In May 1961, more than a year before Telstar, the world’s first commercial communications satellite was launched. America’s transcontinental phone system suffered a man-made catastrophe. At a time when coast-to-coast communication still depended on copper wires and microwave relay towers, a pair of saboteurs set off explosives that crippled critical communication links in Utah and Nevada.
The events that transpired in nearby Utah and Nevada had a profound effect on the young men of the Wyoming National Guard.
“This was before satellites, we didn’t have any communication coast to coast,” Bill Sedlacek of Dubois, then a young guardsman, said. “No one knew what happened.”
What happened was the deliberate demolition of a cable repeater station in Knolls, Utah, and two microwave repeater towers near Wendover, Utah, and Grant, Nevada.
On May 28, the “American Republican Army,” a group organized by Jerome Brous and Dale Jensen, set off the explosives that destroyed these facilities.
The two men came from diverse backgrounds on opposite ends of the country. They were tied by a common motive; they hated big companies like AT&T and wanted to scare them into lowering prices and improving services for the average consumer.
Brous was a real estate advisor from New York; his partner in crime, Jensen, was a heavy equipment operator from Nevada.
The explosions were first thought to be attacks by Soviet agents, a concern in the rapidly escalating Cold War.
It wasn’t the Russians, but rather disgruntled Americans who caused the panic. The attacks set off a worldwide effort to locate the bombers. Three weeks later, Brous and Jensen were arrested on a yacht near Ensenada, Mexico. The yacht was filled with weapons.
New York Times – June 19, 1961
WASHINGTON, June 18 – The capture of two Americans in Mexico on charges of complicity in the blowing up of three remote communications towers near the Utah-Nevada border just three weeks ago was announced today by the Justice Department. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy announced the capture of the men, with an arsenal of weapons, on a yacht at Ensenada, Lower California. Reports from Ensenada, a port seventy-five miles down the coast from San Diego, Calif., quoted the men as saying that the towers had been blown up on behalf of an organization, the “American Republican Army,” that sought to seize power in the United States.
While it played out as the attack of a couple of individuals and not a Cold War conspiracy, it did provide a week of excitement for National Guard troops from California to the East Coast along the communications corridor adjacent to the recently completed Interstate 80.
The Wendover Blast, a narrative written by George Phelps a quarter-century after the event describes the phone company’s response.
“No one actually saw the explosions that morning, though several Wendover residents were jolted awake by the tremendous blast. A truck driver, asleep in his cab near the Wendover Notch driveway, was startled by the thunderous boom. Blinking in disbelief, he watched a shower of white flecks—Styrofoam from the shattered antennas—drift down like snow.
At exactly 4:42 a.m., Evard Van Welch, the transmission man on duty at the Elko toll-repeater office, was alerted by a signal from the Wendover Notch station. The alarm codes spelled out a “total failure.” He immediately notified his supervisor, George Elmore, who was on weekend duty. Elmore in turn called Red Wayman, the Supervising Wire Chief. (Had I been home that morning, I too would have been on the call list.)
Moments later, before Van could regroup, his console lit up with a “Christmas tree” of alarms from the eastern underground-cable repeaters—clear evidence of a major outage. All communications to the east were down, including the Company’s own maintenance circuits. Control offices in Reno, Sacramento, and Oakland rang in simultaneously, desperate for answers.
Relief arrived at 5:20 a.m. when Wayman and Elmore joined Van. A three-man crew—Albert Salls, Ernie Simonsen, and Larry Staley—was quickly dispatched to Wendover. (Unknown to the Elko men, Salt Lake City had already sent crews to Cedar Mountain and Knolls.) A preliminary incident report was rushed to PT&T headquarters in San Francisco.
By 6:00 a.m., the chain of notification was in motion: Wayman reported to Paul Brown (maintenance superintendent), who notified Jim Dodson (Nevada plant manager), who in turn contacted Bob McAdam (assistant to the Vice President and General Manager) in Reno. In Sacramento, the Company’s chief special agent, Knopp, was brought in. East of Nevada, parallel calls spread through AT&T Long Lines territory.
From San Francisco to New York, telephone men of every rank scrambled to assess the damage, reroute circuits, and launch emergency restoration. By noon, hundreds of employees were involved—engineers, exchange maintenance crews, and nearly every toll man in Nevada and California.
That evening, portable microwave radio units and operating crews were airlifted from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego aboard Air Force Globemasters and civilian transports. They landed first at Wendover Air Base, with additional Long Lines flights touching down in Salt Lake City.”
Interstate 80 in Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada had red brick buildings along the highway approximately every 50 miles. These were relay stations on the transcontinental telephone line.
The Utah National Guard was mobilized immediately, and soon units in neighboring states were activated.
“National Guard units across the country were called to guard relay stations, some were microwave and some were wired,” Sedlacek said. “They called guard units that were adjacent to those buildings all across the country. They put guards on each one of the stations, with support people from the armories.”
Sedlacek was in a communications platoon.
“I set up a radio relay between the various guard units in southern Wyoming,” he said. “We were there for four, five or six days.”
The guard units worked out of individual armories to deploy troops, send out relief, set up food services and provide bunks.
“We stayed on duty. The guard unit across the southern part of Wyoming was the 351st artillery battalion,” Sedlacek said. “After Korea was shut down, the Wyoming troops from the northern part of the state that had gone to Korea, came back. The southern part of the state became tankers and they sent them to Germany to sit on the Czech border.”
When the guard units returned from Korea and Germany, it was decided they needed to beef up the guard. Officially, the Korean War wasn’t over; it still isn’t over today.
“They started recruiting,” Sedlacek said. “Four battalions of artillery. The 300th that served in Korea stayed with 105 mm guns. The other three went to 155 mm, 6-inch guns.”
The 349th was stationed in Casper/Riverton/Lander, the 350th in Newcastle, and the 351st, Sedlacek’s battalion, in the southern part of the state in Laramie.
“We went out and sat at all those pillboxes,” Sedlacek said. “We guarded them until they caught those guys and figured out what had happened.”
The 351st A Battery was sent to Rawlins, B Battery to Rock Springs, and C Battery to Green River. The Service Battery was assigned to Evanston.
They covered almost the entire southern part of the state. The Headquarters Corp was in Cheyenne. Nebraska picked it from the border.
“It was ‘panic-ville’, I remember it very well. My brother had gotten married, and I moved into a basement apartment,” Sedlacek said. “I was going to have dinner with them. I walked in and my dad said report to the armory, your unit has been activated. That’s when I realized this was serious, the first thing we were told to do was draw our weapons from the arms room. I drew my carbine and I knew it was real when they issued live ammunition. There was something going on.”
Manning the arms room was Jimmy Mecca, from Rock Springs.
“He was two years older than me. He’d gone to Korea in the Navy, when he came back he joined the National Guard,” Sedlacek said.
Mecca was the father of the well-known Dubois teacher and coach Ernie Mecca.
“If we were to have trouble with any of our batteries, it would be in Rock Springs,” Sedlacek said.
He related the story of an incident at the relay station near Rock Springs.
“This car comes off the Interstate and starts down the road to the relay station. The guy on guard post calls for him to halt, advance and be recognized. He gets out of his car, sees the guardsman, turns around, runs back to the car, jumps in, turns around and heads out. The guardsman had a grease gun (.45 caliber machine gun) He started shooting at the car,” Sedlacek said. “When you fire a grease gun it rises up and to the right. He put diagonal bullet holes in the back of the car.”
The guards called the highway patrol.
“This guy is met by a highway patrolman just as he hits the interstate. He comes to a halt and says, ‘Boy, am I glad to see you; they’re shooting at me,'” Sedlacek said. “‘I’m glad to see you too,’ the patrolman said and took him into custody.”
The man turned out to be a principal at one of the Sweetwater County schools, and the woman with him wasn’t his wife.
“Only in Rock Springs can this kind of thing happen,” Sedlacek laughed.
The saboteurs were captured three weeks later.
The Wendover Blast
“On Monday the 19th, we received the first news of the saboteurs. A 47-foot ketch, the “Monsoon,” was boarded at Ensenada, Mexico, for a routine inspection, and four people (three men and a woman) were arrested for possessing “several machine guns, rifles, shotguns, a large quantity of grenades and other paraphernalia.” A subsequent check with the FBI linked them with the Nevada-Utah bombings.”
The “American Republican Army” turned out to be just an army of four people. One was Brous’s wife, Minnie, and the other a Las Vegas dealer, Robert Bartoli. Only Brous and Jennings were charged.
The result of the sabotage was short-lived. Alternate circuits were quickly established. Four television stations went off the air for a brief period, and telephone calls were interrupted for a few hours.
The attacks did lead to enhanced security and new legislation earmarked to protect transcontinental communications.
Other legislation increased the penalties for destroying communication links.
Cold War paranoia increased after the explosions went off.
Brous and Jennings were sentenced to eight years in federal prison for conspiracy, willful destruction of private property, and fleeing.
During their trial, one of them told reporters the explosions were a step in destroying “cartels” such as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, who owned the towers.
In 1962, communication technology jumped into the space age with the launch of Telstar.
Currently, there are over 10,000 satellites in orbit, and Elon Musk’s “Starlink” has 9,700 alone.
There are 565 geosynchronous satellites orbiting at 22,500 miles, providing dedicated phone, television, internet, and other communication services.
The copper lines damaged in the 1961 incident have all been replaced by huge bundles of fiber optic cables. They still follow Interstate highways, making the junction of major interstates like I-25 and I-80 in Cheyenne and I-25 and I-90 in Sheridan valuable for data storage companies since they can tie into broadband connections following both four-lane highways.
The Wendover Blast
“The actions of Brous’ “army” exposed the vulnerability of our communications network in the 1960s, and the Bell System would spend millions of dollars over the next several years providing new, alternate routes, sophisticated equipment, elaborate emergency plans and ongoing restoration exercises.”