If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission

If Nuns Ruled the World

Ten Sisters on a Mission

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Weapons Are Made Like Gods

Putting trust in weapons is idolatry. Weapons are always false gods because they make money. It's profiteering.

—Sister Megan Rice

She couldn't keep walking. Sister Megan Rice had been training for this moment for months, but she was tired and kept slipping to her knees into the prickled shrubs and the high grass as she willed herself up the hill to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The eighty-two-year-old nun was the mastermind of this plan—a plan that, once completed, would become known as the biggest security breach in the history of the nation's atomic complex. But she was also the weak link. A person half her age would have been exhausted as they scaled the steep and densely wooded hill on the path into the heart of Y-12.

It was the very early morning of July 28, 2012, when Megan, a vowed Sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two accomplices—Gregory I. Boertje-Obed, age fifty-seven, and Michael R. Walli, age sixty-three, both US veterans—broke into the nuclear weapons facility. Using bolt cutters, the three of them first infiltrated an exterior boundary fence, six feet high with bright-yellow No Trespassing placards threatening a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison. Sister Megan went first. The men mended the fence behind her with twine, and together they began the forty-degree ascent.

The plan was to hike along the ridge of the hill, breach another set of fences, and then walk toward the facility, which houses the nation's cache of highly enriched uranium—enough to fuel more than 10,000 nuclear bombs.

"Megan has trouble going up hills, so we walked at an angle," Mr. Boertje-Obed told me. "We just kept going to the right. Megan was so tired when we got to the top that I said, 'Let's just go to the first building that we happen to see.'" Next they negotiated through an infrared intrusion detection system called the PIDAS, a perimeter intrusion detection and assessment system.

"The motion detectors are set off often by wildlife," Ralph Hutchinson, a friend of the three, a co-conspirator, and the coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance told me. "That's why they were ignored. One of the cameras that would have picked them up was malfunctioning, and the other camera did pick them up but the guard wasn't looking at it."

The one thing they all agreed on was that they felt they were being led by the Almighty.

Maybe they were. Some kind of providence was with them that night. The first building they happened upon was the big one, the site's mother lode for nuclear storage—a billion-dollar Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility. That was where they would carry out their mission.

Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was where the nuclear age began. Ground was broken on February 18, 1943, in the midst of World War II, for an electromagnetic separation plant—or, in layman's terms, a place that could make enough enriched uranium for a new kind of bomb. The atom bomb. At peak production in 1945, more than 22,000 workers were producing enriched uranium for Little Boy, the bomb the Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima that killed approximately 60,000 civilians and ultimately ended World War II in the Pacific. During the Cold War, more than 8,000 people worked at Y-12 to make nuclear weapon "secondaries"—the components of a nuclear weapon's secondary explosive that are compressed by nuclear fission from the primary explosive and generate the crux of explosive energy.

Once inside the facility, Sister Megan and her co-conspirators– swung banners over the walls: woe to an empire of blood, one declared. They looped panicked yellow crime-scene tape reading nuclear crime scene around the site. They chipped bits of concrete from the wall with small hammers.

"Just a little. It wasn't violent," Sister Megan told me as she remembered mustering her strength to bang on the wall. "Violence was not an option." She was adamant that the protest not be violent. "Even if we were attacked by dogs after we broke in, I would have just raised my hands," she said. "I would have let the dogs take me down."

Leading up to the break-in the trio had held conversations about whether they would be shot by guards. That was a risk they were willing to take.

They had brought with them six baby bottles filled with human blood (siphoned from three living humans supportive of their cause) and poured them onto the building before conducting a liturgical ceremony with white roses, lit candles, and the breaking of bread. They had chosen Sunday for their break-in as much for its spiritual significance as for the fact that they believed there would be fewer guards on patrol. When a guard finally reached the three trespassers at 4:30 a.m., they did not flinch and instead tendered some of their bread to him as an offering.

That guard, Kirk Garland, a sturdy man with a broad face weathered by the lines of Southern living, was authorized to use deadly force, but at first it all appeared so innocent. All Garland saw was an old woman and a couple of unshaven men. Maybe they were just a painting crew. Then he saw the messages spray-painted on the wall behind them. He read the words and when it clicked that these were intruders he called for backup. Five minutes later a second security guard appeared, this one brandishing an M16 weapon. Sister Megan sang "This Little Light of Mine" as she was placed in handcuffs. The last time that she looked at her watch, it was a quarter to five in the morning.

"They were passive," Mr. Garland would later say during his testimony against them after he lost his $85,000-a-year job, just four years from retirement. Sister Megan would later express remorse at her involvement in Mr. Garland's dismissal, saying she hoped he would find another job in security, preferably somewhere less destructive. "Like a bank," she said.

For the Y-12 break-in, Sister Megan, Mr. Boertje-Obed, and Mr. Walli were charged with destruction and depredation of government property, both felonies. The intrusion caused $8,531.67 in physical damages, according to Y-12 officials. It took 100 gallons of paint to cover up the spray-painted graffiti and human blood and to repair the fences. The security breach also damaged Y-12's credibility as a safe haven for special nuclear materials. If a little old nun and a couple of out-of-shape middle-aged men could get that close to the heart of the complex, what was stopping the terrorists?

"All three of them were elated that they were able to do so much," said Ellen Barfield, a fellow peace activist and the one phone call Sister Megan made from jail after the arrest. With a flick of her hand, Barfield added, with none of the gravitas the statement should have required, "Plus, they were mildly pleased that they were still alive."

Frank Munger, the Knoxville News Sentinel senior reporter who covers the paper's Department of Energy issues, has been on the Y-12 beat for three decades. He told me that in the aftermath of the July arrest, plenty of residents of Knoxville thought that the guards should not have hesitated.

"You heard people say they should have shot them," Mr. Munger said nonchalantly during my visit to the offices of the Sentinel. Sister Megan really likes Frank Munger. He became her de facto biographer after she was arrested, and she talks about him like a proud mother, bragging about how thorough he was in his reporting of Y-12, even when it painted her in a less than pleasant light.

"He is a very special person," she confided. "Special" is a vote of confidence from Sister Megan. Even though she is incapable of insulting anyone, when she doesn't respect a person, she chooses not to answer questions about them at all. She just clams up and minutes later will change the subject.

Y-12 is the largest employer in this small section of Tennessee, with more than 9,000 workers in the area. Residents hate it when other people, especially Northerners, come to town and cause a scene. "In East Tennessee, the worst sin is to draw attention to yourself," Ralph Hutchinson told me. "The second worst is to break rules. These people don't break rules here."

Oak Ridge is an insular place, situated between the jagged bends of the Clinch River and five Appalachian ridges and valleys. Just twenty-five miles west of Knoxville, folks in Oak Ridge don't take to outsiders. It's a town that once detained Santa Claus because they didn't like the cut of his beard. There is a famous picture of Jolly Old Saint Nick from 1948, one hand in the air, a toy in the other, being detained and searched by two armed guards as he attempted to get into the first annual Oak Ridge National Laboratory Christmas party.

I traveled down to Eastern Tennessee at Sister Megan's invitation, just days before Thanksgiving in 2012, hoping to meet with her and her legal team as they prepared for a pretrial hearing for the Y-12 break-in.

"We can drive back together and you can stay with me," Sister Megan told me in her soft and measured voice that rarely rises above a whisper, over the phone from Rosemont, Philadelphia, where she lived with her order.

When an eighty-two-year-old nun facing federal prison for the rest of her life asks you to go on a road trip with her, you don't hesitate. I had been covering the presidential election for nine months straight, and I thought a good old Southern trial might be the perfect antidote to my political languor.

"There's this nun down in Knoxville facing life in prison," I said to my boss, Victor Balta, the managing editor of the website for Current TV. He was skeptical.

"She is a peace activist, broke into a nuclear weapons facility," I explained breathlessly. Then, for good measure: "Nuclear disarmament is a big issue with our viewers. Plus ... she's eighty-two." Victor gave me the two days off as long as I paid for my own plane ticket.

I booked a one-way ticket to Knoxville and flew two legs coach early on a Monday morning, the second of which was filled with sweaty and statuesque members of the University of Tennessee men's basketball team. Sister Megan, who doesn't drive, arranged for a member of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) to greet me at the airport. Carol, a United Methodist in her sixties, was wearing a flower-patterned embroidered vest when she met me en route to baggage claim carrying a sign written in black marker that read Namaste. Carol filled me in on the history of Y-12, to which she referred as both the nation's "nuclear insecurity complex" and the "bomb plant," always with a girlish giggle, as we drove along the highway past the kinds of motels that advertise $199 for a one-week stay.

Our destination was the basement of St. John's Cathedral in downtown Knoxville, where Sister Megan was meeting with her legal team in advance of the hearing. It was the first time we met in person, but Sister Megan greeted me with a hug like we were old friends.

The temperature was a moderate fifty-five degrees in Knoxville that day, but Sister Megan looked ready for a family ski trip in a soft gray wool sweater, lavender hoodie, fleece vest, and navy sweatpants. "I'm always too cold," she said with a small shiver. I could feel her shoulder blades through four layers of clothing. She grabbed my rough hand in her small soft one and we walked down the dimly lit hall together. It is hard to describe what Sister Megan's presence is like. She projects an aura of calm that washes over everyone near her. Three coffees and an early morning flight had made me jumpy, but she made me feel at ease. There is a force and a vitality that transcends her tiny body.

Sitting in the basement's spacious conference room were OREPA's Ralph Hutchinson, a crunchy Richard Dreyfuss doppelgänger, and Kary Love, an advising counsel partial to black turtlenecks and cowboy boots, who had driven down from Michigan for the hearing. Compared to Hutchinson in his slightly ripped jeans, beard, and hiking sneakers, Mr. Love, who had been trying nuclear disarmament cases for the better part of three decades, looked the part of the dashing antagonist in a daytime soap opera.

"I long ago recognized that were Jesus to return, many of those imprisoned in US federal prisons today for peaceful demonstrations against US nuke weapons would be those with whom he would associate. Megan Rice, I believe, is one of those," Mr. Love told me.

Standing, huddled in a corner, were Francis Lloyd, the local Knoxville attorney, and Bill Quigley, a dapper law professor from Loyola University New Orleans.

Thousands of civil disobedience cases are tried each year, and while the group gathered in the basement was keen to focus on the grander issues surrounding nuclear disarmament, they couldn't ignore the fact that they were sitting on public relations gold with this particular case.

"What they're asking for is the death penalty for an octogenarian nun," Mr. Love declared, his voice rising in excitement and his fist rapping on the distinguished dark wood table in the church basement conference room. He wanted no less than to start a petition asking that Sister Megan receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom rather than sixteen years in prison. "Hopefully because of the buzz with Sister Rice, we get enough media attention that people all over the world sign up," Mr. Love said.

Everyone in the room agreed that the more awareness they could bring to "the nun thing," the better off their case would be.

"If you guys were willing to cross-dress, we'd get more attention," Mr. Hutchinson said to Sister Megan's male co-conspirators. "It would be the cute little nun and the not-so-cute other nuns."

Sister Megan stayed quiet and wrapped a fleece blanket around her shoulders, even though the basement was a little bit warm. She was the only one reluctant to play the nun card. "It's not about me. It's about the three of us, and the message," she quietly told me.

The nun card was a thing that commanded attention, though, attracting reporters from the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post for a story that wouldn't have otherwise gotten much attention outside of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dan Zak, a reporter for the Post who wrote a pitch-perfect account of the break-in, aftermath, and trial, described it to me as perfect casting for the perfect news story.

"A break-in at Y-12 would have made a splash because of Megan's age, but you add on top of that the fact that she is a nun, and people really perk up," Zak told me. "First off you did have this older woman doing this thing, but then she was also a nun, doing something that most people wouldn't consider nunlike at all."

It was strangely warm for November, even in the South, and from St. John's it was just a meandering five-minute walk across the red and gold tree-lined Cumberland Avenue to the Howard H. Baker Jr. Courthouse in Knoxville's town center. Sister Megan was happy for the little bit of exercise. "I have to get it in while I can," she joked, the first of many I'm-probably-going-to-prison-soon cracks she made during our time together. The Baker courthouse is something straight out of a Hollywood movie—pristine, white, and unapologetically antebellum in design. Until the mid-1930s it was home to the publishing empire of a gentleman named Chris Whittle. The four-block campus, with its 250,000-square-foot neo-Georgian building, was once the headquarters for Whittle's nine hundred employees and hub for forty media products, including nineteen magazines and the youth news program Channel One, most famous for giving CNN stalwart Anderson Cooper his first newsanchor job. When Whittle's empire unraveled and the scraps of the company moved in a reverse carpetbag to New York City, the elaborate campus was sold off to the federal government.

Sister Megan threw her shoulders back as she strode through the pristine white doors of the courthouse and past a statue of Lady Justice. Scarred by bird feces and wearing an odd Indian headdress, the mistress of the law faces away from the entrance to the Knoxville federal court.

No one told the nun where she should sit, so she found a practical place in the third row of the courtroom. "When you're the guest of honor, you get to sit up front," her attorney, Mr. Lloyd, told her. She hugged him in thanks and he guided her to the defendant's table by her elbow. Nearly dwarfed by the great piece of furniture, she sat calmly and quietly, placing her two index fingers in a steeple supporting her chin.

The section for the audience was split into two sides like at a formal wedding, the defense on the right and the prosecution on the left. The right side was filled with gray-haired peace activists who held hands and sang "Peace Is Flowing Like a River" before the start of the proceedings. The prosecution, conservative in their well-tailored suits, glanced sideways at them with thinly masked disdain.

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Excerpted from If Nuns Ruled the World by Jo Piazza. Copyright © 2014 Jo Piazza. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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