Hoaxer is misfit activist -- He's quiet, brainy, sent e-mail to feds

The News & Observer, Raleigh NC ^ | 10-26-03 | By CRAIG JARVIS

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GREENSBORO -- Nat Heatwole doesn't look as though he would attract much attention.

Clean-cut, conservatively dressed and unfailingly polite, the 20-year-old college student would blend into the background altogether if he weren't so successful at what he does.

He certainly didn't attract the attention of federal airport security screeners at Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Sept. 12, when he boarded an airplane with a plastic bag full of hoax weapons and left it in the plane's lavatory.

He was arrested last week and charged with a federal offense after telling authorities he had smuggled box cutters and other potentially dangerous items on six commercial jets in Raleigh and Baltimore as an act of civil disobedience to make the skies safer.

Suddenly, the quiet college student led the national news and reinvigorated a political debate over airport safety. The reaction ranged from gratitude to calls for his imprisonment. Those who know him say they were stunned he went that far, but they aren't surprised he acted on his convictions.

Heatwole is in his third year at Guilford College in Greensboro, a campus with a tradition of fostering social concern among its students. It is just the place to nurture a budding activism.

Guilford occupies 340 shaded acres once owned by a Quaker who refused to fight in the American Revolution. The campus stands apart from its neighbors just as the Quaker settlers who founded it in 1837 were unusual in the South at the time.

The college has drawn pacifists throughout its history; some recently retired faculty were conscientious objectors from World War II. Guilford's students have been jailed for a variety of social causes. This year, two were sent to prison for six months for protesting at Fort Benning in Georgia against a U.S. training program for Latin American soldiers.

Only about 10 percent of the 2,100 students today are Quakers, but the principles of conscience run deep.

"You're expected to have your beliefs," says Rexford Adelberger, a physics professor who has taught there for more than 30 years. "It's not so important what they are, as that you thought about them and can justify them to your peers."

Max Carter, campus ministry coordinator, says Guilford, the only Quaker-affiliated college in the South, welcomes nonconformists.

"If you're... the one person in your school who was thrown up against a locker and beat up for not doing the Pledge of Allegiance, for not supporting the war in Iraq, for not joining the ROTC, and you're looking for supportive place, Guilford is that place," Carter said.

Varied passions

That's where Heatwole showed up in the fall of 2001, although he was far from that stereotypical oddball in search of a safe haven.

As a boy, Heatwole was a pitcher on a recreational league baseball team in Montgomery County, Maryland, and he accumulated a collection of 13,000 baseball cards. As a teenager, he got interested in ham radio, a hobby that his engineer father had also once enjoyed.

In 1999, his parents moved with him and his sister into a two-story farmhouse surrounded by a forest outside Damascus, Md. Horses roamed nearby, and their closest neighbor was a fruit farm.

In high school, he played tennis and took up ham radio contests, where competitors make as many radio contacts around the world as they can in a given period. The Potomac Valley Radio Club, which stretches from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, twice awarded him $1,000 scholarships to use toward his education.

Jack Hammett, a former officer of the club, met Heatwole at several meetings. "My total impression of him is that he's sharp, focused, hard-working," Hammett said. "I know him as a real fine young man."

Heatwole brought his enthusiasm for ham radios to Guilford College, where he started a club after convincing others to donate equipment.

Adelberger, who has taught Heatwole physics for three years, described him as an ideal student, who is quiet and thoughtful. "He's going to be a great scientist some day," he said.

At the end of his sophomore year, the college awarded Heatwole a $2,500 scholarship based entirely on merit.

In his freshman year, he won a dean's writing award for an essay titled, "If You're Not Your Own Person, Whose Person Are You?" Heatwole described the essay as a hypothetical high school graduation speech that warned of becoming "society's person instead of your own."

Heatwole had his feet in two worlds: his love of science and his interest in politics. He has a dual major in physics and political science.

Increasingly, it seems, his heart was in activism. Just before he began classes at Guilford, he had returned his Selective Service System registration card with a letter explaining that he was declining to register.

"I wanted to let them hear the voice of dissent," Heatwole told the campus newspaper, "just in case they were listening."

Soon after, the federal government sent him a letter informing him it had taken the liberty of registering him anyway. Heatwole turned to Carter, the ministry coordinator, for advice. Since then, Carter said, he has counseled Heatwole and worked with him on issues involving war resistance and in teaching other students about alternatives to the Selective Service System.

"He has a deep conscience," Carter said. "He's quiet, somewhat introverted -- but it isn't the kind of keep-to-himself, Ted Kaczynski [the Unabomber] thing. He's not at all. He just measures his words."

A bold, quiet mission

Despite his growing sense of activism, Heatwole's politics didn't attract the attention of his classmates. Annie Erbsen, 19, was his lab partner in their sophomore year, and she remembers him mostly as shy, smart and observant.

She never would have guessed he would smuggle weapons onto airplanes.

"If I pictured a Guilford student doing something like that, I would pick a more radical activist," she said. "He kept his political views to himself, I guess."

But in February, he quietly embarked on a new mission, according to the FBI, testing airport security by carrying box cutters aboard two airplanes but not leaving them behind.

In April, plastic bags with box cutters and other items were found within days after being left on two planes.

On Sept. 12, Heatwole walked through the security gates at RDU, federal agents say, boarded Southwest flight No. 993 and casually walked into the rear lavatory, where he stashed a plastic zip-lock bag below the sink. Inside the bag were two ash-colored box cutters, about 12 ounces of red clay molded to look like plastic explosives, a few dozen strike-anywhere matches and bleach in an 8-ounce suntan lotion bottle.

He included a short note in the bag and signed it, "Sincerely, 3891925" -- his birth date in reverse.

He did it again two days later at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, agents say.

The next day he sent the Transportation Safety Administration an e-mail message claiming to have smuggled similar bags onto four other airplanes earlier in the year. It was "an act of civil disobedience with the aim of improving the public safety for the air-traveling public," he wrote in the e-mail message, which included his name and phone number.

Then Heatwole sat back and waited nearly five weeks before Southwest maintenance crews found the material on the two planes he had boarded in September. That prompted the TSA to finally notice his e-mail message and send it to the FBI.

The next stage

On Monday, he was charged with a federal offense and released without having to post bond. He has returned to his parents' home in Maryland to wait for a court hearing next month.

The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Carter said he has spoken with Heatwole a couple times in the past week and found him to be confident in the face of his legal problems.

Heatwole and his parents have declined all news media requests for interviews. Back on the Guilford College campus, some of his friends are pulling for him.

"He's messing with some very powerful people who have shown they can trample on those who don't agree with them," said Adelberger, the physics professor, who is a Quaker. "I just hope he doesn't get trampled on."

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	Heatwole is charged with smuggling box cutters onto planes.