They had assault weapons, they had some AK47s, they had a Louis machinegun that they were mounting on an armored car they were building. They had plenty more mine type of devices, they had hand grenades, they had a LAW rocket which will knock out a light tank. They were very very formidable.

Now Coulson takes us back to the scene to recount the tense showdown with the CSA.

then the main compound was very heavily fortified, the stone buildings had pillboxes. It was protected by explosives.

Coulson’s first move is to surround the compound with 200 FBI agents and dozens of state and local police, making escape impossible. The FBI’s secret plan is to use reverse psychology, not to attack as the CSA is expecting, but to do the opposite.

Their religion taught them that when the government came, we would attack them and they would have to defend themselves. And if nobody was attacked, it really did them off balance.

Coulson’s strategy is to wait it out and lure the CSA into negotiating.

This is more of a psychological operation. It was a tactical operation. The psychologying was basically be patient, negotiate, talk to them, make them appear hopeless that they can’t get out. If you want to get into this and again we wouldn’t want to hurt anybody but also that we had tremendous firepower and I want them to understand that, that if there’s a firefight there, they’re gonna lose it.

The CSA makes it clear that they would rather fight than talk.

James Allison will not surrender to the authorities, we no longer feel that the people of this country and especially those involved with the right wing can receive absolute justice from the court system. The ??? is here and now I need to get back, thank you.

That’s Allison’s right hand man, Kerry Noble, who has also agreed to revisit the scene of the standoff. Noble reveals that the CSA was scheming to draw the Feds into a violent gun battle.

What we were hoping for and expecting was that once they’d go and came in on us and we started the shootout and the war. That others would come in also. And started a chain reaction of Domino effect that would cause uprisings throughout the country. That would just keep going, keep going, escalating snowballing effect to where the apocalypse would come in which would usher in the second coming of Christ.

But the FBI is about to deploy another secret tactic, they will try to trick the CSA into believing that it has choices and even some control over the outcome of the standoff.

The secret of bringing some one to your point of view is options. What kind of options you give them. Now we give them two options, one was to engage in a war here and lose it or to talk and to live.

Coulson’s plan works. Allison finally agrees to meet with the FBI. But this won’t be an ordinary negotiation, Allison will only talk directly to Agent Coulson.

Allison would only talk to a tactical person, and a commander. He viewed himself as a commander. He wouldn’t be about to talk to a subordinate negotiator. It makes sense although it was a violation of the FBI’s policy at the time to do that.

Coulson uses the unusual face-to-face meeting to attempt the next phase of his strategy which is to make the militia leader feel important.

We didn’t try to intimidate him, we didn’t yell at him, we didn’t make demand. We just talked in a very calm way just like we are talking here today. I felt right then that I won him over.