The Oklahoma City Bombing: A Fresh Look

On April 19, 1995, the Alfred E. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed. The generally accepted account of the Oklahoma City bombing is that one man, with some assistance from an accomplice, pulled it off, using just one explosive device, a Ryder Truck full of a fertilizer- based explosive.

It was such a horrible event—costing 168 lives—that none of us at the time could bear to think that there could have been something wrong with official account. The evidence that we have about this terrible incident lends itself to several interpretations, none of which can be proven. Some have even connected strands to suggest that it was some sort of false flag operation gone-wrong that was intended to pin the blame on Saddah Hussein or Muslims. But there is not enough evidence to make that case. There is much more evidence for the view that the people who perpetrated this horror were closely watched by government agents, but that somehow they were able to bomb the building before government got its act together and arrested them.

Basic Information
Timothy McVeigh was quickly apprehended and labeled the main bomber. There was a brief search for the second man who was seen with McVeigh just before the explosion—John Doe #2, who could have been Michael Brescia, a German who roomed with one Andreas Strassmier, who lived in a white supremacist compound frequented by Mc Veigh. While still claiming to search for John Doe #2, the head of the investigations ordered other agents to cease looking for him. At one point there were five candidates as John Does, but the government lost interest in them.

McVeigh’s Army buddy Terry Nichols, who was far away in Herington, Kansas at the time, was arrested as an accomplice. Nichols admitted to helping to construct a bomb on April 18.

The prosecution’s supporting testimony came from Michael Fortier and his wife Lori after months of badgering and intimidation. It is also compromised by the effects of drug use on their memories. Lori Fortier rehearsed her testimony with the F.B.I. for 4 days before she went o the stand. She was granted immunity, and Michael was to serve less than 11 years for not warning authorities about a crime he knew was about to be committed.

Some of the witnesses described a man who did not look like McVeigh renting the Ryder truck. McVeigh’s fingerprints did not turn up on the truck or the counter of the body shop where he allegedly rented it. Some of the workers say that two men came in to rent the truck, and that one of looked a lot like Tod Bunting, who was with McVeigh at Fort Riley. Bunting later said he rented a truck at the same place a day later, but this was never pursued. Some experts think Bunting looked a lot like the John Doe- 2 composite. Some who believe there were two trucks, aside from the one Bunting said he rented, note that a second truck was rented a week before McVeigh allegedly rented one.

Some Doubts About the Official Story
Stephen Jones, attorney for Timothy Mc Veigh and a former Nixon aide, was certain that McVeigh exaggerated his own role in the bombing to protect others. The bomber repeatedly said he alone should suffer so that the “revolution” could go on. Sixteen times the prosecution told the court it was not withholding any evidence from the defense. Then three weeks before McVay’s execution, it turned over some additional material. Jones was ultimately able to prove that the F.B.I. withheld hundreds of pages of documents from the defense. Eventually the bureau admitted to withholding over 4,000 pages. The Associated Press reported that 75% of the files used in the McVeigh trial were at least partially sealed.

Jones suspected that McVeigh got some assistance from white supremacists and thought it possible that Nichols could have had a tie to Islamic extremists in the Philippines. Norm Olson, a Baptist preacher and then leader of the Michigan Militia, revealed that McVeigh attended one of his meetings. A number of witnesses saw McVeigh with men who looked like they came from the Middle East. Jayna Davis, a former KFOR- TV reporter, has amassed much evidence along these lines. Davis and her partner turned up the fact that McVeigh associated with a number of men from the Middle East. She also produced people from the motel on Route 50 who saw Iraqi Republican Guardsman Hussain Ali Hussaini in the company of McVeigh and exiting the Ryder truck before the explosion. The motel employees saw Mc Veigh with other Iraquis as well. He was never questioned. In 1997, she gave her files to the FBI. It is impossible to pass judgment on her arguments, but she was correct in noting that President George H.W. Bush relocated many Iraqi officers to Oklahoma City and Lincoln, Nebraska.

It cannot be established if John Doe #2 existed or if he was from the Middle East.
Some experts thought it would take from 4 to 8 men to pull off the Oklahoma City bombing. Immediately after the event, police circulated composites of two men seen together 15 minutes before the blast. The people who saw more than one suspect were never called before the grand jury.

Craig Roberts wrote that a federal law enforcement official told him that the bombing was about the records of Mountain Aviation, which had operated at the Mena, Arkansas Airport, and allegedly moved drugs. He has a fireman witness to support the report that records were removed from the building the next day. He had another law enforcement source that claimed money for the operation was provided by a Mexican national with previous C.I.A. ties, who might have been working then for the Columbian drug cartel. He, like this writer, found all of the pieces of the story difficult to fit together.

How Much Help?
McVeigh said he alone mixed all that fertilizer and diesel fuel oil. It is hard to believe one man could have done that. Charles Farley testified to seeing 4 men with McVeigh near Geary State Lake the day before the explosion. The accounts of the explosion raise a question about whether there was a second bomb in the building, and explosives experts, including Brigadier General Benton Partin, are on record that the fertilizer bomb was not powerful enough to do the damage attributed to it. It could not have been the only source of damage. It would have been impossible to destroy a large concrete pillar deep in the building. The general thought that demolition charges on some pillars would be necessary. The general is a self-described Christian who hates Communism and appeared before the National Press Club to insist that the explosions must havbe been the work of leftists. For four years, he was chairman of the Republican Party of Fairfax County, Virginia. The F.B.I. interviewed him but ignored his carefully framed comments. Sam Cohen, a physicist and inventor of the neutron bomb agreed that a truck bomb could not have done all that damage.

Dr. Roger Raubach, a physical chemist who worked at Stanford, agreed with Partin and said he didn’t care if there were a semi-trailer with 20 tons of ammonium nitrate, “it wouldn't do the damage we saw there." Testimony of people who were inside the building when the explosions occurred has recollections that seemed to support the general’s view.

The on-scene reporting by Oklahoma City TV stations leave the impression that two unexploded bombs were found there.

KFOR Channel 4: The FBI has confirmed there is another bomb in the Federal Building. It's in the East side of the building.
They've moved everybody back several blocks, obviously to, uh, unplug it so it wont go off. They're moving everybody back.
It's a… it's a weird scene because at first everybody was running when they gave the word to get everybody away from the scene, but now people are just standing around kind of staring. It's a very surreal, very strange scene.
Now, we want to get some information out to people, to people who are in the downtown area. You don't want to stand on the sidewalk, and the reason for that is there are gas mains underneath and if there's a second explosion, that those gas mains could blow. But, again, we do have confirmation. There is a second bomb in the Federal Building. We know it's on the east side. We're not sure what floor, what level, but there is definitely danger of a major second explosion. They're warning everybody to get as far back as they can. They're trying to get the bomb defused right now. They are in the process of doing it, but this could take some time. They're telling people that this is something to take very seriously, and not to slip forward to get a look at this, because this thing could definitely go off.
KWTV Channel 9: All right, we just saw, if you were watching, there, there was a white pickup truck backing a trailer into the scene here. They are trying to get people out of the way so that they can get it in. Appears to be the Oklahoma Bomb Squad. It's their Bomb Disposal Unit, is what it is, and it is what they would use if, if, the report that we gave you just a few minutes ago is correct, that a second explosive device of some kind is inside the building. They'll back that trailer in there, and the Bomb Squad folks will go in and they'll use that trailer. You see the bucket on the back? This is how they would transport the Explosive Device away from this populated area. They would try to do something.
Finally, KFOR announced:
The second explosive was found and defused. The third explosive was found — and they are working on it right now as we speak. I understand that both the second and the third explosives were larger than the first.[105]

No one ever explained how they got the storey so wrong, and some journalists claim they were threatened and told to change their stories. The media reported that two unexplained bombs were removed from the building. There is also a FEMA memo on this subject. CNN reporter Suzanne Sealy told viewers that one bomb was found on the east side of the building and that the F.B.I. sent people a few blocks away.
Films of the explosion showed two smoke plumes, one outside the building and one inside. Allegedly two tons of ammonium nitrate was used in the McVeigh bomb, but the smell of ammonia was not present at the scene. The truck was 30 or 40 feet away from the building. Witnesses testified to a tremendous flash and feeling great amounts of static electricity, all characteristics of nuclear and sub-nuclear blasts. The Feds demolished the building on May 23. Mc Veigh had military training and would have known that ANFO was not effective in destroying steel and concrete.
Terrance Yeakey
Terrance Yeakey, an Oklahoma Police Sergeant, was the first officer to get to the Murrah Building at the time of the explosion. He was certain he saw a flash within and that windows were blown out. He called his former wife to say, “it’s not what they are saying it was.” He also over heard ATF agents reveal something else that convinced him the official view of the explosion was very wrong. Three days before he was to receive the department’s Medal of Valor in 1996 his body was found in a field, half a mile from his car. His arms and wrists were slit as well as both jugular veins. There was a downward gunshot wound in the head. When the car door was opened, blood ran out. The death was declared a suicide. No autopsy was done, and the car was not dusted for prints. There was no investigation. But the Medical Examiner did find that there were no “stellat” wounds, meaning a silencer prevented the head from being marked by escaping gas. The mortician found multiple rope burns. Yeakey’s notes on the bombing were never found.

Yeakey’s former wife revealed that the sergeant shared a safe deposit box with Dr. Charles Chumley, with whom he worked during the rescue effort. After that they conferred several times about what had happened. Chumley and Yeakey had refused to turn in false reports as requested by federal officers. Chumley, a pilot, went down in a crash in August.
The Tapes
There is a dispute about the security tapes at the Murrah building. The F.B.I. says the tapes show nothing, but a Secret Service memo claims the tapes showed that McVeigh have had accomplices. There were four security cameras in the area. Eventually footage was released, but there was nothing for the minutes before the explosion. It was said that the tapes were being changed or the camera had run out of tape.
The Hammer Manuscript
David Paul Hammer, a death row inmate, has a manuscript allegedly containing things McVeigh told him. The F.B.I. tried to interview him before he was executed, but the interviews did not take place due to disagreements about who could be present. The manuscript said that McVeigh was contacted by a major at Fort Bragg before he left the army. McVeigh was being recruited to gather intelligence on right-wing groups like the Klan and the Aryan Nation. McVeigh was deeply disappointed at the time that he had not been taken into Special Forces. In mid-1991, Mc Veigh was ordered to attend Special Forces training. He had just returned from the Persian Gulf and found the training very taxing. Technically, people who complete that program are asked to evaluate themselves and determine if they should go into the Special Forces. He claimed that he dropped out and was not terrible disappointed. Whatever happened, this was a turning point. He became more and more disillusioned with government and the Army, read survivalist and anti-government literature, and started carfrying a weapon wherever he went.

He later claimed that he had been asked to join a secret assassins squad. While still a soldier, he wrote to his sister Jennifer that he had been asked to join “a Special Forces (Green Beret) Covert Tactical Unit (CTU) that was involved in illegal activities. These illegal activities included “protecting drug shipments, eliminating the competition, and population control.” He also mentioned assassinations and asked her to tell no one about this.
The Hammer manuscript further claims that McVeigh and Nichols were helped by people connected to Elohim City ( City of God in Hebrew), Christian enclave in northeastern Oklahoma where Andreas Strassmeir was in charge of security. Mc Veigh and Nichols drove from Fayette, Arkansas to Elohim City, on October 12, 1993.
The Far Right, White Supremacist Connection

Elohim City constituted 1,000 acres and was home to racists, Neo-Nazis, right-wingers, and just plain criminals. In 2004, the F.B.I. released a memo that indicated that the Southern Poverty Law Center had an informer planted in that small community.

Strassmeir was son of the head of the German Christian Democratic Party and most likely a member of the super-secret counter terrorism agency, GSG-9. That unit once rescued a Lufthansa flight in Mogadishu to rescue him. He was a former Bundeswehr officer and a graduate of the elite Hanover War College. It is likely that he was on loan to the CIA or some other agency to infiltrate these white supremacists and keep an eye on Aryan Republican Army, which robbed 22 banks. He told the Telegraph of London that he was briefly in the US in 1989, trying unsuccessfully to get a DEA job. Though denying he was an agent, he all but admitted it: "The Right-wing in the U.S. is incredibly easy to penetrate if you know how to talk to them," he told the Telegraph. “He added that the bombing was the result of a government sting plan gone wrong. He had been in the United States since May, 1991, and the AFT had put out a BOLO saying he was in violation of INS regulations, but that he should not be arrested.

Andreas met Timothy McVeigh at a Tulsa gun show April, 1993. They met again in April, 1994. It is estimated that McVeigh visited the town about 20 times. Strassmier claims McVeigh never visited the place, but an AFT informant placed Tim there in the winter of 1994. The Dublin Sunday Times (June 13, 1997) reported that Strassmier was the key link between the American Revolutionary Army and the IRA. An AFT informant reported that the IRA supplied the detonator used by McVeigh.

When Strassmier later fled the US he was found in Arkansas, but Governor Frank Keating two generals intervened to get him released. Mc Veigh called Andreas Strassmeir “Andy the Kraut.” His wife was an Israeli. It is believed that he was somehow tied to McVeigh through Kirk Lyons, who had been a Klan lawyer.

The enclave was run by a Reverend Robert Millar, 71, a Christian Identity minister. His church believes that white Anglo-Saxons are the chosen people and the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Three of the men there had ties to the military. Two of those men, Richard Guthrie and Pete Langan, and McVeigh robbed banks to raise money for the community and to arm it. ( The F.B.I. probably thought Guthrie and Kenney Trentadue were the same person.) Apparently the men McVeigh met at Elohim City went only by code names. One of them was “the major” who contacted him at Fort Bragg.
Differing Views on the Threat Posed by the Militias

Days before the explosion, former CIA director William Colby told John De Camp, his protégé, that the right wing militias must be discredited. He wrote: "I watched as the Anti-War Movement rendered it impossible for this country to conduct or win the Vietnam War. I tell you, dear friend, that this Militia and Patriot movement in which, as an attorney, you have become one of the centerpieces, is far more significant and far more dangerous for America than the Anti-War Movement ever was, if it is not intelligently dealt with. And I really mean this.” Colby understood how quickly the outlook of these right-wing fringe groups could spread, and he thought that far more people shared their views than most would suppose.
He must have realized that the bumbling and bloody assault at Waco strengthened the militias and their allies. De Camp, then an infantry captain, served Colby in 1969-1970 when he was deputy ambassador to south Vietnam. De Camp was a skilled linguist, having mastered six languages including Farsi. Much later in life, after having served in the Nebraska senate, he seemed sympathetic to the militias after had uncovered and written about a pedophile ring that rounded up children for the sexual pleasures of politicians. A British film on the ring called “Conspiracy of Silence” was supposed to have been shown on the Discovery channel but it was never aired. There re copies of it available on the internet. Later, De Camp became lawyer for a man who had been ejected from the McVeigh grand jury for asking too many difficult questions.

Two days after the event, F.B.I. director Louis Freeh told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Most of the militia organizations around the country are not, in our view, threatening or dangerous." Go figure!

Testimony of AFT Plant Ignored
Transcripts on a December 8, 1997 “in chambers” conference between Judge Richard P. Matsch, Nichols’ attorneys, and Justice Department lawyers reveals that the judge never read the file on what ATF informant Carol Elizabeth Howe, 26, once a Tulsa debutante, told here F.B.I. handler, Angela Finley. Howe was Confidential Informant 53270-183, and her code name was “Freya.” Judge Richard Matsch refused to let the defendant’s attorney introduce Howe’s information, dismissing it as “irrelevant.” She said that the Elohim City community were plotting against the US government. She described its inhabitants as racists and added that Andreas Strassmier, head of security at Elohim City, had threatened to blow up federal buildings. Finney’s reports show that Howe was being taught how to make explosives by “Andy” Strassmier.

A May report had Howe talking about “the bombing of the building in Oklahoma City.” Two days after the attack she talked to Finley about their plans to blow something up and mentioned Dennis Mahon, a member of White Aryan Resistance, as her source, and added that he talked about Andreas Strassmeir having made three trips to scout out the Murrah Building. She had also travelled with Reverend Millar. Howe was re-interviewed and confirmed that Finley’s written report. The records from McVeigh’s telephone rental card showed that the bomber called Strassmier two minutes before calling the Ryder Truck Rental agency.

At one point the prosecution denied that Howe was an informant. Later it denied that she provided any warnings before April 19, 1995, and it said she was dropped as an informant6 in June. However, government records demonstrate that both were lies. They also show that federal officers believed she was in physical danger because she talked to the defense, but they refused to provide protection. Howe was arrested for making a bomb threat when the prosecutors learned that Stephen Jones, Nichols’ attorney, was going to call her as a witness. She was acquitted in a Tuila trial that was not covered by the national press.

Agent Peter Rickel admitted in open court that Millar was a paid informant since 1994. When he spilled the beans, a senior agent bolted the room for some reason. This means there were 3 informants within the compound, including Howe and Strassmeir.’

Hoppy Heidelberg was a grand juror who made himself a real nuisance. He was troubled that no one who saw Mc Veigh with other people was permitted to testify. He quoted from the manual for grand jurors and asked why no one who saw John Doe #2 testified. He even asked questions about the prosecutor’s evidence, and Judge David Russell removed him from the grand jury. He had previously sent a letter to the judge suggesting that John Doe #2 might have been a government agent who was being protected.

Richard Wayne Snell, a neo Nazi leader was executed on the day the Murrah Building was attacked in 1995. He had been involved in an earlier plot to attack the building and told guards that Murrah would be attacked on the day of his execution. There were people at Elohim City who were sympathetic to Snell and knew about his prediction.

Involvement of Islamic Forces
On July 16, 2005, the McCurtain Daily Gazette reported that the Elohim City Christian fundamentalists were involved in the bombing. Mike German, a 17 year F.B.I. man who led the investigation, resigned when he learned that the Bush Justice Department would not follow this lead. There are several leads that could point to the involvement of Islamic forces, particularly the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, with the bombing of the Murrah Building. Should this be revealed, it would be clear that people we helped in Afghanistan repaid our support with this terrible deed. That was reason enough to ignore these leads.

Just as the far- right militant organizations are filled with government informers, it is likely that there are also informers within the Islamic groups. Gene Wheaton, a former C.I.A. agent, noted “Every major Middle-Eastern terrorist organization is under surveillance and control of the intelligence agencies in the U.S. None of these guys move around as freely as they'd like you to think." To explore the involvement of the white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and Islamists would eventually turn up information that federal agents knew about the planned attack and somehow failed to prevent it.

It should be noted that federal moles are not informed of one another’s presence. So they do not compare notes. It is possible that Hussain al-Hussaini of Oklahoma City was a federal mole and even now sees the tragedy simply as a sting gone wrong and something to keep quiet about so that other informants and operations can be protected. In the last analysis, these people probably had very little grasp of the big picture. People above them must digest their reports and make intelligent decisions. What they were thinking, we will never know.

Nichols and Al Qaeda
At his trial, Terry Nichols insisted there was no Philippine connection to the bombing. The 2006 report of the House International Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on Oklahoma City, headed by Dana Rohrbacker, made it clear that the momb required more expertise than either McVeigh or Nichols possessed. The travels of Nichols have received too little attention. On his first trip to the Philippines in 1990, he met his second wife, Marife, and was asking for assistance in bomb building. McVeigh probably had a two week affair with her while Terry was at work. Usually accompanied by his second wife, Nichols travelled to the Philippines about 16 times. F.B.I. 302 reports indicate and learned that Nichols met with Abu Sayyaf people, Philippine Muslim extremists in late1993 or early 1994. Jones hired investigators who confirmed this. Nichols is known to have made telephone calls to Cebu City when his wife was not home. The Nichols lived in Cebu City for a time in 1993. Also present were Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah. In 1996, Edwin Angeles, military strategist for Abu Sayyaf, surrendered to the Philippine government and said that the Oklahoma City bombing was discussed at that meeting. He was subsequently killed. According to his widow, Elmina -- his third Muslim wife—Edwin was a deep penetration agent for the Philippine government. She said the meeting took place every day for a week in a warehouse in 1994 and that there were two Americans present, Terry the Farmer and another unnamed person. They discussed blowing up buildings. The dying woman said the money came from Yousef. She claimed to hear Edwin discussing the role of Yousef as a representative of the Iraqis with a Philippine soldier.

In March, 2008, Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher became interested in the tie between Terry Nichols and Ramsay Yousef and complained that the Bush administration has obstructed his efforts. Richard Clarke, former NSC counterterrorism director, has said the Feds have not been able to disprove the Yousef-Nichols connection. Both Yousef and Nichols are now in federal prisons.

In late 1994, Nichols’ first wife discovered that he had $20,000 in stash and precious metals worth at least $60,000. Like McVeigh, Nichols came out of the army with a deep hatred of the U.S. government. Mc Veigh wanted to become an arms dealer but he told people his trips to the Philippines were to bring back little paper butterflies to sell in the US.

The late Sherman Skolnick maintained that two Muslim men were often with Mc Veigh. The late Chicago investigator believed they could have been among the hundreds of Iraqi army officers George H.W. Bush relocated in the United States after the First Gulf War. Most of them were settled in Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Cary Gagan, a government informant, attended a meeting at the Western Motel in Los Vegas on May, 1994 attended by 5 from the Middle East, two Columbians, and Terry Nichols. At the time he was moving drugs from Mexico to Denver for two Arabs, Omar and Ahmed, who were at the meeting. The men took some cocaine and then moved to the Players Club, an apartment complex, in Henderson, where they discussed drug dealing. They also discussed blowing up a federal building in Denver with a truck painted to look like a mail truck. On January 14, 1995, Gagan picked up the truck in Golden. It had about thirty duffel bags with ammonium nitrate. He took the truck to the location he was given and informed the F.B.I. where it was and asked for instructions. The F.B.I. did not re-contact him, and he went home via bus.

At a March 17, 1995 meeting with his employers in Greenwood Colorado, Gagan saw architectural drawings of the Alfred Murrah Building. There was a new figure at the meeting, whom Gagan suspected was an agent. He warned the F.B.I. about what he learned, and the Bureau seemed disinterested. On March 27 and 28 he called the US Marshall’s office in Denver, but his calls were not returned. Then he sent a short letter to Tina Rowe, the head of that office. After the bombing, Rowe told KFOR-TV (Oklahoma City) that the letter had not been received. The Feds said he had a history of mental illness, even though he had a letter of immunity on Justice Department letterhead. The effort to discredit him was led by Lawrence Myers, a journalist with likely ties to the government. He had previously succeeded in discrediting a federal grand juror who was view as a problem and played a major role in the conviction of a former C.I.A. agent for allegedly looking for someone to shoot his son.

Danny Coulson, director of the F.B.I.’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force checked into an Oklahoma City hotel on April 19, hours before the attack. Attorney General Janet Reno in 1994 established VAAPCON, an operation to learn if right-wing Christian groups and militias were capable of violence, and Coulson was part of that operation. However, the F.B.I. said it had no prior knowledge the Murrah Building would be attacked. .There is an Embassy Hotel receipt, but Coulson wrote 4 years later that he and his wife were house-hunting in Fort Worth that day.

McVeigh –A Government Tool???
Some think that Tim McVeigh was somehow working for a government operation, and that the explosion was permitted to happen as part of a plan to create enough of a crisis atmosphere to make possible the enactment of legislation giving government extensive powers to monitor the citizenry and restrict civil liberties. It is only a theory, one supported by very little evidence.
After Tim McVeigh returned from the Gulf War, he went to Camp McCall at Fort Bragg to train for the special forces. McVeigh decided not to enter the Special Forces. His reason was that he was not physically up to the training exercises. Whether someone helped him make this decision is unknown. Many thought he was the ideal soldier and was leadership material. After he left the Army, something seemed to have happened to him, he was cold and emotionally spent. While visiting a friend in Michigan, he said something strange. McVeigh said the Army implanted miniature subcutaneous transmitter on him to keep track of him. He said it hurt him when he sat down. It is known that the military had been experimenting with telemetrics from at least 1968, when they were mentioned in Dr. Stuart Mackay’s Bio-Medical Telemetry. Dr. Carl Sanders, who has developed military biochips, claims they were used in the first Iraq War. At Calspan Advanced Technology Center, where Tim worked as a Burns Security Agency guard, scientists were working on artificial intelligence and were engaged in microscopic electronic engineering that included tiny implants used to track people. There was also a drug interdiction program based there. Some of the people who worked with him as guards saw him as robotic and displaying two very different personalities. The sad fact is that the military has a history of using soldiers for mind control experiment.

After his arrest, Mc Veigh presented himself, according to an Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General, as “a polite young man who gave polite, cooperative answers to every question. It was like the dutiful soldier," Gibson said. "Emotions don't come into play, right and wrong don't come into play. What happens next doesn't come into play… his mood was so level, it was unnatural. I looked at him and realized I felt no repulsion or fear. It was like there was an absence of feeling. He exuded nothing. On the other hand, McVeigh was probably putting on the Michigan farmers he told about the chip. Before leaving for Iraq, soldiers were injected in the bottom and they joked about being given tiny biochips.

The government claimed that Nichols and McVeigh raised funds by robbing Roger Moore, a gun dealer who also owned a factory next to the Bahia Mar Marina. McVeigh planned the robbery and Nichols executed it, taking, cash, silver, gold, and guns from Moore’s farm/ranch. Nichols later claimed that Moore gave them some explosives and that he was in cahoots with MvVeigh in planning the heist. Moore manufactured high speed boats that were sold through Intercontinental Industries of Costa Rica. The firm was an Ollie North front in the 1980s, used to get boats to the Contras who used them to mine Nicaraguan harbors. North used nearby Pier 66 for his weapons-running operations. North’s boat, “The Enterprise” ,was often seen there. He tried to sell heavy weapons to the Militia of Montana, which suggests he may still have been working for some government agency. In early, 1995, he wrote to McVeigh about plans to disrupt the country. At the time, he was a confidential informant for two FBI agents in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

In a February 9, 2007 19 page affidavit, Nichols said Mc Veigh was “apparently” being directed by Larry Potts, the FBI’s assistant deputy director for criminal investigations, and he briefly ran the Oklahoma City investigation. Nichols said Potts manipulated McVeigh to change the bomb target. Potts had directed the siege at Ruby Ridge in 1992, where Vicky Weaver, wife of survivalist Randy Weaver was killed. He also had a role in the operation against the Branch Davidians in 1993, and it is said that he told officers to fire on anyone leaving the compound. He was eventually forced to retire. McVeigh allegedly told Nichols in January, 1995 that Potts was forcing him to “go off script” by selecting another target. Both men would have seen Potts as an evil person, and it is possible that this comment was just made to further damage Pott’s reputation. Documents to support his claims have been sealed. Nichols said he wrote, offering to help John Ashcroft, but received no reply. Nichols also claims that the bomb used was very different and much more sophisticated than the device he and McVeigh built.

Attorney Jesse Trentadue used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FBI memos and 302 reports to show that the FBI was communicating with informers who were interacting with McVeigh. One was Dave Hallaway, the CIA pilot who brought Strassmier to Elohim City, and a second was Shawn Kenny. A third was the person the Southern Poverty Law Center planted there. It is also known that Reverend Milar sometimes sold informati9on to the FBI. There is a 302 report that showed that McVeigh attended a 1994 meeting of FBI informants at Elohim City, and there is also documentation that Louis Freeh , director of the FBI, knew that Hallaway helped Strassmier to escape. Hallaway later handled the standoff with the Montana Militia in 1997. In Missouri, McVeigh was seen with one Robert Jacques, whom the FBI briefly investigated until it learned he was one of their people. They also used three informers within the Arizona militia to keep tabs on McVeigh.

The claim that McVeigh was somehow connected to the government might have some merit. It is known that McVeigh claimed that he had done some special black missions for the Army, and there is much evidence that people like him are often recruited for intelligence work as soon as they leave the military. Before leaving Fort Bragg, McVeigh said a major contacted him about going under cover to do intelligence work for the government by infiltrating right-wing militias. Instead, he worked for Burns Security, guarding a facility where government sponsored mind-control experiments probably were conducted. Then he robbed a gun shop operated by a man who had been a C.I.A. contractor. It could all be coincidental.

David Hammer, a murderer on death row in Terra Haute, became McVeigh’s confidant and close friend. He insists that McVeigh thought he was working undercover for Special Forces and that he was controlled by “the major.” Andreas Strassmier worked closely with McVeigh but had another military control officer. McVeigh selected the Murrah Building as a target, but the major went along. The major thought the bombing would seriously damage the right-wing militia movement, with many of its members withdrawing because of the brutality of that action. One of the men who helped McVeigh was one “Poindexter” who had to be murdered. His body was placed inside the Ryder Van, and it was his foot that was found without a match at the site.


A person known as “D” with intelligence connections briefed the McVeigh defense team and said that Tim was recruited to infiltrate the white supremacists. There are internal defense memoes that indicate that his lawyers heard this from others. Terry Nichols, his old platoon leader, said in 2006 that McVeigh told him in November, 1992 that he was working for the government. McVeigh told the defense team that the DOD gave him a credit card.

Steward Webb claims that an unnamed intelligence source told him McVeigh did not die by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. The government, he says, wanted the building destroyed as a means of getting rid of some embarrassing documents. Webb, a former intelligence operative, has previously shed much light on hiw Iran/Contra was financed and other matters. FBI whistleblower John Peeler says McVeigh is in South America. This theory is based on what McVeigh told death row friend David Hammer. He believed that he was to be rewarded for his service in this way. But this makes little sense. No matter what McVeigh was promised, it made sense to silence him for good.
Lorraine Day, M.D. has raised points to refute my view:

The IV that was supposed to deliver the lethal injection dose to Tim McVeigh was placed, of all places, in his leg! I knew right then that they were NOT going to execute him. This was a fake execution, to pacify the families of the victims involved in the bombing disaster.
The public doesn’t understand what every surgeon and anesthesiologist knows very well. There is no large vein close enough to the skin surface in the leg to place a large enough needle or catheter to deliver the proper dose that would reach the vital organs fast enough to kill a person cleanly. It would be a mess.

He raised two other points. A journalist who witnessed the execution insisted McVeigh ‘s “shallow breathing” when it was over. The physician noted that Dr. Louis Jolly West, visited prisoner McVeigh 18 times. But that could have just been debriefing. This is the sort of argument this writer instinctively rejects, but in perhaps 10% of those cases the writer has had to change his opinion.
In 2006, a video surfaced that was supposed to shjow Timothy McVeigh at Camp Grafton in South Dakota on August 3, 1993. It was a camp that specialized in ballistics. Movie producer Bill Bean was there scouting scenes and taking footage. He shot inside a tank and expected friendly treatment, which he received from other Guardsman. He took pictures of a man who was unfriendly and offered curt answers. Years later, he decided that man looked a great deal like Timothy McVeigh, who would have been out of the army more than a year by then. He took the film to Professor Michael Blomgren at the University of Utah who did a voice forensics test, using a McVeigh 60 Minutes interview as a sample of McVeigh’s voice. Thate was an 86% match.
Loose Ends
Not long after the bombing, the F.B.I. arrested the “Midwestern Bank Robbers,” men Associated with the bank robberies—in all 22 heists. They were part of the Aryan Republican Army. Its headquarters was a safe house in eastern Kansas, and Elohim City was one of many outposts.

Prisoner Kenney Trentadue was found dead in his federal prison cell in Oklahoma City in August, 1995. He had been pulled over on June 10, 1995 and was held for a parole violation. The body was covered with bruises and blood. The Bureau of Prisons and F.B.I. prevented Medical Examiner Fred Jordan from conducting a complete examination and pressured him to drop the matter. Trentadue’s death was ruled a suicide, but his brother Jesse, an attorney, said he was beaten to death by the F.B.I. He claims they considered Kenney John Doe #2 in the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building because he had a tattoo on his left forearm. In 1997, Oklahoma Republican Senator Don Nikles said prison guards told him they were ordered not to talk about the death of Kenney Tretadue. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orin Hatch said it looked like Kenny was murdered. Erie Holder was the Justice Department’s point man in persuading Congress not to investigate Mike Trentadue’s murder. Attorney Trentadue has leaked DOJ memos and e-mails documenting Holter’s role in putting a lid on the story.

Jesse thought McVeigh’s contact was Andreas Strassmeir. In 1992, he was arrested for driving without a license, but all sorts of pressure was brought to bear to get the charges dropped. He appears to have infiltrated a number of right-wing militias. Terry Nichols said McVeigh had been promised protection in a safe house. Strassmeir, from his home in Berlin, said he met McVeigh once and denied any connections with intelligence operations. F.B.I. teletypes verify that Timothy had connections with Strassmeir and Elohim City, where the German carried out military training for white supremacists.


There may be a parallel to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. It is now clear that the F.B.I. was using an Egyptian double agent to teach followers of the Blind Shaik’s men how to make bombs. The agency actually provided the materials. When its agent warned that arrests should be made immediately, the F.B.I. hesitated, wanting to gather more information. Perhaps Oklahoma City is another example of bad timing—a sting gone terribly wrong. "