On July 12, 1989, Richard Clark Johnson was leaving work in Bedford, Massachusetts.

When he got to the parking lot, he found two men in his car trying to take out his dashboard.

He cornered them and someone called the police.

But just as the cops pulled up, the men breaking into his car identified themselves as FBI

agents and arrested him.

Richard Johnson was an electrical engineer with government security clearance.

He worked at a large defense contractor called Miter.

But it turned out that he was also part of a ring of technicians and computer scientists

were helping the Irish Republican Army create homemade weapons.

When the FBI arrested Johnson and his co-conspirators in 1989,

they were working on an ambitious pet project.

A homemade guided missile capable of bringing down a British helicopter.

I'm Nate Lavy and this is Foreign Agent.

In this bonus episode, we're going to look at two American attempts to develop weapons

technology for the Irish Republican movement. We'll go from below the waves in the world's

first modern submarine to the skies over county to Rome.

Since the mid-1970s, Johnson had been working with an electronic systems engineer in Ireland,

named Peter McGuire. They traded letters on how to improve the IRA's remote control bombs.

These explosives figured in some of the IRA's most well-known attacks.

On August 27, 1979, one of these led the NBC Nightly News.

Earl Mountbatten was killed today. The Irish Republican Army said it was responsible

and called it an execution. He was a great figure in British and Western history,

...