrospect, and the sense of we over focused on Islamic terrorism for obvious reasons, because it was foreign, because it was coming from the outside and not from the inside, because it reinforced our pre-existing racism. We allowed it to, in some instances, create a moral panic. But also, on the other hand, it feels important to be fair to the fact that something really scary did happen and we did have a lot of reasons to be terrified. It's just that it's on a global scale. Not the most compelling defense to be like, we got really scared because this never happens to us. 

Miles: So into this mess enters Richard Reid, so called “shoe bomber’. Like I said, at the moment the big question is, “what's next?” So from the fact that he became a failed terrorist and went to prison forever, I'll just ask you, do you think he had a nice childhood?

Sarah: I bet he had a childhood that could provide enough random details to be described as nice. I bet you could be like, his father had a Union job with cushy benefits, and he got to go to an arboretum. So how could it be? But no, I bet it sucked. 

Miles: Oh, no, no. 

Sarah: No, just horrible across the board?

Miles: Yeah, I don't think there's anything nice about it. So his journey to radicalization has everything to do with feeling alone and alienated, and then drawn into the abrasive extremists. 

Sarah: Yeah, that does seem to happen a lot. 

Miles: So he's born in 1973 in London to a white English mother, Leslie Hughes, and a father of Jamaican background named Robin Reid. So Robin is in and out of jail for basic street crimes, basically all of Richard's young life. He's locked up for burglary when Richard was born. 

Robin and Leslie divorce when Richard is very young, and he grows up as a mixed-race kid from a fractured home who really struggles to fit in at school and even at home, because Leslie remarries to a white man, and Richard is the only non-white person in his family. A friend in this period recalls Robin always hoped to, quote, “sort out where he was from”, his roots, he wanted to find out an identity. But he's got two white parents. 

I think it's also relevant that this is a time of real anxiety about immigration in the U.K. That also might be status quo for the U.K. as much as it is in the U.S. But it's noteworthy, I think, that the late eighties saw Muslims burning copies of Salman Rushdie's, Satanic Verses, in England after the fatwa was issued against him. And there was this growing tide of Islamophobic narratives among British whites about invasion, a lot of demographic friction that led to increasingly extreme views on either side.

Sarah: There's a Sinead O'Connor lyric from this era that perhaps is helpful, which is, “England's not the mythical land of Madame George and her rose., It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.”

Miles: I absolutely love that song.

Sarah: I was also listening to that in 2001 and just being like, ah, Sinead.

Miles: Yeah, after she passed away, I was listening to that all the time and having big feels. 

Sarah: The U.K. under Thatcher, nothing good is happening really for anyone except the upper crust, as far as I can tell.

Miles: It's bleak. It is bleak. Yeah. Richard's old classmates in a school in South London recall him as helpless and confused, a social outcast who submits easily to peer pressure. And he tags along with a delinquent sort of crowd. But again, he doesn't fit in with the white kids, the black kids. 

One of his teachers says he just never showed any sign of organization. He'd show up without any books or pencils or paper, just nothing. Just drifting through this adolescence. And the trouble he gets into is pretty mild. He sprays graffiti, smokes weed, normal teenager stuff,.

Sarah: Creativity, some might say. But yeah, it feels like we're always looking in these stories. Well, not even necessarily this story, but in any kind of crime or terrorism story, for the exemplary someone who's so destructive or so dangerous from birth. But really, being a follower is dangerous, which is hard to hear in a nation of followers. 

Miles: Yeah, he just has no support system. And the way he starts to graduate to more serious crime is really heartbreaking and kind of unbelievable. But he drops out of school at about 16 years old, and at the same time his mother and his stepfather move out to the west country of England with his younger brother, and basically abandon him.

He ends up in a hostel. Again, no support system. No money. He's an easy target for gangs. But since he doesn't really have anything and he needs to support himself, he ends up coerced into taking part in street muggings and home robberies. Guys can just pull a knife on him and say, do this, do that.

It seems he may have had regrets about these stick-up jobs. There's a story from an old classmate about another person they knew getting stuck up by Richard, and he mouths, “I'm sorry”, as they run away, something like that. There's regret, but there's a way of finally belonging to something as well, even if it was bad. Even though he was a victim of these gangs, he tried to project the kind of street toughness or street savvy. I feel like it's only natural to want to impose a sense of control over a situation where you have none. He's forced to take part in this stuff, so he has to play the part, right?

Sarah: And I also feel like one of the most powerful drives within humans is a desire to be part of something or to belong. And when we have extremely limited options, we'll just take what's available to us, it really seems. 

Miles: So he's 17 when he first goes to jail for mugging. And like his father Robin, Richard is in and out from then on.

Robin turns out to be an influence in another important way. He had converted to Islam while incarcerated in the 80s. And in one of the not so many encounters he had when he and his young son were both free, he recommended Richard do the same if he was jailed again. But interestingly, it's for kind of practical rather than over religious reasons. It's a quality-of-life thing. So you get specially prepared halal meals that are better than the normal food. You get time in mosque away from the other prisoners. Perks like that. Robin also says that Muslims treat you like, quote, “a human being”. So that's attractive if you're in jail, having your brothers.

So in the mid 90s, or his early 20s, Richard is once more behind bars, and he converts as well. It's about far more than attaining some comfort. Richard finally has a real community. He becomes more devout. This was certainly something bigger to belong to, but I would speculate that he is also drawn to radical Islam, and finally jihad, because it gave him absolute identity and the kind of purpose and self-description. You don't really have to doubt yourself or your purpose ever again if you really lean into this extremist and absolutist sort of ideology. So that's the way he's starting to drift. 

Sarah: Yeah, which makes just as much sense for domestic terrorism. And what comes to mind to me for that is, someone who goes out to assassinate abortion doctors or bomb clinics, that there's a complicated moral calculus going on if you think about it. But the point is, that you don't have to think about it anymore.

Miles: I think he enjoys not having to be plagued by that doubt or those decisions anymore. When he's out of Brixton prison in the mid 90s, Richard starts attending London mosques and Islamic cultural centers. So first, it's the Brixton Mosque, which is generally thought of as more moderate. He's actually doing okay at this time. He takes the name Abdel Rahim, and everyone who knows him from this time says he really seemed to be getting his feet under him, he was stabilized. He loved the Quran, and he loved God, and he loved Mosque, and that was his whole life. 

But he'd already spent some time during his incarceration sharpening his critique of Western imperialism, doing a lot of his own reading and research. He seemed totally distraught, and fairly, by what the U.S. did in Africa and the Middle East over decades and decades. Abdul Haq Baker, the Imam at the Brixton Mosque, found Richard a nice addition to the community and, quote, “exuberant in his pursuit of knowledge”. 

But Baker also saw that Richard is very impressionable. In his account, this promising young convert was led astray by extremists at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. So just to set the scene here, during the late 90s, Finsbury saw a lot of from fundamentalist clerics who preached the necessity of jihad and stirred up hate against the unbelievers, that kind of thing. 

One of them, Abdullah El Faisal, is actually also Jamaican, who in 2003 will be convicted of inciting racial hatred and is deported after serving time. Another Richard would have heard at this time was the Imam Abu Hamza. An Egyptian who later wound up extradited to the U.S. and convicted on terrorism charges related to his support for Al Qaeda.

Another figure Richard allegedly looked up to was Zacharias Moussaoui, the one person ever convicted in U.S. court on charges connected to 9/11. Even though he claims he was in the country planning an attack of his own. This is a guy who was also taking flight school classes, so either was going to be perhaps the 20th hijacker or doing his own thing.

The whole Finsbury area had become notorious among Western intelligence services. French authorities had a racist nickname for it, because they were annoyed that the U.K. wasn't clamping down on this ideology.

Sarah: The French racist. 

Miles: I know. I don't want to just say that the U.K. are racist. The French are also racist.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Where there's white people, you'll find it.

Miles: They called it, London Istan. 

Sarah: Come on, you guys. 

Miles: So that gives you an idea what the environment Richard was swimming in. 

Sarah: And to speak to the actuality of 9/11 for a minute, because I feel like I almost want to just gesture to it without getting into it, because it’s hard to touch on it briefly. But I don't know. For me, it's hard to grasp suicide missions. Why is this something that it seems especially young men are able to be talked into?

Miles: Yeah, I think what we see with the disaffection and alienation is that ultimately, they don't really value their own lives. Or they only value their lives as can be fit for this purpose. In the case of someone like Richard, his own life just seems to be an afterthought. And if God can use him in this way, and that's basically what all his higher ups will end up telling him, that becomes your ultimate goal. 

And I think there has to be a kernel of self-loathing always at the beginning of that. And that's often what is exploited in the radicalization process is someone comes to you and they say they're feeling worthless, and you give them a sense of worth. First through religion, and then through God, and then you start interpreting the word of God for them and say actually, “the Quran says not only can you do this, not only is it permissible, but you should do it.”

Sarah: It feels like such a very recognizable pattern. And that also doesn't mean that we all don't, I think, in our own way fall into it. But I would even compare it to something like Girl Defined, where you have the kind of purity culture with an American fundamentalist Christianity that's, “Listen girls, you're worthless. Everyone hates you. But Jesus loves you. But only if you don't get kissed until your wedding day”, or whatever. 

Engaging in purity culture is not as extreme as terrorism. I'm not saying that it is. But I think it's not that far away either. It's doing something that is incredibly counter to what feels good to you, because you've engaged in an ideology where you are at war with your own health and enjoyment of life, and service of a higher power that is ultimately fixated on your death in some way.

Miles: Oh, yeah. Richard is definitely practicing a kind of purity culture. An associate from this period remembers how he had nothing in his room but a bed, a table, and the Quran. 

Sarah: It'd be really funny if he had a Garfield book as well. And that was the third thing he had.

Miles: That's just in the bathroom, yeah. He will always maintain a geopolitical justification for his actions alongside the religious ones. This is from a letter Richard wrote to his mother before the attempted bombing, quote, “I didn't do this act out of ignorance, nor did I do it just because I want to die. But rather I see it as a duty upon me to help remove the oppressive American forces from the Muslim lands. We do not have other means to fight them. We are ready to die defending the true Islam, rather than to just sit back and allow the American government to dictate to us what we should believe and how we should behave. This is a war between Islam and democracy.” 

Sarah: And I really do think he's making some good points, right? When you look at American imperialism and the things that we do as a country, we need to be stopped. To me, the issue… I feel like I'm in like a meeting where someone has proposed terrorism. I'm like, Barb, not to rain on your parade, but to me, the issue with the terrorism idea is that how are we supposed to stop the powers that be in America by killing them? A plane full of civilians, including, Jackie, who's on her way to her first vacation in three years or whatever. 

Miles: Blowing up a random plane doesn't really have the symbolic impact of, attacking a symbol, an actual symbol of American empire and economic hegemony. 

Sarah: You're kind of admitting that it's too hard for you to kill the president, right? Because that's what you should really be thinking about doing. But you're like, it's too hard. We're just going to do a symbol. And it's like, you're killing a symbol? 

Miles: Yeah, we're at a point where stuff gets really murky because now there's a lot of international travel. A lot of this remains mysterious. We know Richard traveled abroad from ‘98 through 2001. No doubt helped by his Finsbury contacts who are seemingly grooming him to become a jihadi soldier. 

No super definitive narrative of his travels. We know he went to Pakistan for further study He probably crossed from there into Afghanistan, where it's believed he received some paramilitary training. But his father is also receiving Richard’s letters from Iran, Iraq. A passport showed that he made it to Egypt,, Israel, Turkey a few countries in Europe probably while casing potential targets for bombing. He was really looking at a lot of buildings at that time. So embassies, because Al Qaeda was already known for bombing embassies. 

The most commonly repeated claim in any version of these travels is that he trained in an Afghan camp named Khaldun, though what he did there is itself a matter of speculation. It's also said that he studied with a man described as Al Qaeda's master bomb maker. Though this is sourced to interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo, which makes it super unreliable to me.

Sarah: I think the idea of there being a master bomb maker is what makes it sound like a bit much.

Miles: Yeah, they really want you to believe that he was the protege of their top bomb guy. And given how the plot unfolded, it would appear he only had the most rudimentary instructions on the handling of explosives, and probably didn't know how they worked, generally.

Sarah: Yeah. Look, I get the temptation once you've arrested someone to be like, hey, he's more important than he is. But it's embarrassing in the long run. 

Miles: That is exactly what they do. But it might suffice to say that at this time, Richard is crossing paths with people who'd later be sought for their alleged roles in 9/11, people who end up in Guantanamo, eventually connected to attempted embassy bombings.

When all is said and done, it won't even be clear how the so-called shoe bomb was obtained or where in the world it was assembled. Though basically, no one believes he could have made it himself. And there are still a lot of questions about how the plot took shape. 

Sarah: And how old is he when the plot goes, so 28?

Miles: Yes. He is 28 when he tries to carry out the plot. 

Sarah: Yeah, so somebody with their life together at that age could have maybe made a nice shoe bomb. But I don't know, it seems pretty complicated. Seems like he's more of a drifter. 

Miles: Yeah, we are talking about someone who dropped out of school at 16, and the education is not there. The entire thing, when you zoom out, it just looks remarkably amateurish or haphazard. Compared it again to 9/11, obviously, it's hard to live up to 9/11 if you're a terrorist two months later. 

Sarah: You got to just do something different. 

Miles: This only came out in the investigation afterward, but did you know there were supposed to be a second shoe bomber? So this guy was also traveling around Pakistan, Afghanistan, basically back and forth between the Middle East and Europe, getting some training. This was another young man in the same circles as Richard, named Sajid Badat. Unlike Richard, Badat, who was tasked with taking down a second plane, backed out of the suicide mission days before he meant to carry it out. So he wound up receiving a lengthy prison sentence anyway and turned government informant. He actually would eventually testify against one of the Finsbury clerics who Richard heard.

He also testified about meeting Osama bin Laden, who encouraged him to die for the sake of jihad. And he said that along with Richard, he received advice on bombing an airliner from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is commonly referred to as the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks. Again, these guys are linked to pretty top al Qaeda guys, but their level of instruction is vague. The planning just seems disastrous. 

Sarah: And again, how much credence do you give to that? Because if I were caught and became an informant, I would be like, yeah, of course I met Osama bin Laden. I talked to the guy. 

Miles: I would absolutely say that. I would even make up something about, I don't know, beating Osama bin Laden at Scrabble or something like that. You could say anything. 

Sarah: I would be like, the thing about Osama, he only likes a runny fried egg. So if you meet up with him, don't hard cook them He'll hate it and then you'll lose your eggs.

It feels like there's a lot of gray area here. But it's also clear that we're looking at a time when, you know, not to zoom out too much, but so much of what the public saw in the years following this period, just the few years following it, was learning so much about how our government interrogated people and how people will say anything if you torture them.

Miles: Yeah, I think it's important to say that the intelligence here is just so bad. Between coerced confessions from black sites, and just FBI and CIA, a kind of making up things that they assume to be true. A lot of it is an educated guess, and a lot of the guesses are wrong, I would say.

There's room for debate over the origin of the shoes as well. So Richard will later claim that the idea was his and that he came up with it after noticing that airport security doesn't examine your footwear. Maybe he just wanted credit for the concept. I doubt that this was his idea It's Mohammad who's thought to have selected airplanes as targets after a lot of reconnaissance of buildings Richard considered for attacks. Richard wasn't even looking at planes, he was looking at a lot of buildings.

So eventually, top al qaeda guy comes along and says, “No, you're gonna blow up a plane instead.” It's reasonable to imagine that the shoes were likewise a top down, you know, this is a pretty hierarchical organization. I don't think Richard was pitching his idea for a bombing.  

Sarah: Al Qaeda is not famous for being like, what are your ideas? Have you been any pet projects?

Miles: Yeah, brainstorming sessions. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Official accounts really agree that he and Badat received financial and technical assistance from Al Qaeda operatives. Richard simply didn't have the time, the money to buy explosives, let alone the skills or resources to construct an IED out of his sneakers with them.

He says he bought the plastic explosives for $1,500 bucks. Where'd you get the money, Richard? You don't have that money, right? But he would tell the authorities that he got his shoes in Afghanistan. The French police argue that Richard’s shoes were put together by a terror cell in Paris, which is where he disembarked on the plane he tried to destroy. But the matching chemical composition and detonator cords suggest that the two pairs were made together somewhere by someone. 

So at this point, both Reid and Badat obtained duplicate passports in late 2001. They visited Pakistan, and likely Afghanistan again following the 9/11 attacks. They separately returned to the UK and Badat was meant to fly from Manchester to Amsterdam and take a flight to the U.S. that he would blow up. But the way he pulls out of this is very interesting. 

When Badat came home, father sat him down and warned him about taking part in a terror plot. When he testifies later in court, he recalled, quote, “My father knew I had traveled to Afghanistan. My father sat me down and said, ‘I've heard about sleepers. If I find out you are one of those sleepers, I will kill you’.”

There's something incredible about being threatened out of a suicide attack this way, but it works. It works. When your dad says, “I'll kill you if you kill yourself”. 

Sarah: You're like, all right. I don't know. It's just because this is such a horrible, sad topic. I really needed that laugh. God, that's so beautiful.

Miles: He's still getting encouragement from his handlers. “No, you got to go through with it.” But he never boards the flight out of Manchester. Dad has spoken. And it's instructive to compare this moment for Badat, who was raised in a relatively stable environment by his Malawi immigrant parents in the UK. He had no trouble integrating into British society as a youth. And compare that with a comment from Richard's father, Robin, who would say of his son's bombing plot, quote, “I blame myself for not being there when he was growing up.” Oh, man. Richard just had nothing to lose and no one to stop him. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's the thing about being a dumb young person. You need someone who loves you to sit you down and be like, “If you take part in a suicide mission, I will fucking kill you.’

Miles: Yeah, I will follow you to hell. 

Sarah: And then I will spank you in hell.

Miles: So his attack is just a failure on every level to any reasonable observer. It looks totally harebrained. While it's true that a violent terrorist group has to view someone like Richard as expendable, I can't shake the sense that this event is just a total stab in the dark.

They're trying an approach they knew had very little chance of success. Very little in the way of logical finesse. On the off chance it actually works, an, worst case scenario, this guy goes to prison forever and we don't really care about him that much anyway. So to give you a sense of how badly planned and plotted this was, Richard can't even manage to get on the plane the first time.

Sarah: Oh boy. Oh, it's just like the attack on Nancy Kerrigan. It's the worst planning ever. 

Miles: Yep, just have thought through basically none of the details. So this is again, just two months after 9/11. Reid shows up at the Paris airport on December 21st, aiming to catch an American Airlines flight to Miami. He pays in cash, has no baggage, is otherwise so disheveled and dirty and oddly behaved, that he's pulled aside for questioning for long enough to miss the plane. 

Sarah: And 9/11 just happened, so you need to be a little bit more sneaky.

Miles: Gotta be a little on the ball. He apparently just is also unfazed by being pulled out of the line and questioned. And you know at this time, if you're getting grilled at the airport, you should sweat a little bit. But he's just oh, yeah, of course of course they got me. 

This to me just recalls the teacher story about not bringing a pencil or notebook to class. He has this mission, but zero idea what it will take to execute. The police and security people are totally unnerved by how he's indifferent to this examination. The incident document calls him ‘emotionless’. You could say if there's a universal red flag in air travel, it's betraying no emotion when you're going to miss your international flight. 

Everything about this original run in just leads me to wonder how much training he actually got from Al Qaeda. Because he shows no sign of what we'd consider the bare essentials of avoiding detection. There's no effort. 

Sarah: It's also so strange for Al Qaeda to have had this terrorist event that they really shocked the world with, and then they're like, and now for our next move, something incredibly low effort that probably won't work. What's that about? 

Miles: I guess it's partly you want to keep the momentum going, but you're going to have to try something else because there are new measures in place already.

They let him go because he hasn’t committed a crime. And he calls one of his handlers, who says, “Oh, you got to try again.” The next day, December 22nd, rather than having a change of heart, he returns to board the same American Airlines flight to Miami. No problems this time. Only when they are out over the Atlantic does everything go sideways.

This is our ‘see something, say something moment’. The flight attendants, who are the hero of this piece as ever, are of course on edge because 9/11 was a few weeks ago. They take notice of Richard pretty soon. He's a big guy, 6 foot 4, 200 pounds, he's behaving weirdly. He won't take food, he won't even take water, and this is a long transatlantic flight.

One attendant tries to feel him out, just with small talk, and the vibes are just off. She feels like he's lying about where he's from, that kind of thing. They go about their work. After meal service, passengers start complaining that they smell smoke. An attendant walks by Richard's seat. He's alone by a window, and she sees him trying to strike a match, which is not allowed. She thinks he's trying to smoke and tells him off for it. I guess if you're flying from Paris, maybe people think you can smoke on the plane. 

Sarah: You probably do run into that, huh? 

Miles: He promises he'll stop. And he takes the odd step of using the charred match to pick at his teeth. That's what he was going to use the match for instead. I don't know. Not convincing. Doesn't exactly put her at ease. 

This attendant comes back in a few minutes, and he's bent over in his seat. But she still thinks he's trying to smoke, and she's really pissed about it this time, as only a flight attendant can be. She tries to get his attention again. This time he ignores her, so she starts pulling at him.

And that's when she realizes that he's got a shoe off in his lap. There's a fuse of some kind coming out of it. 

A few media reports will claim that he's trying to light his shoelaces, or that the fuse is coming out of the tongue of the shoe. This is one of those things where there's just a ton of weird disagreement about whether the fuse is running through the shoelace. Again, all this just suggests to me that this is like a piece of shit bomb that was never going to work. Just seems extremely janky, right. And there's an indifference to how the device is theoretically supposed to work. It's just this cartoonish image, right? You just picture an ACME shoe with a big bomb fuse coming out of it. 

Sarah: And you know about those ACME products, they never work.

Miles: No, that's always going to blow up in your face. Even if not literally. It's just this image that tries to make the shoe seem really scary when, I guess, we should be scared of terrorists. But all of a sudden, all this focus is on the shoe, right? The shoe has this novelty factor. We've never seen this before. 

So the flight attendant is grabbing Richard. She grabs him a couple of times and he throws her off very hard. She's injured. She goes running for help from another attendant, who instinctively realizes Richard is trying to do something wrong. She grabs him and then Richard just bites down on her thumb and won't let go. So he's got her thumb in his mouth, just biting down as hard as he can. She screams. This will give her a scar that I think she probably still has. She did a couple of years after. 

Sarah: I would be worried about losing motion as well. You just feel bad for someone who had no idea that was going to be happening when they got up that morning. 

Miles: She screams. Now the other passengers are getting involved. They start to restrain Richard. He finally lets go of her thumb. By now the first attendant, I love this detail, has distributed bottles of Evian water so that everyone nearby can douse Richard in case anything has been ignited. So they're pouring really nice, probably my favorite bottled water, all over this guy. 

Sarah: Awww. That's so great. 

Miles: Again, the resourcefulness and the action of everyone else aboard is wild. The passengers collect a bunch of stuff like belts and headphone cords and seat belt extensions to tie Richard to the seat. And when the plane eventually makes an emergency landing in Boston, he's bound so tight that FBI agents have to cut him out of the chair. So it was a zealous response from the passengers. 

Sarah: I hope that the passengers on that plane have reunions. 

Miles: Oh my god, I hope so, too. A doctor is on board. He gives Richard some Valium to sedate him, but he's still wriggling and taunting the crew. Now, at this point, there's also the thought that he could have an accomplice aboard. One passenger thinks they saw Richard at the airport with another person the day prior, so they get taken through the cabin to try to look at everybody.

Again, there's no protocol for this, so it's pretty amazing that the flight crew figured all this stuff out. But they say, talk to your seatmates, everyone get to know each other so we can identify anyone else who might be suspicious. 

In all this confusion, the crew don't know immediately to suspect the shoes of being explosive. It's strange. Again, this goes to the seeming jankiness of the bomb, is that nobody thinks that's a bomb, per se. They know he's trying to light something on fire. In fact, Richard is restrained for about half an hour before they think to even confiscate the shoes. 

Sarah: That's so great. It's like when history is happening to you, you just never noticed the salient details, I kind of feel like.

Miles: They're like, oh, we better take the shoes. An officer takes them to the cockpit. Now, you could probably guess that's not true procedure for an object you believe could be a bomb is to take it to the front of the plane. It doesn't seem great.

The thought is that he might have had a knife in there, that's what they think at first. Except then they see the wire and a scorch mark and go, well shit, let's not have that in the cockpit. 

They stash, this is a really confusing thing, they stash the shoes in what a Time article profiling the flight attendants called, quote, “a safe place reserved on all planes for bomb disposal”. I could find zero information on what that space is or how it works. So I just imagine them locking the shoes in the beverage cart or something. 

This is one of those things where the hacky, old comedian routine is, why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box? Why don't you make the whole plane the bomb proof chamber you have? I don't know. This just seems like nonsense. 

Sarah: Do you think this pilot was talking to a Newsweek reporter and just completely bullshitted them? It was just like, “And then we placed it in the safe place on all planes for bomb disposal.”

Miles: Yeah, the bomb drawer. Okay, now imagine this. The flight continues for three more hours as it's diverted to Boston. 

Sarah: So you know, you put on Sex in the City 2. 

Miles: It's better. Nobody can stand up from their seat without permission. Again, the attendants are all coming up with all this stuff on the fly. They have no procedure for this. They search anyone who needs to use the bathroom. Another stands guard at the cockpit. The crew puts on a movie so that everyone can relax. Do you want to guess what it was? 

Sarah: Oh my god. Zoolander?

Miles: You are close in vibe. It's Legally Blonde. 

Sarah: It would be. Oh my god, just imagine. I want this to be a TikTok POV trend. Like POV, you just took down a terrorist and now you're settling in to watch Legally Blonde. 

Miles: Time to unwind with Reese Witherspoon. 

Sarah: Because it just feels so human, right? it feels so great to hear about these people who lived and had this terrifying,, and also very funny experience.

Miles: So while they're en route to Boston enjoying Legally Blonde, the FBI is alerted to the incident. They're waiting to take Richard into custody when the plane lands. They're ready to interview witnesses, etc. 

The next afternoon, one of the FBI special agents who responded to the call, submits a very short criminal complaint against Richard that doesn't mention the bombs at all. It describes him trying to ignite his shoes with a match and his recently acquired passport, but the affidavit is very straightforwardly just charging him with assaulting and intimidating flight attendants on an aircraft and interfering with the performance of their duties. Which he did. 

Sarah: It's certainly true.

Miles: It's pretty serious. It's 20 years in prison, but it's not terrorism. And according to this part of the U.S. Code, the intent of the suspect is actually moot. Whatever your reason for biting the flight attendant, it doesn't matter. You are disrupting the flight and could have killed everyone.

Richard won't be indicted on terrorism charges until a few weeks later, on January 16th. I think that the FBI's initial complaint was much less serious, just the assault charge, and filed so quickly, possibly due to a quirk of the Patriot Act. 

Sarah: Oh boy the Patriot Act. 

Miles: The sweeping national security law that had just been signed. So the US could now indefinitely detain aliens, but they had to be charged with a crime within seven days or be released. So this seems to me the sort of thing where they know they're going to hit him with everything they've got. But for the time being, we'll just hold him on biting the attendant, essentially. 

Sarah: Feels like something Lenny Briscoe would explain. 

Miles: I think one effect this has is that until the really heavy charges come down, the media has complete control of the bomb side of the story. And things got really confusing. Everyone has their different sources. He acted alone. He had help. He bought exposes online. He got them somewhere else. 

There's an op ed columnist who's mad that we were calling him the ‘shoe bomber’ because he thinks it's too cutesy, basically. Quickly you got a pair of competing narratives. On the one hand, there's the sense that Richard is the ultimate loser, incompetent, walking punchline, was never going to pull this off. On the other hand, the Bush department of justice was always going to make a big example of this guy. He was foiled and caught alive. He could be tried only two days afterward. The FBI is saying he had enough explosive material to blow a hole in the plane fuselage and bring it down. We'll get into sort of the nuance of that. 

But by early January, we have a Wall Street Journal article quoting experts who say, quote, “The device is reminiscent of one commonly used by Palestinian suicide bombers, but more sophisticated.” So neither of us is a bomb expert, I assume. But the FBI has a picture of Richard's shoes on their site, and I'm going to send it to you.

Sarah: I'm excited. 

Miles: Tell me if you think this looks like a really sophisticated device. 

Sarah: Okay. These are like computer guy, outdoorsy, a hiking sneaker, I would say. 

Miles: Yeah. IT guy going for a hike. 

Sarah: Yep. Totally. With his elf girlfriend. And so is the bomb in the heel of the one on the right? 

Miles: Yeah. So the soles of the shoe had the material in them. What was in the shoes was PETN, which stands for a chemical compound. I won't try to pronounce, but it's similar to nitroglycerin. This was meant to be the main explosive, and the trigger or accelerant was something called TATP. Which is the ingredient that investigators recognize from lots of other suicide bombs.

The arrangement is really unusual here. PETN is very stable and typically used as the detonator ingredient. TATP, by comparison, is super volatile and has been known to kill people working with it. There's an expert who says, “I’d be careful even stamping my feet in anger if I had that in my shoes.” Richard will claim that he has been walking around on these shoes for a month. That's probably not true. Probably might have combusted anyway. 

Sarah: Although also, classic Richard, I might add.

Miles: He was lying a lot. So this is where you'd get some debate over whether the shoe bomb ever could have worked the way it was intended. PETN is actually so stable that it's difficult to detonate without a metal part, like a blasting cap. Something that would have been detected by airport security because he walked through a metal detector.

So years later a Nigerian terrorist nicknamed, ‘the underwear bomber’ would try to bring down a plane by igniting a packet of PETN sewn into his underwear. And all he managed to do was give himself first and second degree burns before flight attendants turned a fire extinguisher on him. He also had more of the stuff on him, and it didn't combust, he caught fire. He caught fire after this incident. Explosives experts did a test detonation on a decommissioned 747 and found that even if the underwear bomber's device had worked as planned, it wouldn't have broken the plane's fuselage. And most likely it would have only killed the bomber and the passenger next to him. Even in a worst-case scenario, a plane can land with a chunk of the fuselage missing, as we just saw with that scary Alaska Airlines story. 

Sarah: Yeah, which flew out of the Portland Airport, by the way, and back into it 20 minutes later after a chunk of the cabin flew off. That doesn't stress me out at all.

Is the problem here, in a very basic dumbed down way, that the difficulty level of building a bomb powerful enough to take down a plane is raised by having to do it in a way that won't be detected by airport security?

Miles: That's exactly it. The parts you would need for this to be an effective suicide bomb, as you would see, like a suicide vest or something that happens on a ground attack. There's a lot of metal parts. 

Sarah: That's comforting, actually. 

Miles: Yeah. And even with a specific explosive, there's an incident where someone tried to use the same stuff, PETN, had twice as much of it on him, was trying to assassinate someone, and he only killed himself and mildly injured his target, who was a few feet away from him. So the explosive just isn't that effective in these various circumstances that he's in. 

I mean given that nobody to my knowledge has ever carried out a successful shoe bombing, while the Middle East has seen countless suicide bombings with countless fatalities. I just find the word ‘sophisticated’ really suspect. Just say nothing of the Palestinian comparison and they're like, what do we have to do with it. 

To me, it doesn't really hurt your case to call this a ‘crude’ bomb. There's a chance it could have gone off as intended, it could have hurt someone. Yes, it could have killed him. It could have killed everybody, sure. 

Sarah: And that's worth being scared of. 

Miles: We're seeing this simultaneous urge to write Richard off and claim he's a mastermind with a uniquely dangerous weapon. Humiliate him, but raise the fear of the next shoe bomber pulling this off. This is so typical of post 9/11-era. America can vanquish any enemy with ease, but they're always out there lurking, plotting, figuring out a way to kill you with their shoe.

Sarah: Right. And this need to envision the enemy as hyper competent, hyper sophisticated, always one step ahead, because I feel like that really allows us to justify any use of force. Which, famously in this period, we did.

Miles: Yeah, all FBI saying it could have brought down the plane and killed everyone. So yeah, like I said, in January he's getting all the big charges. Our good buddy, Attorney General John Ashcroft, gives a big press conference about Richard's main indictment. 

His main indictment includes a charge for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which is pretty grandiose, homicide charges, and quote, attempted wrecking of a mass transportation vehicle. That is a new anti-terrorism offense at the time, also thanks to the Patriot Act. I have no doubt they could have sent Richard to prison for life if this happened in the 90s, but Ashcroft goes out of his way to act like the Patriot Act really did something here. Quote, “I want to take this opportunity once again to thank the Congress, for providing us with the necessary tools that we need to protect the safety and security of American citizens.” He really leans into the heroic passengers and crew angle, quote, “On Flight 63, for a very few minutes at least every passenger was vigilant and alert, every passenger an air marshal.” 

Sarah: Every passenger watching Legally Blonde. 

Miles: I imagine everyone getting little pilot wings. 

Sarah: This feels like this is seeing into the future of the next 20 years, because something that changed as a norm, really surprisingly quickly, is that now it's very normal for people to have home security cameras, rRng cameras, cameras in the doorbell, cameras inside the house. And I feel not long ago, you would be considered paranoid or weird to be doing that. But I think this era of American history really helped solidify this feeling that we would all be safe if we could all just continuously surveil each other.

Miles: Yeah, I should be able to get on Next Door and ask my neighbors, “Do you think this Amazon delivery driver is stalking me because I keep seeing him in the neighborhood?” Just whatever out your front door is reason to be fearful and suspect. And yeah, you're the main character in some kind of awful thriller. 

So this takes us to Richard Reid's true legacy, the pain in the ass of taking your shoes off every time you fly. So I am a couple years older than you, but I'm wondering, do you have any memories of what airport security was like before 9/11?  

Sarah: I do. Yeah. Because I remember I was 13 when 9/11 happened, and my family flew a decent amount in the scheme of things. And so I remember so well that it was just a normal thing that you would go through a very cursory amount of security and you didn't need a ticket to go through it. And then you could bring someone to the gate. 

And this is I think, in the first or a very early episode of Seinfeld as a relationship test. If you're picking up a woman you're seeing, where do you pick her up? Or no, this was on Friends. It could have been on both, But it was the sort of 90s comedy of manners thing that if you want to be a good partner to somebody, you pick them up at the gate. Because you used to be able to do that and it was incredible.

Miles: Yeah, I feel like an entire generation of rom-coms just make no sense now because you'd never be able to get that far. 

Sarah: Like how did Tom Hanks get in there?

Miles: It was designed to be unobtrusive, a metal detector and that's it. You walk to the gates without a boarding pass, without an ID. It was like taking a bus. 

The Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, is created in November 2001 and becomes an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with federal oversight of security procedures at all airports. Now since then, the TSA has come up with all kinds of fun hoops to jump through challenges. I like to think of them as it would be fair to describe most of them as security theater. 

You have the full body scanners, which are invasive and have led to the harassment of transgender travelers. We have dealt with a lot of racial profiling. In TSA lines, there's the rule about only bringing fluids in containers smaller than 3.4 ounces. Which we know isn't based on anything because they made a COVID exception for hand sanitizer, which is actually flammable. 

Sarah: Yeah, and they're like, I'm sure you've read those nightmare stories of people having to throw out breast milk that they just pumped because it violated the rule.

Miles: Yep. And in fact, that rule, the fluid rule, is probably to help the airport sell you overpriced concessions because they want you to get that 7oz bottle of Dasani, which just tastes like sweat. And you have to put your shoes through the x-ray machine to check for bombs, obviously. 

Sarah: Which is great for people who want to look at each other's feet, but terrible for the rest of us.

Miles: Foot fetishes. Winning. 

Sarah: Yeah. Quentin Tarantino has come out on top yet again. 

Miles: Now interestingly, this doesn't become mandatory right away for a few years. The TSA keeps people in a weird limbo like they like to do. Like you're encouraged to take your shoes off, but it's still technically your choice. They just make it more annoying if you don't voluntarily take them off in the form of extra searches and pat downs or whatever. 

And in 2006, it seems the TSA decides to standardize shoe removal and maximize the misery for everyone. Now nobody got blown up by a shoe bomb in those five years, of course, and ever since, it's been a top complaint about air travel across the board, unless you're shelling out for pre check privilege.

So this 2006 decision to make it standard, the agency said this choice is, quote, “based on intelligence pointing to a continuing threat from shoe bombs.” 

Sarah: Oh, really? 

Miles: A continuing threat from shoe bombs? It's ongoing. They've issued a few similar warnings in the years since. Always very vague. Always just this, ‘oh intelligence points to there might be a shoe bomb at some point. They are asking their agents to be vigilant’. 

And that's all the justification you're ever going to hear for this policy. The TSA has never publicly announced that they caught another shoe bomber with their screening process. But if they had, I bet we would have heard about it, because the person would have been prosecuted as a terrorist.

Sarah: We tend to really like publicizing the terrorists that we catch in this country. 

Miles: Plus this is an intensely hated federal agency. They would take any PR when they could. I just know they would love to say, “See, a shoe bomb! We kept you safe. We got it.” 

Sarah: It's also worth pointing out that TSA, for all of the rigmarole, makes a lot of mistakes and lets a lot through. And it's famously surprisingly easy to get a gun through airport security to this day. Not that I've done it, but I've read about it.

Miles: Notably, too, if you've flown out of any airport outside the US, you most likely didn't take your shoes off. This is a distinctly American thing. Not even in Israel, which has some of the tightest airport security in the world. They pay about 10 times more per passenger on security costs than we do. They don't make you take your shoes off. 

Sarah: That feels like it illustrates really well that this is something that we're doing because, for whatever reason, we wanted to give people another thing to do that would allow them to, I don't know, as you said, to make the theater feel complete. Because there's just, there's nothing in those things.

Miles: Just some foot funk. That's it. In the more than two decades since Richard Reid, nobody has been injured or killed because of a shoe bomb anywhere, no matter the security protocol at the point of their departure. But Americans normalized this inconvenience as the cost of safety. 

And we automatically take our shoes off now, even when we're abroad and we don't have to. There are stories of people doing this at the airport in Germany or so, and a German person has to say, we don't even do that here. What are you doing? 

It's so strange that while failing in his mission, Richard should leave this lasting imprint on our society. He pleads guilty to eight federal terrorism charges in 2002. He gets three life sentences, plus another 110 years. He's been in the Colorado Supermax prison ever since. That's the same place that housed Ted Kaczinski, Timothy McVeigh. A lot of notorious people who are isolated from general prison populations. 

He's never shown any remorse, and by all accounts, remains a religious zealot. Here and there over the years he's gone on hunger strikes, saying he's not being allowed to practice his faith or study Arabic, and over time he gets a few more freedoms.

His mother passes away only a few years after the attack. Her friends will say that it was a broken heart. He keeps writing letters to his estranged father, sometimes upbraiding him for not being a devout Muslim. He's giving him shit for not praying five times a day. Over the years he becomes an interesting point of comparison because he's living in way better conditions than detainees at Guantanamo, which is something he's keenly aware of early on. 

He tells a lawyer that quote “Guantanamo Bay will provide us with thousands of recruits the longer it is maintained.” Meaning recruits for Al Qaeda. As for the attempted bombing itself, Reid tells a researcher that he writes letters to that. He has quote, “tactical regrets”. Fair enough, understatement of the century. But believes everything that happened the way it did is what Allah wanted for whatever reason, quote, “I am NOT crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing. Of course, I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous. It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed.” 

Years later, he argues in a letter to this extremism researcher, Dr. Kimberly Melman Orozco, that what he tried to do is permitted by Islamic law, but quote, “at the same time, I also believe that it wasn't supposed to happen. Not because it was displeasing to God, rather because it was not either my time to die nor that of those on the plane with me, and he had other plans for me. Which include my staying in prison and other matters, which I may not be aware of as yet.”

So Melvin Orozco cites this as an example of how once radicalized, a terrorist sticks to their worldview, even after being locked up in isolation. And it makes perfect sense. This identity as a soldier of jihad was everything to him. And Islam was part of how he survived jail as a younger man. He has to keep believing he was following divine orders. He even at one point writes a letter saying that he's gotten favorable signs from God. But he does continue to see, optimistic signs, like in his religion, which is fascinating. He's 28 when he got on that plane, now he's 50. Almost half of his life in the supermax. 

Sarah: God. Yeah, and this, I don't know that this feels partly connected to how dangerous man's search for meaning can be, and that engaging in terrorism can help with your search for meaning and belonging. And then starting a war to allegedly counter that terrorism can do the same thing. And it's hard to look back and identify solutions, at least for me, but what is looking at this story in particular help show you about this moment that we shared as a country?

Miles: It's pretty clear from his correspondence and some of his requests in prison for magazines and the like, that Richard continues to follow current events. I'm sure he kept up with the war on terror. And from his comments about Guantanamo getting Al Qaeda more recruits, he clearly thinks that American empire will continue to self-destruct in this way.

I'm inclined to think he does know that Americans take their shoes off at the airport now. How could he not know? But not having seen it or experienced it, I wonder if he can really grasp what that shift in behavior means. Billions of minutes of discomfort, the loss of dignity that comes with shedding your footwear for government inspection in this heavily trafficked public space. I would never say this ritual humiliation is worse than the loss of human life. But in the broader context of air travel, which has become an exercise in inflicting minor pains that you can then pay your way out of, it's definitely an insult. And I think Richard would take some satisfaction in that every day, these godless infidels made to suffer a tiny bit for no good reason. And of course he'd say we deserve it. 

Sarah: I think I'm okay with having a moral where if you really want to have a legacy by doing something terrible, then you actually have a better chance of being remembered by inconveniencing hundreds of millions of people than by killing a comparatively small number. So if you must do something along those lines, do the inconveniencing thing, it'll work out better. 

Miles: Anyway, yeah, unleash a computer virus that makes it your smart chip card tap system doesn't work anymore, or just fucks up half the time. 

Sarah: I guess become an engineer at Apple Don't be a terrorist. Become an engineer at Apple. Get rid of a feature that people weren't done using yet. Decide that we can't have AirPods anymore and have to beam music directly into our brains. 

Miles: Buy a social media app and ruin it. 

Sarah: Yeah, don't be a terrorist. Go into tech. Go into business. Get an MBA. That's really how you make people suffer.

Miles, this was a delight, which is a weird word to use for a program of this nature. But I feel like the story is somewhere within the very large story of this period in history in a way that makes it feel less overwhelming. And I really appreciate that.

Miles: Oh, thank you for having me. This was a story I've always wanted to look into and always felt this just got totally lost between the cracks as we hurtled toward a much bigger geopolitical moment. 

Sarah: Where else can people find your work? What have you been up to lately?

Miles: Yeah, so I'm a staff writer at Rolling Stone. You can find my byline there. Other than that, I am still, against my better judgment, tweeting on my third account after a couple bans. Don't have to get into that. The handle is, @YouWouldntPost. Play on that you wouldn't steal a car music piracy ad. 

Sarah: You wouldn't download a purse. Yes, I would. 

Miles: And I have a couple of books that are somewhat harder to find, but if you really want them, you'll find them. 

Sarah: If you really want to get these mysterious books, you must paddle to an island. I think that's a really good approach to getting people interested in your books.

Miles: A little mystery. Good luck finding them.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you to Miles Klee for being an amazing guest. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for being a wonderful editor. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for being the producer extraordinaire. 

Join us in Britney land if you can, we would love to see you there. Bye bye. And until next time, thank you for being here. We'll see you in two weeks.