00:00Three men approach the Yugoslav diplomatic mission to the United Nations.
00:06Outside the mission, a New York City police officer stands guard.
00:13Inside, Yugoslav security agents protect the embassy.
00:17One of them asks the visitors for identification.
00:25Stairs, go! Go!
00:27Hearing the shot, police officers rush into the building.
00:31Foreign missions are technically outside the NYPD's jurisdiction.
00:37The officers are now in Yugoslav territory.
00:45As backup arrives, the officers inside the mission try to negotiate with the three men,
00:51but they have barricaded themselves in an upper office.
00:54The intruders warn they have taken a woman hostage.
00:58They will kill her if anyone tries to enter.
01:01One officer offers himself as a substitute hostage.
01:05Take me for the hostage.
01:08The gunmen refuse.
01:11Agents from the FBI's New York field office respond to the scene.
01:16According to federal law, the FBI is responsible for investigating all attacks on foreign missions.
01:25Special Agent Len Cross.
01:28As I arrived, we had police officers in the park.
01:31We had police officers on surrounding buildings with scoped rifles.
01:35And then we had the emergency service units making entry into the building.
01:41What was going through my mind was, you know, what was happening on the inside.
01:44The suspects appear in an upstairs window, brandishing a Croatian flag.
01:54They toss propaganda leaflets into the street.
01:57The leaflets call on the United Nations to force communist Yugoslavia to grant Croatia its independence.
02:03What they were trying to do was gain publicity for their cause and showing the oppressive regime that existed in Yugoslavia and how they were oppressing the Croatian people.
02:16A hostage negotiator talks to the suspects for nearly two hours.
02:20They finally agreed to come out, but only if they are taken into custody by U.S. authorities, not Yugoslav officials.
02:30They were just trying to protect themselves from the officials because they knew if they got their hands on them, they'd kill them.
02:41And then finally, when they realized it was the New York City police, the FBI on the other side of the door,
02:48and assured them that no harm would come to them, they surrendered without incident.
02:54Move!
02:56Stay right there.
02:58The suspects revealed that they never had a hostage.
03:00They were only bluffing to prevent Yugoslav security agents from mounting an armed assault.
03:07As the police officers escort the suspects out of the building, mission security confronts them.
03:14Step side, gentlemen.
03:18They tell the officers to hand over the radicals.
03:23This is Yugoslavian mission. You have no right here. This is territory of Yugoslavia.
03:29Put the guns down.
03:31The NYPD officers refuse.
03:34Step aside.
03:35No.
03:36They intend to leave the mission with the prisoners.
03:39We're taking our prisoners out. Lower the guns.
03:42The security agents finally back down.
03:55The invasion of a foreign mission on U.S. soil is unprecedented.
03:58One of their employees has been seriously wounded.
04:09Special Agent Cross now leads the investigation.
04:12He searches for a possible motive for the attack.
04:16He starts by analyzing the long history of hatred and violence between Yugoslav Serbs and Croatians,
04:21as they fought over the same Eastern European lands.
04:26The reasons and motives stretched centuries, where Serbians would go into Croatian villages and kill every man, woman and child, and the Croatians would reciprocate.
04:351971. The violence spread outside Yugoslavia.
04:42Croatian radicals assassinated the Yugoslav ambassador to Sweden.
04:47In 1972, they hijacked a Swedish airliner and forced the government to release seven political prisoners from jail.
04:55Later that same year, Croatian terrorists claimed responsibility for planting a bomb on board a Yugoslav airliner.
05:02The blast killed 26 innocent people.
05:06The hatred was so deep, and it was hard to fathom.
05:10We were dealing also with trying to understand culture, cultural and historical issues.
05:17And it was not your simple criminal matter.
05:22It was a lot of payback on both sides.
05:25Now, that payback is spread from Europe to the United States.
05:29It's a terrifying trend.
05:32Cross contacts fellow FBI agents at U.S. embassies around the world.
05:37They confirm that there has been a disturbing increase in Croatian attacks on Yugoslav embassies and diplomats worldwide.
05:45Special Agent Cross works closely with police and prosecutors, providing background information on the men who attacked the Yugoslav mission.
05:53Four months later, on October 13th, a New York jury finds all three men guilty of conspiring to take hostage Yugoslavia's ambassador to the United Nations.
06:07The jury also reflects the gunman who wounded the Yugoslav security agent of assault with a deadly weapon.
06:14For Agent Cross, the case is officially closed.
06:17But everything he has learned tells him that Croatian terrorism in the United States is on the rise and about to explode.
06:24Nine months later, in Chicago, Cross's fears become a grim reality.
06:31Croatian businessmen begin calling the FBI in a panic.
06:36They have each received an anonymous letter written in Serbo-Croatian.
06:41The letters demand a large sum of money and threatens horrific consequences if the recipient fails to pay up.
06:48I'm a little concerned about this.
06:50Special Agent Bjarn Borson of the FBI's Chicago field office examines the letters.
06:56Yesterday.
06:57Borson speaks fluent Serbo-Croatian and has a background in counterintelligence.
07:02They said, you are not doing your part in our cause to overthrow the Communist government.
07:09We've assessed your situation and decided that you are capable of paying this amount of money.
07:13And they would instruct them to send this money to an address in Paraguay.
07:17And if you fail to do that, you'll pay the consequences.
07:20It's absolutely extortion.
07:22That's the way the FBI looked at it.
07:23It was, yeah, this was an extortion attempt and they were threatening your well-being if you didn't cooperate.
07:28Agents are unsure whether the culprits are Serb spies or Croatian criminals.
07:34But they do know the extortionists have cast a wide net.
07:37Nationwide, the FBI collects a total of 52 extortion letters from Croatian businessmen.
07:44The letters are nearly identical but with one key exception.
07:50The senders demand a different amount of money from each victim.
07:54Most of the people who received those extortion letters were well-off or at least comfortable individuals
08:00and had the ability to pay that money that was requested.
08:04In New York City, Special Agent Len Cross heads the investigation into the extortion letters.
08:11Searching for leads, he contacts Pero Vucas, a prominent Croatian political writer living in Queens.
08:18He was known to be against the violence and we felt that he might be an individual who could perhaps assist us in terms of identifying who may be responsible for these letters.
08:33Agent Cross asks Vucas if he thinks the extortionists could be fellow Croatians.
08:39He did not feel any good Croatian would have written these letters and made the demands that were made in these letters.
08:47Instead, Vucas blames the Serb government of Yugoslavia.
08:52He told me that it was his belief that these letters were generated by the Yugoslavian intelligence service to try to disrupt the Croatian community.
09:02The majority were peaceful and they wanted to overthrow the Yugoslav government but by peaceful means.
09:09But there was always those who wanted to use more violent means and would do anything to achieve that goal.
09:14Vucas believes the letters are an attempt by Serbian spies to sabotage Croatian demands for freedom.
09:21I left them my card, told them if you could think of anything else, please just to give me a call and we would appreciate it.
09:28In Chicago, Agent Borisson focuses on the letters demand to send money to a post office box in the South American country of Paraguay.
09:41The address in Paraguay was of key significance to us because somebody had to collect that money so they had to zero in on who that might be.
09:47The FBI sends an agent from the U.S. Embassy in Argentina to Paraguay to investigate.
09:56The agent observes a man receiving the money.
09:59He is later identified as a known Croatian terrorist who in 1972 had shot the Yugoslav ambassador to Sweden.
10:06A month later, in New York City, the case takes a dramatic turn.
10:18A man calls local news stations claiming two bombs have been planted in New York City.
10:23One at the United Nations, the other at Grand Central Station.
10:32A police officer finds a suspicious looking bag.
10:42The officer immediately calls in the NYPD bomb squad.
10:45Investigators find a note nearby written in Serbo-Croatian.
10:51It demands Croatian independence and says, quote,
10:55This is the beginning. Our decision is kamikaze.
10:59Bomb technicians carefully dismantled the device.
11:03It's armed with dynamite and a blasting cap.
11:06The timer is set to explode within the hour.
11:09It was designed to go off. It's just that it malfunctioned.
11:11At Grand Central Station, police find the second bomb stashed inside a locker.
11:17Again, the device is accompanied by a letter demanding Croatian independence.
11:22If either of the devices had detonated, the loss of life and property would have been disastrous.
11:29The writing was on the wall. Things are becoming more and more violent and they were happening more frequently.
11:34They call Special Agent Cross in New York to inform him they have found one of Oatpour's primary bomb makers.
11:41Special Agent Cross.
11:46Cross again questions Stepan Satchich, asking him if he knows a man by the name of Vuka Ulich.
11:52He says, yeah, a little I do.
11:55I says, you're going to have, you've got some problems.
11:58And we've just arrested him.
12:00I says, he had a large quantity of explosives and caps and weapons in his house.
12:05Satchich still refuses to talk.
12:07New York investigators call in Special Agent Bob Gorth from San Francisco to question Ulich.
12:18The former Oatpour member turned confidential informant accompanies him.
12:22Late in the afternoon, with the moral support of the Croatian co-operator, Ulich finally begins to open up.
12:40He wanted the feeling that fellow Croatian believed in him, trusted him, and he wouldn't be entirely alone.
12:50And when he finally got the courage up, he said, yeah, I want to talk about it.
12:56And of course, that was the linchpin of the whole case.
12:58Vuka Ulich tells investigators how other Oatpour members convinced him to kill a Croatian community leader in California two years earlier.
13:09After drinking all one evening and into the morning, he decided he'd strike a blow for Croatian freedom and go kill this enemy of the people.
13:17So he did.
13:18And later on, he realized that what he'd done was not advancing the Croatian cause, but really was harming it.
13:26He was one of the few people that I firmly believe regretted what he did.
13:30Wow.
13:33Ulich agrees to testify against Sacic, Dreven, and the other Croatian terrorists.
13:39For the FBI and law enforcement nationwide, dismantling Oatpour was a vital achievement.
13:45Terrorists operating inside U.S. borders were stopped dead in their tracks.
