Oklahoma City Bombing: Was Timothy McVeigh a Patsy in a Sinister Black Flag Operation?
Ruins of the Alfred A. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after April 1995 bombing. [Source: fbi.gov]
Originally published in CovertAction Magazine
[Note: April 19 marks the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Local and national media are spotlighting the stories of victims and eyewitnesses while repeating the official narrative of Timothy McVeigh as the lone mad bomber. My investigation, published three years ago in CovertAction Magazine and republished here today, uncovered that the official narrative is false and that Timothy McVeigh was part of a clandestine operation and was set up as a patsy. The bombing remains highly significant because the legislation that resulted in its aftermath helped push the U.S. on the trajectory towards that of an authoritarian police state, which it clearly is today. This trajectory did not result haphazardly, I would argue, but rather by design, with the history I recount in this article bearing this out -Jeremy Kuzmarov]
At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995—27 years ago today—a bomb reduced to rubble the Alfred A. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, resulting in the deaths of 168 people, including 19 children at a second-floor day-care center, and injuring of hundreds more.
The bomb was allegedly detonated in a Ryder truck rented by Timothy McVeigh, a former Army veteran from New York State, who was subsequently arrested 80 miles north of Oklahoma City after driving a Mercury Marquis with no license plate.
The motive for the bombing allegedly was anger over an assault by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) on the compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas, two years earlier which had resulted in the deaths of 85 people, many of them innocent children.[1]
The Murrah Building housed ATF offices, though the plan for the siege at Waco had been planned at the ATF office in New Orleans, and all the ATF agents were conveniently out of the office at the time of the blast—they had been tipped off not to come into work that day.[2]
This contradicts the claims of ATF Agent Luke Franey that the agents were not in the office that morning because they had been working late on an unspecified criminal case the night before (another agent claimed they were all playing in a golf tournament in Shawnee).[3]
The ATF claimed in a news release that Alex McCauley, Resident Agent in Charge, was in an elevator during the bombing and survived a five-story plunge.
However, when Eugene Duane James searched for survivors in the elevators, he found the elevators frozen between floors, but empty, after blasting through them with a blowtorch. The safety cables were intact and there had been no free fall—which modern elevators do not do.[4]
An Inside Job?
Timothy McVeigh and his collaborator, Terry Nichols, an old army buddy from Lapeer, Michigan, supposedly used nothing more than a crudely constructed ANFO bomb (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil), which was detonated from the Ryder Truck they had rented parked across the street.
However, Brigadier General Benton K. Partin (USAF, Retired), after carrying out a detailed study, told members of Congress that “the damage pattern on the reinforced concrete superstructure could not possibly have been attained from the single truck bomb without supplementing demolition charges.”
At most, the truck bomb would have taken out the flooring on the first and third floors. Partin believed that bombs were placed inside the building at key points to destroy its supports.[5]
A subsequent series of Air Force test blasts on concrete structures corroborated General Partin’s main contention that air blast from a truck bomb outside of the building could not possibly account for the pattern and magnitude of the damage to the Murrah Building’s superstructure.
This assessment was further corroborated by a) a study carried out in collaboration with one of the most respected bomb experts in the world, John A. Kennedy of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, who also investigated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; b) a seismic study carried out by Dr. Charles Mankinof the Oklahoma Geological Survey in Norman; c) the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which determined that a truck bomb of 4,800 pounds of ANFO would have been insufficient to cause the destruction experienced at the Murrah Building; and d) Army demolition manuals, which clearly state that ANFO is not good for destroying concrete or steel.[6]
Craig Roberts, a Tulsa police officer who investigated the bombing at the request of the FBI, found that much of the Murrah building was blown outward, not inward, and that the building had been built to be bomb proof from outside explosives.
The biggest damage was not the small crater where the Ryder truck was parked, but a much larger hole and collapse in the rear of the building, which indicated explosive charges inside the building.[7] Survivors of the bombing tellingly said they had trouble breathing after the blast(s) because of dust, but there was no gas or fire inside the building which would have been absolutely unavoidable after an ANFO bomb explosion.[8]
Samuel Cohen, inventor of the Neutron bomb, wrote to Oklahoma State Representative Charles Key that
“it would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil…no matter how much was used…to bring the building down.” Rather, what did in that building was “an inside job.”[9]
Blue Death
CIA explosives expert Michael Riconosciuto—who was framed by the government on drug charges—said in a jailhouse interview that the blast power of the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building—which also blew out the windows in many surrounding buildings and destroyed a restaurant 150 feet away—was extraordinary. It could not have come out of a conventional weapon but rather had to have been a device developed out of the nuclear weapons program.[10]
As a young scientific prodigy in the 1980s working for Hercules Manufacturing in Silicon Valley, Riconosciuto had developed the A-Neutronic bomb, or “Electro-Hydrodynamic Gaseous Fuel Device” (aka barometric bomb), which he and other experts believed was the one used to take down the Murrah Building.
Classified under the “Nuclear Weapon category” by President Reagan—its first test had occurred at the Pentagon’s secret Area 51 in Nevada, where it resulted in the death of a technician and injury of several others because of the underestimation of its power.[11]
FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who independently investigated the bombing, reported that the government contract number for the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Building showed its manufacture by Dyno Nobel, Inc., in Salt Lake City—a company previously connected with Hercules Manufacturing where Riconosciuto worked.[12]
A key feature of the A-Neutronic bomb was its generation of an electrostatically charged cloud. Consistent with this, a victim in the Department of Housing and Urban Development office in the Murrah Building told National Public Radio (NPR) that she felt a heat wave and a static electricity charge immediately before the windows of the building blew in.
Daina Bradley, who lost her mother and two children and one of her legs in the bombing, said she felt electricity running through her body right before the bomb went off. Ramona McDonald, who was driving about a block away, described feeling static electricity and seeing gold and blue flashes of light when the bomb went off. Riconosciuto had called his device “blue death.”[13]
Textbook CIA?
Chris Emery, co-producer of the documentary A Noble Lie, said he learned from the Oklahoma County bomb squad that a “subnuclear device” had indeed been detonated, which caused an “invisible mushroom cloud” to rise up over the Alfred P. Murrah Building, sucking up all the air for a two-block radius for about a second.
According to Jack Goldman, a Vietnam War veteran who was working on the sixth floor of the Murrah Building at the time, this was “textbook CIA.” It caused a momentary pressure imbalance that caused the gas tanks of vehicles parked in the lot across the street to explode like “mortar rounds,” setting vehicles on fire.
Unexploded Bombs, Multiple Explosions, and the Smell of Sulfur
Immediately after the attack, an unexploded bomb was found in the Murrah Building, delaying rescue efforts. Footage also showed unexploded bombs—of potency levels obtainable only by military sources—being carried out of the building by the bomb squad, suggesting that there were others that had destroyed the building.[14]
Journalist J.D. Cash interviewed witnesses who helped the ATF remove undetonated explosives and weapons, including TOW missiles, from the pit area where most of the victims were found, and who said they had heard multiple explosions.[15]
Bill Martin, head of public relations for the Oklahoma City police, said he believed workers found two or three five-gallon containers of mercury fulminate, a substance used in explosives, in the Murrah Building after the blast.[16]
Jim Ferguson, heating and air conditioning foreman in charge of the Murrah Building who was at Ground Zero less than a minute after the bombing, said that he and “everyone in town heard two explosions.”[17]Ferguson told ABC News in an unaired segment that bullets were zinging by his ear as he worked to rescue victims. Ammunition that was being stored in the building had been set off by the explosion.
Joe Harp, a retired CIA operative who survived the attacks, said that he smelled sulfur before the bombing. This could not have emanated from the ANFO bomb, but rather must have come from gas-enhanced “Daisy Cutter” bombs like the ones that Harp had deployed when he served in the Vietnam War.[18]
Other witnesses smelled the sulfur too and said they felt rumbling and shaking and that the windows began to shatter as if there had been an earthquake before the ultimate blast went off—indicating that demolition charges had been placed inside the building.[19]
Strange Occurrences
Tiffany Smith, a young emergency technician who was on the scene within five minutes of the explosion, said that the first person she saw on the scene was an FBI agent in raid gear, which seemed curious to her because the FBI office was fifteen minutes across town and no FBI agent would be able to change into raid gear and get to the scene within five minutes of the bombing.[20]
The local Sheriff’s bomb squad oddly was seen by a witness, Norma Joslin, a 30-year employee of the Oklahoma County Board of Elections, congregating in front of the Murrah Building at 7:30 a.m., an hour and a half before the bomb went off.[21]
Courthouse clerk Renee Cooper said he saw men in dark jackets with bomb squad markings outside the federal courthouse, right next to the Murrah Building, at 8 a.m, while a private investigator, Claude Criss, said he saw the same men rooting through the bushes.[22]
Between 2 and 3 a.m. on April 19, witnesses working in the courthouse across the street saw two people in the Murrah building with flashlights when there was no security personnel scheduled for duty that night (perhaps the were there planting bombs).
After the bombing, the axle from the Ryder truck was found by Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating of all people in a location that defied the laws of physics unblemished with the VIN number visible; raising suspicion that someone had placed it there.
Don Browning, a dog handler with the Oklahoma City police, met a woman during early rescue efforts wearing a red jacket from either the ATF or FBI who told him the building had been secured so the feds could recover some “crucial files.” When he entered the building, he recognized boxes of small arms and ammunition and blocks of plastic C-4 explosives, which could have been used to bring down the building.[23]
Reckless Negligence Amounting to Manslaughter
April 19 was coincidentally a training day for the Oklahoma County Sherriff’s bomb squad. This brought bomb squad agents from as far as Ardmore Texas to Oklahoma City, providing a perfect diversion and cover if in fact there was a conspiracy. One of the agents, John Haynie, the head of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s tactical team, had carried out surveillance operations in Elohim city, a white supremacist enclave which McVeigh had visited (discussed below).[24]
A Customs agent assigned to the Murrah Building on April 19 told Kathy Wilburn (Sanders), whose two grandsons had died in the blast, that the ATF office on the ninth floor had received a threat that morning, which meant that the Murrah Building should have been evacuated.[25]
The Fire Department also received a warning, and judge who worked across the street, Wayne Alley, had heard rumors of an attack on that day.[26] According to Randy Yount, a state park ranger who helped with the rescue effort, explosives experts spent all night looking for a bomb in response to a warning that one had been planted inside the federal courthouse.[27]
April 19 was significant in the white supremacist/right-wing anti-government movement: It was the anniversary of the a) burning of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco (1993); b) the aborted raid by U.S. Federal Marshalls on Randy Weaver’s cabin at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, resulting in the death of Weaver’s wife (1992); c) a 1985 FBI raid of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA—a white hate group) compound in the Ozarks; d) the anniversary of the Nazis burning the Warsaw ghetto; and e) the date of the Battle of Lexington which started the American Revolution.
On the day of the bombing, Richard Snell—a convicted murderer[28] who had tried to blow up the Murrah Building in 1983—stated in his last words before being executed by the state of Arkansas: “Governor, look over your shoulder, justice is coming!”
Stephen Jones, Timothy McVeigh’s lawyer, uncovered an FBI report of an interview with three Justice Department employees working in Washington, D.C., who said that they received a call from someone who said the Murrah Building had just blown up—twenty-five minutes before the bomb actually went off. Jones believed that, if the government received a phone call and did nothing, it was the height of reckless negligence amounting to manslaughter.[29]
Strange Military Men and More Evidence of an Inside Job
After the explosion, a fireman on the third floor of the building noticed two military ambulances pull up to the building and saw several men in dark fatigues carrying stretchers from the building to the waiting ambulances. What were on the stretchers were not bodies, but boxes, which appeared to contain documents. One of the stretchers also had a missile launch tube.[30]
An FBI agent, David Hall, said that it was known that explosives had been delivered to the building beforehand, and that the ATF had a magazine inside the building which was found with a foot of concrete blown out of it, indicating it may have caused some of the damage.[31]
General Partin said that the structure’s building support had failed primarily at the third-floor level. The Department of Defense was on this level adjoining column B-3 of the building, which Partin believed contained the main detonation charge.[32]
William Northrop, a former Israeli intelligence agent, told author David Hoffman that a friend in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations informed him that there was plastic explosive residue on the Murrah Building’s columns, giving further evidence of an inside job.[33]
Jane Graham, who worked in the Murrah Building, said she had seen three men in the garage days before the bombing who had plans of the building and were holding what looked like C-4 explosives. The men did not resemble Nichols or McVeigh: one was in military gear, another resembled Andreas Strassmeir, a government informant who is discussed below.
They looked uncomfortable when they saw Graham and put the C-4 explosives away. They had been putting grey putty on the building’s columns and stringing wire there, suggesting they were stringing the C-4 with debt cords that could ignite them.[34]
Unmatched Leg
There has been speculation that an unmatched leg found at the bombing site may have belonged to an unidentified bomber.
The authorities attempted to attribute the leg to a Black female Air Force officer named LaKesha Levy. However, the State Medical Examiner’s Office originally claimed that the leg belonged to a white or light-skinned male, and later reported that all efforts to identify the owner of the leg had failed, despite the use of DNA testing.[35]
Advanced Preparation?
Five survivors of the blast attest that they saw three men in the parking garage of the Murrah Building with wires, tools, and what appeared to be building plans several days before the bombing. Another witness saw men with plastic explosives and something resembling a TV remote control; and another, men in the garage sawing at the Murrah Building’s support pillars.[36]
In the weeks preceding the bombing, Michael Loudenslager, who worked in the Murrah building, had become aware that large amounts of ordnance and explosives were being stored in the building and, as a result, he (along with the operator of the day-care center) strongly urged a number of parents to take their children out of the Murrah Building.
On the day of the bombing, Loudenslager was spotted doing rescue work and then getting into a heated argument with someone about the ATF, though shockingly he was reported to have been killed in the bombing sitting at his desk, and is listed as one of the 168 bombing fatalities.[37]
The Myth of the Mad Lone Bomber
In McVeigh’s military training (Primary Leadership Development, Fort Riley Infantry, Fort Benning, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles Transition, Fort Riley), he would not have been taught how to produce no-residue, high-end ammonium nitrate explosions—thus, he could not have been the lone bomber.[38]
To build a succesful ANFO bomb, a person would require some chemistry background, bomb-making experience and skills and access to uncommon components and an industrial size blender, which neither McVeigh nor Nichols possessed.
Nichols’ brother James reported that since early 1994, the ATF and Army Corps of engineers had been experimenting with ANFO/car/truck bombs and C-4 explosives at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico under a secret project named DIPOLE MIGHTfunded by Clinton’s National Security Council (NSC), which could have been linked somehow to the OKlahoma City bombing.[39]
An ATF agent assigned to DIPOLE MIGHT, Harry Everhart, just happened to be working across the street from the Murrah building at the federal courthouse on the morning of April 19 and immediately reported that the building had been hit by an ANFO bomb before any samples were taken for laboratory diagnosis.[40]
Multiple eyewitnesses spotted McVeigh in the company of other people on the morning of the bombing. One witness, who saw McVeigh’s yellow Mercury Marquis enter the Murrah Building parking garage with McVeigh and a woman in it, was threatened with court martial if he spoke about what he saw.[41]
Another witness (Gary Lewis), whom the FBI also tried to silence, claimed to have seen McVeigh get out of the Ryder truck, walk across the street, and jump into the driver’s seat of a Mercury Marquis, which leaped over a concrete barrier. The license plate from the car was dangling on one bolt and McVeigh was accompanied by another man on the passenger side.[42]
Daina Bradley was accused of being mentally unstable after she said that she and her sister had seen a man jump out of the passenger side of the Ryder truck and take off running.[43]A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employee encountered McVeigh and an accomplice in an alley near the Murrah Building after the bombing standing and watching. McVeigh asked if any children had died and appeared sad when the employee said yes.[44]
These stories were all confirmed nine years after the bombing when an Associated Press investigation uncovered a Secret Service log entry referring to previously unseen “video security” footage of the detonation, which pointed to suspects (plural) exiting from the [Ryder] truck.[45]
Timothy McVeigh—All-American Terrorist
Born on April 23, 1968, McVeigh grew up as a typical American kid in western New York just outside of Buffalo. A fan of science fiction and comic books, he was named as his school’s most “promising computer programmer as a senior in high school.”[46]
After dropping out of community college, McVeigh enlisted in the military, where he appeared to have found his calling. His combat arms-proficiency scores were in the top five percent, and he received an army commendation medal and Bronze Star for his work as a gunner in the first Persian Gulf War, where he took out an enemy tank and killed two Iraqis.[47]
Three former soldiers said that McVeigh also killed four surrendering soldiers who had already been taken prisoner. Richard Cerney called McVeigh a “cold blooded bastard.”[48]McVeigh nevertheless claimed to have felt sorrow for the Iraqis because of all the death and destruction. According to his biographers, he felt as if he had become “one of the bullies, one of a type he had reviled since childhood.”[49]
Upon returning to the United States, McVeigh’s anti-government sentiments allegedly radicalized following the siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, in April 1993.
Struggling to find meaningful well-paying work, he was drawn to the gun-show culture and became inspired by The Turner Diaries, a novel by William Pierce (pen name Andrew MacDonald) and classic among white supremacists and anti-government groups, which described the bombing of the FBI headquarters with a homemade truck bomb.[50]
Manchurian Candidate?
In a 1993 letter to his sister Jennifer published by The New York Times in 1998, McVeigh claimed that, during his time at Fort Bragg, he and nine others were recruited into a secret black ops team that smuggled drugs to fund covert activities and “were to work hand-in-hand with civilian police agencies to quiet anyone whom was deemed a security risk. (We would be gov’t-paid assassins!)”[51]
Terry Nichols alleged in a 2001 deposition that McVeigh reported in December 1992 how he “had been recruited to carry out undercover missions,” and later told him that FBI official Larry Potts, who had supervised the Ruby Ridge and Waco operations, directed him to blow up a government building.
An inmate in the SuperMax facility in Colorado responsible for sweeping Nichols’ cell when he was in the yard exercising, saw a letter with reference to a $2.5 million payoff to be split between Nichols and McVeigh and said: “Sarge is going to take care of us.”[52]
McVeigh told other of his friends that a microchip was implanted in his body while he was in the Army—a scenario not implausible given that the Pentagon had developed this capability through identification technology whose purpose was to track soldiers in the battlefield.[53]
His personality was judged to be perfect for an undercover intelligence assignment since he was technically competent but not an independent thinker or leader. An FBI agent with the psychological profile unit told the New York Times after the bombing: “this is an easily controlled and manipulated personality.”[54]
Ron Rice and Carol Moore of the American Board of Forensic Examiners characterized McVeigh in a personality profile as an “Apollonian” personality—“a steady, unemotional, organized individual…more apt to value reason over passion”—and at his core “a military man… his heart and soul belongs to the military of the U.S. government.”.
Back in Buffalo, McVeigh worked for the Calspan Advanced Technology Center—a defense contractor that conducted classified research in aerospace rocketry, electronic warfare, bioengineering and artificial intelligence, and was a staging ground for an undercover operation that involved the National Guard, which McVeigh at the time belonged to.[55]
Founded as Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Calspan had in the past provided a cover for the “Fund for the Study of Human Ecology,” a CIA conduit for mind control experiments by émigré Nazi scientists and others working under MKULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb.[56]
After his arrest, police found eerie McVeigh’s calm and polite demeanor and lack of emotion—as if he had been programmed or trained to carry out a preconceived order upon command.[57]
Terry Nichols’ brother James, in his book, Freedom’s End, stated that McVeigh was met in prison by the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-bender Dr. Jolyon West who had handled Sirhan Sirhan following the Robert Kennedy assassination, and was probably there to reinforce McVeigh’s programmed brain.[58]
Authorities suspected links between McVeigh and the Arizona Patriots—described as “cavemen with bombs”—whose leader Jack Oliphant claimed he was a former CIA mercenary who trained guerrillas from around the world in the use of explosives.[59]
Roger Moore, another accomplice whom McVeigh knew from the gun show circuit in Arkansas and supplied him with explosive detonators, was rumored to be linked to Barry Seal and illegal arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras out of Mena, Arkansas in the 1980s. Moore was a paymaster for a group organized to provide aid to the Contra guerrillas, and had a relationship with the CIA. McVeigh once delivered weapons on Moore’s behalf to a group in the Florida Everglades training for a coup against Fidel Castro.[60]
While on death row, McVeigh told fellow inmate David Paul Hammer that he had been recruited by a “Major” who led a secret unit attached to the Defense Department for a special mission in which he was to infiltrate the right-wing, anti-government movement and ultimately help plan an act of domestic terrorism.
To maintain his deep cover, he was instructed to cultivate a persona as a veteran with extreme anti-government views that would be believed even by his family.[61] When McVeigh was arrested by state trooper Charles Hanger, he turned in a security badge which McVeigh said was an official badge given to him by “The Major.”[62]
Despite officially leaving the Army on April 7, 1991, medical records indicate that McVeigh was given a medical examination in Ft. Riley, Kansas—which was known to have housed secret army psychological warfare experiments—on August 22, 1991 at the request of two physicians who said that he was “qualified for Special Forces.”[63]
Filmmaker Bill Bean believes he filmed and briefly spoke to McVeigh—who was wearing military fatigues, on August 3, 1993—while doing location scouting at Camp Grafton in North Dakota, and that this interview confirmed that McVeigh was still in the Army after he officially resigned.[64]
See video here: https://www.moddb.com/groups/government-corruption/videos/timothy-mcveigh-still-at-camp-grafton-03-august-1993-fbi-lied.
At 9:30 p.m. the night before the bombing, McVeigh met with ATF Agent Alex McCauley and two other men of Middle-Eastern descent at a McDonald’s near the Murrah Building. Money changed hands. In the days preceding the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh had attended meetings with ATF and DEA agents.[65]
This gives the further impression that he was a government agent, as does the fact that he stored equipment before the bombing in a military storage facility and was taken to Tinker Air Force Base after his arrest.[66]
McVeigh Doubles and More Than One Ryder Truck
The use of doubles in espionage work is standard practice.
Several people testified before the grand jury of seeing different Ryder trucks in different places and saw characters resembling McVeigh in different times and places that overlapped. Some of the McVeigh’s acted out of character to the real Tim or wore things such as a backwards baseball cap that Tim never did. [67]
McVeigh also went out of his way to be noticed, which suggests the whole thing was staged.
On the morning of the bombing, witnesses spotted a Ryder truck with a man resembling McVeigh at 8 a.m when McVeigh testified at his trial that he did not drive into Oklahoma City until 8:50 a.m. McVeigh allegedly purchased cigarettes before the bombing though did not smoke, and also asked for directions to the Murrah building elsewhere, when he had previously been known to have cased the building and the building was visible to anyone in the downtown vicinity.[68]
McVeigh told David Paul Hammer that in the days before the bombing he rented a Ryder truck in Minneapolis using the alias Timothy Tuttle—a claim supported in FBI files.[69]McVeigh also allegedly rented one in Junction City, Kansas, at Elliott’s Body Shop, where employees described McVeigh—who was accompanied by an accomplice[70]—as being 5’10” to 5’11” and weighing 185 pounds with a rough complexion.
The real McVeigh was 6’2”, 160 pounds, and had a clear complexion. A shop employee said that the McVeigh who rented the truck there had a deformed chin, which the real McVeigh did not.[71]
The McVeigh who rented the truck listed his name as Bob Kling and gave an address in South Dakota, though at the motel where he stayed, The Dreamland, he listed his name as “Tim McVeigh” and gave Terry Nichols’ address in Michigan.
The manager of the motel and the desk clerk told the FBI that they had seen a Ryder truck in the motel parking lot the day before Robert Kling rented his Ryder—which McVeigh was seen with at the motel the next day—at Elliott’s Body Shop.[72]
Jeff Davis, a deliveryman for the Hunan Palace Restaurant who brought an order of moo goo gai pan and egg rolls to McVeigh’s room, reported being paid by a man who was not McVeigh—though the FBI tried to talk him into saying that the man was McVeigh.[73]
McVeigh allegedly used a prepaid phone card under the name Daryl Bridges to call Elliott’s to make the reservation, yet an early version of the FBI reconstructions shows two calls within two minutes from phones 25 miles apart, which implied involvement of someone other than McVeigh or Nichols since neither was then in the second location.[74]
Kling was wearing military fatigues when he rented the Ryder truck but when McVeigh was caught on surveillance footage an hour before at a McDonald’s, slightly over a mile from the Elliott’s Body Shop, he was not wearing military attire. The prosecution contends that McVeigh left McDonald’s, walked 1.3 miles to Elliott’s during a light drizzle extremely quickly, then showed up dry, wearing completely different clothes (where he would have got the new clothes or changed is uncertain).[75]
Another curiosity is that witnesses reported seeing a Ryder truck on April 10 at Geary State Fishing Lake in Kansas—where McVeigh and Nichols allegedly built the ANFO bomb—when McVeigh allegedly rented the Ryder truck at Elliott’s on April 17. On April 10 also, McVeigh was in Kingman, Arizona, according to the FBI (though he was not seen where he was supposed to be staying), and Nichols was returning from a gun show in Michigan.[76].
One other telling thing is that the U.S. Army had a clandestine base with a Ryder truck outside OKC in the months leading up to the bombing. This could very well have been the truck used in the bombing.
Setting Himself Up to Be Caught
On April 8th, McVeigh, in the company of Michael Brescia and Andreas Strassmeir (discussed below), told a stripper at the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa, “you’re going to remember me.”[77] Perhaps this was not actually McVeigh, but an impersonator who wanted to set the real McVeigh up—by telegraphing his crime. According to the FBI, the real McVeigh was in Arizona at the time.[78]
Another thing that is suspicious is how McVeigh set himself up to be caught—by driving a car without a license plate as his getaway vehicle; by leaving alleged plans to bomb other buildings in the glove compartment of his car; and by leaving a business card from Paulsen’s Military Supplies with a notation to pick up more TNT in the police cruiser after his arrest.[79]
A parallel is with Lee Harvey Oswald who, after purportedly killing JFK, walked into a movie theater house without paying, purposely attracting the attention of the police.
Curiously, a brown pickup truck traveling with McVeigh, was pulled over along the highway at the time of his arrest. It was registered to Steven Colbern, a chemist wanted on federal firearms charges who allegedly carried out bomb-making experiments with McVeigh in the Arizona desert.
The truck contained traces of ammonium nitrate believed to be the main explosive ingredient used in the bombing. Later, when the government released the arrest videotape to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, there was no image of the brown pickup truck on the tape.[80]
An all points bulletin broadcast by the Oklahoma police department to search for the brown truck was curiously withdrawn once McVeigh was apprehended slightly over an hour after the bombing–even though McVeigh’s initial arrest was on a gun charge.[81]
When the FBI arrived at Nichols’ home after he turned himself into authorities, they found detonator cords and receipts for bags of ammonium nitrate with McVeigh thumbprints—raising the question as to why he would leave such incriminating evidence while feigning incredulity that he was a suspect.[82]
Unexplained Visits to the Philippines-Middle East Terrorist Connection
Eyewitnesses placed McVeigh in the company of a man of Middle Eastern descent in the days before the bombing—thought to be Hussain al-Hussaini, an Iraqi who immigrated to the U.S. in the wake of Operation Desert Storm.[83] Middle-eastern men were also spotted hanging around the Murrah building on the day of the bombing.[84]
Previously, McVeigh and Nichols had traveled to Cebu City, which was home to terrorist groups such as the Liberation Army of the Philippines and Abu Sayyaf. The latter was formed by veterans of the anti-Soviet mujahadin in Afghanistan including World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef; its funding was traced to Osama bin Laden.
Witnesses swore they saw Yousef at a used car lot in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in November 1994 with a man resembling John Doe #2, and driving a yellow Mercury Marquis similar to the one McVeigh was caught driving after the bombing.
The Oklahoma City bombing had some eerie similarities to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed seven people. Yousef and his accomplices had detonated an ANFO bomb from a Ryder truck, and the terrorist cell that carried out the World Trade Center attack was known to have been infiltrated by the FBI.
According to Edwin Angeles, a leader of the Abu Sayyaf and deep cover operative for the Philippines government, Nichols attended meetings with Yousef and other terrorists in Cebu City near a place Muslims were taught bomb-making. At the meetings, Nichols referred to himself as a “farmer.”[85] Nichols meanwhile received a visit at his Cebu City residence from Jack Sapihi, an arms dealer and member of the Moro Liberation Front.[86]
Lana Padilla, Nichols’ ex-wife, believed that Nichols’ decision to marry a mail order bride from the Philippines—17-year old Marife Torres who spent part of the year in the Philippines even after their marriage——provided him with a cover story for his visits.
Padilla recalled that McVeigh was the one who bought his first tickets to Cebu City in 1989, just after the two had supposedly got out of the Army, which was suspicious because McVeigh was not making a lot of money at the time.[87]
Nichols traveled to the Philippines dozens of times and made more than 200 phone calls to the Philippines. On one trip, he took a book on how to make a bomb with him there. On another, he carried two stun guns and left $20,000 taped behind a drawer for his son and a note to McVeigh saying, “you’re on your own if I don’t come back.”
Elohim City
McVeigh and Nichols visited Elohim City in the months before the bombing—as phone and motel records and a speeding ticket confirm.
Taking its name from the Hebrew “City of God,” Elohim City was an enclave for the Christian identity movement and radical right in Adair County, Oklahoma, on the Arkansas border.
Founded in 1973 by Canadian Robert Millar, who preached a “holy war against the U.S. government” but became a government informant, Elohim City housed members of the Aryan Republican Army, Covenant Sword, and Ku Klux Klan (KKK), who carried out paramilitary training there.[88]
Informant John Shults told federal agents in 1997 that he was sure “beyond a shadow of a doubt” he saw McVeigh at Elohim City in 1994 at a meeting about a mysterious delivery and use of a Ryder truck. Katina Lawson, who partied with McVeigh and some of his friends, described McVeigh as an ideological activist in the Aryan Nation movement—which he appears to have infiltrated.[89]
John Doe #2
Michael Brescia, an FBI informant from Philadelphia who had resided at Elohim City, admitted he had assisted McVeigh in loading explosives onto the Ryder truck and helped mix them.
The day before the bombing, a man thought to be Brescia—identified by his good looks—was spotted in McVeigh’s company at an upscale hair salon in Junction City, Kansas.[90]
Several people suspected that Brescia—who was arrested in a 1997 Wisconsin bank heist—was a man police referred to as John Doe #2. A witness identified him as having driven the Ryder truck to the Murrah Building before getting out to do something [relight the bomb?] in the back of the truck, before fleeing.
McVeigh told David Paul Hammer that John Doe #2 was Richard Lee Guthrie, an ex-Navy SEAL born to CIA parents who bragged about torching abortion clinics and shooting interracial couples as a member of the Aryan Republican Army. His fingerprints were found in an explosives cache seized by the FBI in 2005 at Terry Nichols’ Kansas residence.
Described as a “raving psychopath,” Guthrie drove with McVeigh and Brescia to the Murrah Building in the Ryder truck on the morning of April 19, according to what McVeigh told Hammer.[91] In November 1994, a man resembling Guthrie calling himself “Robert Jacks” was spotted with McVeigh and Nichols at a real-estate office in Caseville, Missouri. The trio aimed to purchase land in a remote location with a cave on it.[92]
After the bombing, Guthrie and Brescia were supposed to pick McVeigh up in an SUV, but abandoned him, leaving McVeigh to escape in the 1977 Yellow Mercury Marquis whose license plates had been stripped—hence setting up McVeigh to be caught.
Andy the German
Eleven days before the bombing, McVeigh was seen in the company of Andreas Strassmeir—Brescia’s roommate—at the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa. McVeigh had first met Strassmeir—who went by the nickname “Andy the German”—at a Tulsa gun show.
He admitted to calling him two weeks before the bombing to ask if he could use Elohim City as a hideout, and then called him again two days before the bombing.[93] When McVeigh was arrested, Strassmeir’s card was found in his wallet.[94]
A lieutenant in the West German Special Forces with training in military intelligence,[95]Strassmeir was the son of a top aide to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the grandson of a founding member of the Nazi Party.
Strassmeir admitted that part of his work was to detect infiltration by foreign agents and then feed them disinformation, leading to belief that he was an agent for the German anti-terrorist unit, the GSG-9.
During the early 1980s, Strassmeir had spent three summers living on a Kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, near the Golan Heights, where he developed contacts with the Mossad, the Israeli secret service.[96]
At Elohim City, Strassmeir was the firearms and paramilitary arms trainer.
Journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard interviewed a member of the Texas Light Infantry who observed Strassmeir entering an ATF office after successfully submitting an access code—indicating that he was an ATF employee.[97] ATF records indicate substantial intelligence gathering activities in which Strassmeir was a participant.[98]
Terry Nichols believed that Strassmeir was an FBI or CIA agent provocateur. When Glenn and Kathy Wilburn visited Elohim City in an attempt to gain information, their hostess told them that Strassmeir was not well-liked as “he was always trying to get [the people at Elohim City] to do bad things.” This is precisely the job of a provocateur.[99]
According to a brief prepared by McVeigh’s defense team, Strassmeir had accompanied FBI Director Louis Freeh on a trip to Italy and Germany where he met with German internal security officials.
His high-level connections were further evident when after his car was impounded, the highway patrol received calls from the state police, military and State Department who demanded the vehicle’s release, stating that otherwise the “governor” would become involved.”[100] The highway patrol happened to have found bomb-making plans in a locked briefcase.
Strassmeir claimed that he came to the U.S. to work on a special assignment for the Justice Department after being recommended by Vincent Petruskie, a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and CIA-man involved in off-the-record black budget operations who is believed to have been part of the Phoenix program in Vietnam and was stationed in Berlin during the height of the Cold War where his job was to “assassinate Soviet agents.”[101]
In an interview with The Telegraph, Strassmeir stated the “right-wing in the U.S. is incredibly easy to penetrate if you know how to talk to them. Of course, it’s easier for a foreigner with an accent, nobody would ever suspect a German of working for the Federal Government.”[102]
A bombing survivor identified Strassmeir as being in the Murrah Building wearing a maintenance or military uniform in the days before the bombing; another said he was was wearing black cowboy boots and was attaching putty and wires to the columns of the parking garage. Other witnesses identified him in Junction City, Kansas, with McVeigh during the days leading up to the bombing.[103]
McVeigh told David Paul Hammer that Strassmeir was an undercover operative with a different handler from him, though they worked together in planning the Oklahoma City bombing.[104]
Beauty Queen Informant
Strassmeir himself admitted that the ATF had an informant inside the [OKC bombing] operation.[105] The informant to whom he was referring was Carol Howe, the daughter of a prominent Tulsa family drawn into the white supremacist movement in her early 20s after having been the victim of a crime committed by a group of Black males.
A one-time Miss Teenage America contestant, Tulsa debutante and award-winning equestrian, Howe briefly dated and was then raped by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader Dennis Mahon. Howe said she believed that McVeigh was in Elohim City prior to the bombing. She reported to her ATF case officer Angela Finley that Mahon and Strassmeir discussed “targeting federal installations for destruction,” such as the Tulsa IRS office, the Tulsa federal building, and the Oklahoma City federal building.[106]
Howe warned specifically that “a cataclysm was pending” in the spring of 1995 and that federal buildings in Oklahoma City or Texas were being targeted for a bomb, that would coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco inferno on April 19, 1995 and would signal a racial holy war—though inexplicably she was ignored.[107]
Howe said that Strassmeir was a mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing and that she overheard Mahon take a phone call from McVeigh (who went under the alias Tim Tuttle).[108]
Howe also said that she saw McVeigh walking with Strassmeir at Elohim City, and that the sketch of John Doe who rented the Ryder truck used in the bombing appeared to be Peter Ward, an Elohim City resident known as “Andy’s shadow.[109]
Deadly Secrets
According to author David Hoffman, Elohim City was “one great big government-run neo-Nazi training camp.” FBI documents reference an FBI undercover operation (thought to be part of Operation PATCON designed to infiltrate militia groups), and there were at least three government informants at Elohim City—Howe, Strassmeir, and Millar.
Brescia, Mahon and McVeigh along with a former Air Force captain named Roger Moore, who had provided McVeigh with explosives, appear to have worked with the Feds as well.[110]
The CIA had spy satellites over Elohim City, so also knew of any bombing plots.
For reasons that remain unknown, a planned ATF and INS joint raid on Elohim City was stopped in February 1995, at the direction of FBI Special Agent in Charge Bob Ricks of the Oklahoma City office—probably to protect the undercover operation or even bombing plot, which had to have been known by the Feds in advance.[111] Ricks had overseen the slaughter of the Branch Davidians at Waco and was subsequently promoted to Director of Public Safety in Oklahoma.
Andreas Strassmeier testified that the Ryder truck(s) had federal tracking devices on them placed by federal authorities the day of the bombing; people were also spotted in front of the Murrah building at 3:30 a.m. the morning of the bombing with antennae-like devices on their head for monitoring the location of the vehicle(s)–which for some unknown reason were delayed.[112]
A secret service agent, Alan Gerald Wichter, who was ordered to be at his desk at 9 a.m. the morning of the bombing, happened to have been on President Clinton’s security detail and knew many things about the Clinton’s they didn’t want exposed.[113]
The bombing plot was believed to have been financed through a string of bank robberies—netting as much as a quarter million dollars—carried out by Richard Guthrie, Peter Langan, a one-time secret service informant whose father was a CIA agent in Vietnam,[114] and McVeigh, whom Guthrie said he paid with money derived from the robberies.[115]
McVeigh told Hammer that the night before the bombing, an accomplice named Poindexter—with the help of McVeigh and Richard Guthrie—built a 7,000-pound bomb laced with military-grade explosives. At a warehouse meeting where the bomb was inspected, a man named Roberto slit Poindexter’s throat. “The Major” told Tim: “Soldier, he was only hired help, not one of us.”[116]
At that point, McVeigh said he learned that other members of the elite unit run by “The Major” had installed C-4 explosives inside the Murrah Building. McVeigh was given a hand-held transmitter to be used in detonating the explosives.[117]
A Godsend for the Clintons and the Deep State
For President Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma City bombing was a godsend. It gave him the moral high ground over his right-wing adversaries, an opportunity to regain his administration’s footing after the disastrous 1994 midterm elections, and shifted focus away from the scandals that he and Hillary were implicated in.
A congressional investigation was scheduled to begin four weeks after the bombing. The Murrah Building may have also housed documents incriminating to the Clintons, including ones that exposed their involvement in drug trafficking and money laundering operations at Mena, Arkansas as part of the Contra war.[118]
On April 24, 1996, Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which had been introduced in the U.S. Senate two months before the Oklahoma City bombing by Joe Biden. Designed to alter the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which prevents the military from exercising police powers within the U.S., it provided a $500 million windfall for the FBI and curtailed habeas corpus rights by giving the feds more access to private bank accounts and empowering the Secretary of State with the ability to establish a list of foreign terrorist organizations. First proposed by CIA agent Theodore Shackley, the legislation, which set the groundwork for the USA Patriot Act, allowed “no knock” searches, expanded use of wiretaps, and made it easier for illegally seized evidence to be used in court and for the military to intervene in domestic situations deemed a national security threat.[119]
David Hoffman wrote that the bill “gutted the First, Fourth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution, [laid] the framework for an entrenched police state, and [gave] the Federal government full power to target anybody deemed a threat to its authority.”[120]
Section 328 amended the Foreign Assistance Act to bolster assistance in the form of arms and ammunition to certain countries, for the purpose of fighting terrorism. This led in 1997 to the creation of a secret “Eyes Only” liaison agreement between the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) and Saudi Arabia, followed by a subsequent CIA agreement in 1999 with Uzbekistan, whose president, Islam Karimov, had been accused of boiling political opponents alive.[121]
Cody’s Story
In 2025, a former CIA paramilitary operative going by the name "Cody," a petroleum industry geologist who had worked for a time undercover as a gun dealer, gave an interview to Danish research Ole Dammegard in which he he claimed to have been given $500,000 by the late Harold Leonard of the CIA to carry out the bombing of the Murrah Building, which he refused.
"Cody," who in the 1980s had carried out covert arms and drug smuggling operations to the Nicaraguan Contras in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor, stated that the Murrah building bombing was a CIA black flag operation for which McVeigh and Nichols were set up as patsies.
The Murrah building was targeted, he believed, in part because it housed the medical records of Gulf War I veterans who had been poisoned by depleted uranium and other military weapons tests in the war. A Congressional investigation was at the time being conducted and the records would have proven governmental responsibility, resulting in a huge financial settlement to the veterans that was averted by the Murrah Building bombing
“They Killed Him”
Police Sergeant Terrance Yeakey, 30, was one of the first on the scene after the Murrah Building was bombed. He worked arduously for two days to find survivors. On May 8, 1996, only three days before he was to receive the Oklahoma Police Department’s Medal of Valor, Yeakey was murdered. His death was ruled a suicide.
He allegedly slashed his forearms, cut his throat, and then walked a mile and a half over rough terrain and climbed a fence before shooting himself. Yeakey, however, suffered from sickle-cell anemia, which meant he would likely have been too weak to walk the distance he traveled, particularly after losing two pints of blood.
After his death, handcuff bruises were found on his wrists and muddy grass in his slash wounds. His face was bruised and swollen, and blood was found on his body and clothes that did not match his own type.
Yeakey’s wounds were consistent with him having been tortured and then executed. The fatal shot was fired with a pistol with a silencer, and there was strong evidence that he had been dragged through the mud.[122]
Yeakey had witnessed the explosion in the Murrah Building and had questioned why the police were up behind the building before he arrived—a mere two minutes after the bombing, and why so many ATF/FBI agents descended on the building so quickly—before even he had arrived.
On the morning of his death, Yeakey was seen exiting his Oklahoma City apartment with nine boxes of videos and files and drove to the police station where he was told by his supervisor to “drop it” or he would “wind up dead.”[123]
After Yeakey’s death, the police inexplicably never dusted his car for prints, or performed a forensics investigation or autopsy. His car’s seats were unbolted, the floorboards ripped up and the side panels removed, all in an apparent effort to find incriminating documents.
There was no suicide note and the Oklahoma City Police Department’s investigation remained sealed. Yeakey’s brother-in-law discovered a bloody knife stashed underneath the glove compartment though, according to the responding officer, Yeakey had used a razor blade to slash himself.[124] When Yeakey’s family was at police headquarters, an officer whom his ex-wife described as Yeakey’s “only true friend,” pulled them off to the side and whispered: “They killed him.”[125]
Two More Suspicious Deaths
The same people may have killed Dr. Don Chumley, an osteopath who ran a medical clinic a half-mile from the Murrah building, who died in a mysterious plane crash five months after the bombing. Dr. Chumley never opened the landing gear after his plane went into free-fall and there were no distress calls. Dr. Chumley had been one of the first to arrive at the bombing site, helping many people, including seven babies whom he later pronounced dead.
At the time of the crash, Dr. Chumley was rumored to be about to go public with some damning information, namely, that he had been asked to bandage two federal agents who falsely claimed to have been trapped in the building—and were not actually hurt.[126] What these agents were doing and why they wanted to be bandaged remains a mystery.
Stripper Shawntelle Farrens, aged 23, was found dead in her apartment after journalist J.D. Cash discovered a tape from the Lady Godiva club from the night when McVeigh bragged to her about being famous and was spotted with Strassmeir and Michael Brescia.[127]
When Tulsa police officer Craig Roberts studied the crime scene photos, he noticed a bloody hand print on a wall next to Farrens’ patio doors, which gave the impression she had been murdered (and did not die from a pill overdose as was alleged).[128]
“Them Good Ole Boys Killed Him”—Yet More Collateral Damage
Kenneth Trentadue was killed after being mistaken by federal authorities for John Doe #2—whom the FBI wanted to get rid of to sustain the lone-bomber theory. McVeigh stated that the first time he saw a picture of Trentadue and learned of his death, he “knew instantly that someone thought he was Richard Guthrie and that them good ole boys in Oklahoma killed him because they thought he was involved in Oklahoma City.”[129]
Trentadue, 44, allegedly hanged himself on August 21, 1995, in the Federal Transfer Center (FTC) in Oklahoma City, where he was being held on a parole violation.
Trentadue’s body, however, was found bruised and battered with a gash across his throat and wounds on the back of his head, biceps, foot, and anal verge, which could not have been self-inflicted or be explained by a hanging. An alleged suicide note was found on the cell wall, but without Trentadue’s signature.
Alden Gillis Baker witnessed three guards in full riot gear go into Trentadue’s cell, heard sounds of a violent struggle, and then saw the guards leave the cell covered with blood.[130]
A year after giving this testimony, Baker, 47, was found hanging by a bed-sheet rope in his cell at the U.S. penitentiary in Lompoc, California. The Justice Department refused to disclose any of the evidence or acknowledge that he had been threatened if he continued to speak out about having heard FTC guard Rodney DeChamplain admit that “he killed Trentadue.”[131]
In a further twist, the real John Doe #2, Richard Guthrie, was found hanging in a cell in the Kenton County, Kentucky, Jail on July 12, 1996, while awaiting disposition on a federal bank robbery case. Held in isolation as a protected witness after making a plea deal to shorten his sentence, Guthrie at the time was supposed to be on 20-minute guard watch, though was found dead more than 40 minutes after his last check.
The coroner’s report said he had been last seen six minutes before his hanging—which is suspicious because forensics experts say it takes at least six minutes to die from hanging—meaning he should have been discovered and saved.
Guthrie also was not reported to be taking any prescription drugs, yet the coroner’s laboratory data disclosed high levels of acetaminophen in his blood and phenylpropanolamine and pseudoephedrine in his urine.[132]
According to Matthew Moning of the Cincinnati police department, the FBI had questioned Guthrie about the bombing and threatened him with the “death penalty” if money from bank robberies he had carried out was ever tied to the financing of McVeigh’s plot.[133]
Before his death, Guthrie had been in contact with a Los Angeles Times reporter whom he told about his manuscript on the Aryan Republican Army, which mentioned a driver named “Tim.” The book would have likely disclosed key information on the Oklahoma City bombing plot, which the authorities wanted to be kept secret.
Classic Cover-up
Police and rescue personnel were told in no uncertain terms by one of the lead federal officials that it was necessary for security reasons to provide the public with “misinformation” regarding certain aspects of the case, and that the “official line” was not to be contradicted by any one of those in attendance.[134]
When Republican State Representative Charles Key tried to initiate a House investigation into the bombing, he was stymied by Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating—an FBI agent during COINTELPRO where he investigated left wing groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its radical offshoot, the Weather Underground.
Adamant that “two evil men did this [the Oklahoma City bombing] and two evil men paid,” Keating said that Key and others who questioned the official narrative were “howling at the moon” and “off on reservations.”[135]
Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson said that Key was proposing a “wasteful witch hunt” and was “pushing the worst kind of paranoid conspiracy pandering.”[136]
The Daily Oklahoman and Tulsa World published nine separate editorials viciously attacking him and others who stood up to demand the truth about the bombing.[137] The Tulsa Worldcalled Key a “dedicated hustler” peddling “goofy theories” to “right-wing crank audiences.”[138]
FBI Special Agent Ted Gunderson, who arrived with a major investigative team before the dust had even settled from the explosion, faxed critical information on the two detonations to Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and to the news media but never heard back from either. He suspected that the media were not interested in publicizing the story, only gauging what information he had.
He said that the bombing was a pre-planned event designed to “frighten the public” and force Congress to pass draconian anti-terrorist legislation that imperils constitutional liberties and civil rights. In his assessment, the existing anti-terrorism guidelines were more than adequate to investigate terrorist groups within the U.S.; there was, thus, no reason for any new terrorist legislation.
The government’s decision to demolish the Murrah Federal Building on May 23, 1995—less than a month after the bombing—prevented an independent forensic investigation of the bomb site and destroyed key evidence that could have helped to clarify the facts about what happened.
The demolition occurred after Timothy McVeigh’s attorneys reached an agreement with the government to permit the building to be destroyed.[139]
General Partin stated: “It’s a classic cover-up.”[140]
McVeigh’s defense team, in a legal brief, previously attested that the government had failed to follow up on investigations into Strassmeir and Mahon’s involvement—which they said would have led back to the government’s foreknowledge of the attacks.
At McVeigh’s trial, the only bomb expert to testify for the prosecution, Robert Hopler, worked for a reputed CIA front, Dyno-Nobel (later Hercules Powder Company).[141] Key witnesses who contradicted the government’s official story were excluded, including Benton K. Partin, along with records pointing to McVeigh’s connection to Elohim City.
When Carol Howe informed her ATF handlers prior to April 19, 1995, that residents of Elohim City—led by Strassmeir and Mahon—were planning attacks on federal buildings, including the Murrah building, she was accused of being “unstable” and indicted on trumped-up charges—which she successfully fought in court.
Grand juror Hoppy Heidelberg came to the conclusion that the government was covering up key facts in trying to narrow the case to McVeigh and Nichols; he expressed his belief on talk shows nationwide that there was a John Doe #2—and probably #3 and #4—and that the government was refusing to share the information with the American people.[142]
Heidelberg’s view was shared by Holly Hanlin, a juror in Terry Nichols’ trial who felt the government had failed to prove its case, and jury forewoman Niki Deutchman, who criticized the FBI’s sloppy crime lab procedures and claimed agents were “arrogant” for failing to tape-record Nichols’ initial nine-hour interrogation.[143]
FBI Cover-up
The FBI investigation was marked by a pattern of dishonesty and corruption. The FBI’s first-on-scene commander, Weldon Kennedy, claimed there were no eyewitnesses when 24 people interviewed by the FBI said they saw McVeigh on April 19th with another person (s).[144]
After the bombing, the FBI confiscated surveillance tape from a convenience store that showed McVeigh buying a homeless man two beers after he had provided him a pay-off.[145]
The FBI also confiscated surveillance cameras located in the parking lot across from the Murrah Building that would have shown precisely who got out of the Ryder truck and the Murrah building collapsing—and verified whether it collapsed by cutting charges or a truck bomb.[146] The FBI further seized surveillance footage taken by Trooper Charles Hanger upon his arrest of McVeigh which captured a brown pickup just ahead; afterwards, Hanger was instructed by the FBI not to talk to anyone.[147]
At McVeigh’s trial, witnesses who had seen McVeigh outside the Murrah Building with other suspects were not asked to testify. Other witnesses were convinced to retract previous statements, intimidated, or forced to make statements that were favorable to the prosecution.
A primary example of the latter was Michael Fortier, who served 11 years in prison as an accomplice to McVeigh. Originally, he told investigators that “he did not believe that McVeigh had blown up any building,” and that his friend (McVeigh) was “not the face of terror as reported in Time Magazine.”
But after the FBI raided his home, Fortier reversed his statement, saying that he and McVeigh “cased” the federal building, in response to an offer for a plea bargain.[148]
Special Agent John Hersley contended that traces of military-type detonation cord known as PDTN (pentadirythri tetranitrate), commonly known as Primadet, were found on McVeigh’s clothing at the time of his arrest (in another report it was PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate). PDTN was allegedly used to wire the barrels of ANFO.
Senior FBI chemist Frederic Whitehurst conducted a test on McVeigh’s clothing but found no residue there, or in McVeigh’s car either. Whitehurst came forward with allegations that the FBI was slanting results of forensic tests for years; and that the explosives unit and chemistry and toxicology unit inappropriately structured their conclusions to favor the prosecution.[149]
Whitehurst’s allegations were further elaborated on in a highly revealing report issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which concluded that the bombing investigation was one of the most serious cases of evidence tampering it had ever seen; that FBI investigator David Williams repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis and that were not explained in the body of the report.
It appears that Williams reached his conclusions based, not on empirical evidence, but on the fact that Terry Nichols allegedly purchased large quantities of ANFO. As the OIG report states: “without the evidence of these purchases, Williams admitted he would have been unable to conclude that ANFO was used. Indeed, Williams stated that, based on the post-blast scene alone, it could have been dynamite.”[150]
Michael Riconosciuto told former FBI Agent Ted Gunderson that the theory of drums of ANFO being detonated by PDTN-soaked loops of rope or “det” cord is highly improbable, if not impossible. “The only way to obtain blast control is with volumetric initiations. This takes electronic circuits of similar sophistication as would be required in nuclear weapons. This sophistication is not available to the average person.”
Finally, the OIG report states that “Whitehurst questions Williams’ conclusion that none of the structural damage evident within the Murrah building was caused by secondary explosive devices or explosions.”[151]
Carting Off Documents
Ten hours after the blast, 40-50 federal agents began carting away boxes of files from the ATF and DEA offices. An angry rescue worker told the New York Daily News “you’d think they would have let their evidence and files sit at least until the last survivor was pulled out.”
Approximately ten days after the blast, two white trucks pulled up to the postal annex across from the Murrah Building that was being used to store emergency supplies and a dozen men in black unmarked uniforms, wearing ski masks and carrying submachine guns, jumped out and formed a protective corridor to the building.
As a witness watched, he observed “box after box of what appeared to be files or documents in boxes [that] were loaded on the unmarked trucks that looked like Ryder rental trucks but were white.”
The witness, a Tulsa Fire captain who was filming the site of the explosion, was told by one of the agents to put down his camera. His film was later confiscated.[152]
What was in the documents remains a mystery, but one speculation is that contained details of the Mena drug smuggling/money laundering operation overseen by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton as the boxes were carted off from a DEA office.[153]
Throwing McVeigh Under the Bus
After his conviction, McVeigh accused his lawyer, Stephen Jones, of lying and succeeding only in “getting him the death penalty.” At the trial, Jones failed to present the letter McVeigh had written to his sister Jennifer describing his recruitment into a secret government team involved in illegal activities. He also did not call Benton K. Partin to testify, seismologist Ray Brown or other military experts who would have pointed to a far more powerful bomb than the ANFO bomb in the Ryder truck McVeigh drove.
Carol Howe was also excluded—by Judge Richard Matsch, a Nixon appointee who had a background in military intelligence—though she testified at Nichols’ trial.[154]
A lifelong conservative practicing law in Enid, Oklahoma, Jones had started his career working for Richard M. Nixon.[155] Former Nebraska State Senator John De Camp, who investigated a child-abuse ring run by high government officials, believes Jones had made a deal with the Feds which enabled the demolition of the Murrah Building in order to destroy the forensic evidence. This led to the impression that Jones had helped throw the trial.
Jones for his part expressed his belief that McVeigh had not received a fair trial because of the prosecution’s withholding of evidence, exclusion of witnesses, and Judge Matsch’s refusal to allow Carol Howe to testify—after government agencies had willfully covered up information she had provided.
When Jones filed a motion to examine the bomb crater at the scene, it was granted, but when they went there, the crater had been filled in and the government refused to allow him to uncover it. Jones further pointed to stonewalling tactics by the CIA which refused to release any documents to him that might have had relevance to the case, including pertaining to Islamic terrorism in the Philippines.[156]
Media Blackout
After the bombing, Glenn and Kathy Wilburn worked with Unsolved Mysteries producer Stanley Brown to develop an entire show about the cover-up surrounding the bombing.
Brown was convinced that the government had prior knowledge of the attacks. The day before the camera crew was supposed to arrive at Glenn and Kathy’s home, Brown called them to tell them that the show had been cancelled— executives at the network had decided to call it off out of fear that the ATF and FBI would no longer cooperate with them on producing future shows.[157]
ABC News later also cancelled a show about Carol Howe. 20/20 producer Don Thrasher and researcher Roger Charles, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant, had planned for ABC News host Peter Jennings to interview her. In its place, ABC ran a high-speed car chase from New Zealand.[158]
Wider Pattern
The Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy and cover-up appear to bear some disturbing parallels to the JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King assassinations.
In each case, high-level government authorities wanted the public to believe that a deranged lone assassin was responsible (Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Timothy McVeigh) and then corrupted the police investigation and rigged the legal process.
The media did its duty by failing to probe deeply into the facts of the case, while maligning those who did as conspiracy theorists. Afterwards, key witnesses turned up dead, and others were threatened.
McVeigh had in common with Oswald and Ray his recruitment as a government agent during his army service. The three were clearly set up to take the fall for a wider conspiracy.
One other disturbing parallel is with the 9/11 terrorist attacks: Engineering experts believe that the World Trade Center towers came down on 9/11 from internal explosives/demolition—with witnesses testifying to large explosions and destruction of the basement/lobby areas of WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 prior to the total disintegration of those buildings.[159]
Thus, the bombing of the Murrah Building may have served as a test case or trial run for 9/11. Both appear to have been part of a “strategy of tension,”[160] whose aim was to instill fear in the public and enable passage of draconian anti-terrorist legislation that has transformed the U.S. into more of a police and garrison state—contrary to the so-called espoused principles upon which the U.S. was founded.
Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books, 2001). ↑
Kathy Sanders, After Oklahoma City: A Grieving Grandmother Uncovers Shocking Truths About the Bombing…and Herself (Arlington, TX: Master Strategies, 2005), ch. 9. The Executive Secretary’s office at the Justice Department also received warning of the bombing 24 minutes before but warned no one. ↑
In early May, Franey, curiously, showed up at the home of Glenn and Kathy Wilburn—whose two grandsons were killed in the daycare center—with his hands bandaged from injuries he claimed to have received while clawing his way out of the bombing rubble. (Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 80, 81). The Sheriff’s video from the day of the attacks, however, showed Mr. Franey shaking hands with law enforcement officials. He told a local news reporter that he had been unharmed by the blast and escaped the ninth floor through the stairs after being trapped. A picture showed him at ground zero free of dust. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, ch. 9; Victor Thorn, Hillary (and Bill): The Murder Volume, Part Three of the Clinton Trilogy (Washington, DC: American Free Press/Sisyphus, 2008). ↑
Thorn, Hillary (and Bill); David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998), 1. This theory is given credence by the fact that eyewitnesses and local news channels reported on the existence of a second and third bomb within the first few hours of the explosion. An ANFO bomb that detonated at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, a U.S. army barracks killed 20 people, a non bomb proof building, when the Murrah building was bomb proof, the implication being the ANFO bomb would have done far less damage there. Significantly, the columns remained standing directly across the sidewalk from the Ryder truck where the ANFO bomb allegedly detaonetd as opposed to those that had collapsed more than 50 feet away, Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles believe that Partin overestimated the strength of the concrete pillars and failed to appreciate the powers of gravity to pull down part of the building once key support columns had been weakened. Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles, Oklahoma City: What the Investigation missed—and Why it Still Matters(New York: William Morrow, 2012), 53. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 2, 5, 19; John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska(Lincoln, NE: AWT Inc., 1992), 343, 344; Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 197; Jon Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing: The Suppressed Truth (Escondido, CA: The Book Tree, 1995), 72, 73. Dr. Roger Raubach, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry who served on the faculty at Stanford University, said that his assessment as a scientist was that “all the AP, UPI type-stuff, what is bandied about by Dan Rather, all that is B.S.” The kind of damage that was done to a heavy structure like the Alfred P. Murrah Building could only have been done by military explosives. Raubach also noted that the effect of explosives lessens dramatically with distance—making further unlikely that the Ryder truck ANFO bomb could have taken down the building (it would have had to knock out a whole wall of the building first). Ammonium nitrate bombs were used in the past to loosen up dirt in mining operations, not destroy the whole mine. Sam Gronning, a licensed professional blaster in Casper, Wyoming, with 30 years’ experience in explosives, told a journalist that “the Partin letter states in very precise technical terms what everyone in the business knows: No truck bomb of ANFO out in the open is going to cause the kind of damage we had there in Oklahoma City. In 30 years of blasting, using everything from 100 percent nitroged to ANFO, I’ve not seen anything to support that story.” Gronning added that the destruction of the Murrah Building very likely came from a demolition. ↑
Craig Roberts, The Medusa File II: The Politics of Terror and the Oklahoma City Bombing(Sydney Australia: Consolidated Press International, 2017), 38, 56. ↑
James D. Nichols, as told to Robert Papovich, Freedom’s End: Conspiracy in Oklahoma(Decker, MI: Freedom’s End, 1997), 74. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 2, 18. ↑
Riconosciuto had drugs planted on him and was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he became a whistleblower. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 12. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 12. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 13. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 24, 27. Employees suggested that planting the bomb would have been easy because of lax security in the late night and early morning hours, when nobody guarded the building. ↑
Chuck Harder, and Pat Shannan, “‘OKC Bombing’—The Forerunner to 9/11,” https://www.moddb.com/groups/government-corruption/videos/oklahoma-city-bombing-forerunner-to-9-11 ↑
Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 28, 71, 72. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 21. ↑
Thorn, Hillary (and Bill). ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 18. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 68; Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 287, 320. Smith’s husband believed “they would have had to have had some kind of warning to respond that quick because they would have had to get in their gear and everything.” ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 287, 320; Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 66, 67. Dan Adomitis, an Oklahoma City attorney headed downtown to a charity board meeting, also saw the bomb squad around the same time as Joslin. Joslin had her house broken into twice after her story appeared in a local newspaper. Frightened, she took early retirement and moved out of the state of Oklahoma. The bomb squad incidentally denied being there. Another witness, J.D. Reed, said the bomb squad was there before he ran down the street [to escape the blast], prompting more questions about how they could move so quickly. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 33. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 71, 72, 73; Nichols, Freedom’s End, 134, 135, 314. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 33. There are parallels with the NORAD training exercise occurring on 9/11. John Haynie told a Grand Jury in 1998 that he focused on honing his team’s surveillance skills. Gumbel and Charles speculate that he may have been involved in a different operation, with the training session acting as a cover story ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 245. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 90. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 33, 34, 39. Debbie Nakanashi, a window clerk at the center city post office across the street from the Murrah building indicated to a congressional investigator that she had seen sniffer dogs but was ordered by her superiors not to talk about them. There were rumors that the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which inexplicably brought three out of town agents into Oklahoma City on the evening before the bombing, had also been forewarned. Republican Congressman Steve Stockman of Texas received a fax from a Michigan militia leader, Mark Koernke, specifying that a bomb had been set off in Oklahoma minutes before it actually had. ↑
Snell, a white supremacist leader in Arkansas, had killed a pawn shop owner, William Stumpp, he erroneously thought was a Jew and a Black police officer. He purported to have video of Bill Clinton visiting the Mena International Airport where drugs and arms smuggling operations were carried out to the Nicaraguan Contras. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 205. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 27. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 26. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 27. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 28, 361. ↑
Idem. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 216; David Paul Hammer, Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing(Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010), 208, 209. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 25. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 361. ↑
Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 82. The bomb afterwards did not give off a lot of soot—implying it was made by a professional. ↑
Nichols, Freedom’s End, 69, 70, 71. The intent of the Dipole Might experiments in 1994 included making videos and computer models to be displayed in a courtroom to aid in the prosecution of defendants in vehicle bomb cases, according to government documents. Investigator Pat Shannan writes: “Despite only one known case in almost 25 years, why did Clintons NSC anticipate a need for detailed information regarding ANFO vehicle bomb attacks a few months prior to the Oklahoma City blast? ↑
Nichols, Freedom’s End, 71. ↑
Danielle Hunt, who operated the Stars and Stripes Child Development Center in the Murrah Building, told the FBI that, on December 16, 1994, McVeigh, wearing camouflage fatigues, approached her seeking to place his two children in the day care center but asked only questions about the day care center’s security. This contradicted McVeigh’s claim that he did not know that there was a child-care center in the Murrah Building. Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 25. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 91, 92. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 150. Mike Moroz, who worked at Johnny’s Tire Company, and Danny Wilkerson who worked at a convenience store, identified McVeigh on the fateful morning in the company of other men. Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 89, 252. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 362. ↑
Stuart A. Wright, Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193. Terry Nichols himself admitted that others were involved besides McVeigh, himself and Michael Fortier. Roberts, The Medusa File II, 412. ↑
Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, ch .1 (“The Boy Next Door”). See also Brandon M. Stickney, “All-American Monster”: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996). ↑
McVeigh’s superior at Fort Riley, Kansas, Albert Warnement sad that McVeigh was “without a doubt the best soldier I have ever trained with.” ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 169. ↑
Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, 75; Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 39. McVeigh said that “we were falsely hyped up [to kill Iraqis], and they are normal like you and me.” Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 170. ↑
Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist. Pierce was a former member of the American Nazi Party. In the novel, after the passage of a law called the Cohen Act makes gun ownership a crime, the Organization—led by protagonist Earl Turner—rises up against “the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague,” slaughtering Jews and Blacks wholesale to establish an all-white “New Era” at the end of the 20th century. ↑
Jo Thomas, “McVeigh Letters Before Blast Show the Depth of His Anger,” The New York Times, July 1, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/01/us/mcveigh-letters-before-blast-show-the-depth-of-his-anger.html. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 108, 410. ↑
Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 23, 69. ↑
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 211. ↑
Wendy S. Painting, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh (Walterville, OR: Trine Day LLC, 2016), 253. Some of the classified research was applicable to telemetrics, part of an ongoing military project to track soldiers on the battlefield. For a period, McVeigh set up a mailbox in Colorado where he may have gone to Executive Security International School (ESI) in Grand Junction, which provided training to Special Forces soldiers in executive protection, investigation, and intelligence operations, including anti-terrorism.
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 53; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 419. Calspan was instrumental in REDCAP, an Air Force electronic warfare system that winds through every Department of Defense facility in the country. McVeigh worked for another defense contractor, Burns International Security services in Buffalo. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 56. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 109, 110, 402; Nichols, Freedom’s End, 350. ↑
Belew, Bring the War Home, 213. McVeigh spent time in Kingman Arizona with accomplice Michael Fortier who said he had wanted to start his own militia there. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 240, 250-51; Boltzmann Booty, “The CIA Asset Who Funded the OKC Bombing,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, January 2023, 20. Moore was never prosecuted, adding to the likelihood that he was being protected by the FBI or intelligence agencies. In 2005, the FBI raided the former Kansas residence Terry Nichols where they seized a cache of explosives. Nichols said that Moore and other bombing conspirators’ (notably Richard Lee Guthrie) fingerprints would be found among items in the explosives cache, though the FBI never followed up on the lead and destroyed the evidence. Richard Booth, “The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing: A Case Study in FBI Corruption and Failure,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, March 2022, 77.↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 30, 34, 35, 40. McVeigh was under the illusion that, afterwards, he would be protected. In the summer of 1993, McVeigh traveled to several U.S. Army bases where he engaged in maneuvers with U.S. troops, though his real purpose was to scout armories in the attempt to obtain large destructive weapons for the mission. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 78. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 31. When McVeigh was arrested after the bombing, the state trooper (Charles Hanger) who arrested and booked him into jail, turned in a security badge had in his possession, which McVeigh said was an official badge given to him by “The Major.” (Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 78). ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 418. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 109. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 341; Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 69, 70. There is speculation that McVeigh believed he was on a secret government mission and was told to deliver a truck and did not know he had killed anyone. ↑
Stephen Jones, and Peter Israel, Others Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 100; Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 235; Nichols, Freedom’s End, 223, 224, 228, 230. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 34, 35, 36; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 59, 62. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 68. ↑
The Justice Department later advanced disinformation trying to discredit Eldon Elliott, the owner of the shop’s observation that McVeigh was accompanied by another man. Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 200. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 94 .Elliot’s body shop was very visible off the main interstate, making it a poor place to rent a truck for a crime unless the culprits wanted to be identified and it was all a set up.
Jones, Others Unknown, 331; Penny Nolan and Nolan Clay, “Motel Clerk Puts McVeigh with Truck,” The Oklahoman, May 9, 1997; Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 118. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 119. A maid saw a man in McVeigh’s room who looked like he was Puerto Rican—after she thought McVeigh had checked out. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 233, 234; Jones, Others Unknown, 358. Jones emphasizes that there is no way of knowing who made any of the calls charged to the Daryl Bridges credit card. McVeigh’s fingerprints, curiously, were not found at Elliott’s, in the Ryder rental paperwork, or in motel rooms where McVeigh stayed, or in the storage lockers where McVeigh allegedly stored the bomb-making materials. Afterwards, Eldon Elliott, who rented the Ryder truck to McVeigh, was told not to talk to anyone about the case. The FBI enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Ryder Trucks; its CEO, Anthony Mitchell, was a member of the Trilateral Commission. ↑
Jones, Others Unknown, 100; Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 232. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 236. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 94. ↑
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishers, 1997), 88. ↑
Note: It is suspicious that there were two yellow Mercury Marquis’ 1970s vintage model spotted in downtown Oklahoma City just before the bombing of the Murrah building. This could have been part of the staging of the crime scene and attempt to create an association in the public mind with McVeigh and the vehicle to make the public believe in the lone bomber scenario.
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 96. McVeigh at the time of the bombing was wearing a t-shirt featuring a picture of John Wilkes Booth on the front and a tree with red blood droplets on the back along with a quote from Thomas Jefferson that said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Jon Rappoport speculates that McVeigh did not shoot officer Charles Hanger because he did not think he had done anything wrong; he may have been under the impression the bomb in the Ryder truck was a small one designed to set off symbolic fireworks to protest the Waco raid. Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 96. Another theory is that McVeigh was instructed to turn himself in by his handlers whom he believed would bail him out of jail. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 78; Nichols, Freedom’s End, 213; Richard Booth, “All Points Bulletin: Timothy McVeigh and the Brown Pickup Truck,” Garrison: The Journal of Deep History and Politics, May 2023, 127-135. Colbert was later arrested in Arizona, but the FBI never investigated any link between him and the Murrah Building bombing. A brown pickup truck had been spotted in the vicinity of the Murrah Federal Building just before the bombing. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 130. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 230. ↑
Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing (Nashville, TN: Thomas Dunne, 2008), 57, 338. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 130. ↑
Jones, Others Unknown, 152; Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 190, 191, 199; Davis, The Third Terrorist, 57, 242; Peter Dale Scott, “Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension,” The Asia Pacific Journal, September 22, 2012, https://apjjf.org/2012/10/39/Peter-Dale-Scott/3835/article.html. Nichols traveled to the country sometimes on his own, without Torres. He told his family he was bringing back paper butterflies—curious merchandise for a man who had wanted to set himself up in the military surplus business. ↑
Davis, The Third Terrorist, 242. Nichols had renounced his U.S. citizenship and, with his brother, supported the defense fund of holocaust denier David Irving. ↑
Davis, The Third Terrorist, 57, 243, Lana Padilla, with Ron Delpit, By Blood Betrayed: My Life with Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh (New York: Harper’s, 1995), 3. ↑
Though initially starting out as a pacifist enclave, Millar came to host numerous violent extremists at Elohim City, including Gordon Kahl and Chevie Kehoe who murdered an Oklahoma family, in his attempt to kick-start a revolution. Required reading was Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries. ↑
Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, 86. Lawson considered McVeigh’s political views repugnant. She said that he would make racial slurs and said that “Hitler would have been a great leader for the world. If he planned it better, it might have worked out, and we’d have an Aryan world.” This may have been part of his cover. The prosecution and media deliberately suppressed McVeigh’s connection to the Aryan Nation, and instead created the impression that he was an anti-government radical out to avenge Waco. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 119. Brescia was a part-time student at Lasalle University who came from a middle class family and joined or infiltrated the Aryan nation. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 76; Wright, Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing, 188; Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 86, 87, 88; Booth, “The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing,” 77. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 232; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 103. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 202. Strassmeir later removed tags with McVeigh’s name from some army fatigues of his he had in his possession in order to try to disassociate himself from McVeigh. ↑
Belew, Bring the War Home, 236. ↑
In an interview with the London Sunday Telegraph, Strassmeir stated that part of his work was to detect infiltration by foreign agents and then feed them disinformation. It was widely believed that he was an agent for the German anti-terrorist unit, the GSG-9. Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 129. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 129; Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 97. Strassmeir was photographed in the company of General Rafael Eitan, the architect of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. ↑
Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton. J.D. Cash reported in the McCurtain Daily Gazette that a highly placed FBI official confirmed to him that Strassmeir was a paid government informant sent by the ATF to infiltrate Elohim City. Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 133. Evans-Pritchard suggests that Strassmeir may have also been simultaneously working as an undercover German intelligence officer infiltrating U.S. neo-Nazis—as the Germans for many years felt that U.S. neo-Nazis were stirring up the German far right. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 132. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 135. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 266. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 98. Petruskie allegedly killed a Soviet spy in the 1950s and left him hanging in the Reichstag ruins. According to Craig Roberts, Petruskie interacted with a cabal of ex-military men and former and current CIA employees who were involved in gun running, mercenary action, espionage, drug trafficking, blackmail, subversion and money laundering. Roberts, The Medusa File II, 95. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 133. The McCurtain Daily Gazette reported on July 14, 1996, that a “highly placed source at the FBI confirmed that Andreas Carl Strassmeir was a paid government informant sent by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to infiltrate Elohim City.” ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 143. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror. 137. ↑
Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, ch. 5; Jones, Others Unknown, ch. 12; Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 131. Mahon was arrested in 2009 for the 2004 mail bombing of a state diversity official in Arizona. He allegedly told his cellmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, Alan C. Scott, that he had known Timothy McVeigh, had sold him the Anarchist’s Cookbook, and was the “number three anonymous person in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.” ↑
Belew, Bring the War Home, 219. ↑
In the incident that led her into the white supremacist movement, Howe was forced to jump off a building to save herself and broke her ankles and legs. She became a close personal associate of Mahon before becoming an ATF informant in August 1994. She was indicted on a phony explosives charge in 1997 she believes as a signal to keep her mouth shut about what she knew about Strassmeir and Mahon. (Howe was ultimately acquitted of the charge.) ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 231, 416. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 147; Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 145, 146, 201. FBI documents reference an FBI undercover operation at Elohim City. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 133; Ambrose-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, 63; Wright, Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing, 12, 189. Ricks explained his reason for canceling the federal raid in this way: “I do remember I told them I didn’t want another Waco on our hands.” ATF Director John McGraw said the decision to halt the raid came from higher up than Ricks. Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 275. McGraw said the ATF was not at the time prepared logistically to carry out the raid. Craig Roberts notes that the raid was scrapped after senior members of the ATF, FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office met. Roberts, The Medusa File II, 114. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 121, 426. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 430. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 86; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 100. The Secret Service intervened and had Langan released after he was caught robbing a pizza hut in Georgia. After his capture in Cincinnati, Ohio, Langan’s white van was shot up by the FBI, U.S. Marshal’s and local police, though he survived. Langan is now a transgender woman named Donna who has renounced her previous racist views and was transferred to a female penitentiary, where she is serving a 240-year sentence. Langan was a high school friend of Guthrie’s; the two grew up near each other in Wheaton Maryland. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 42, 43, 202. Roberts in The Medusa File II alternatively suggests that financing may have come from drug smuggling and as a result of collaboration of Mexican and/or Colombian drug cartels that were in the pockets of the CIA. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 74, 75. Poindexter’s body was loaded onto the Ryder truck and obliterated when the bomb went off. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 75. Craig Roberts suggests that McVeigh may not have actually been executed. In his book, he quotes Dr. Lorraine Day, former chief of orthapedic surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, who said that the execution was “a farce.” The government unusually flew in its own executioner complete with his own drugs. The IV that was supposed to deliver the lethal injection dose was placed in McVeigh’s leg, rather than the arm, hand, foot or an area near the clavicle to gain access to a large vein directly to the heart, which was standard practice. A witness to the execution, Susan Carlson, a reporter for WLS-AM Radio in Chicago stated on air that McVeigh “appeared to be still breathing or what appeared to be shallow breathing, even after being pronounced dead, and his eyes remained open.” Afterwards, McVeigh’s body was transported away in a government van allegedly to a funeral home where it was to be cremated and the ashes given to his attorney. Roberts wonders whether the “Major” or “Sarge” took care of McVeigh? Does he have a new identity, and is now somewhere living off his half of the $2.5 million dollars placed in a private account as described by Nichols. Roberts, The Medusa File II, 422. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror; Derick L. Hulme, Jr., The Domestic Politics of Terrorism: Lessons From the Clinton Administration (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), xii. Clinton performed masterfully after the bombing, with a mix of soothing talk for the victims and tough talk for the perpetrators while proposing new legislation against terrorism designed to prevent future attacks. ↑
James D. Boys, Clinton’s War on Terror: Redefining U.S. Security Strategy, 1993-2001(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2018), 98; Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 47. Clinton complained when the bill was held up in Congress, stating that “the tools we need to fight terrorism have been shoved into a dark corner of the House of Representatives by an alliance of extremists on the left and right.” Hulme, Jr., The Domestic Politics of Terrorism, 52.
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 378, 386. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, “Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension,” The Asia Pacific Journal, September 22, 2012, https://apjjf.org/2012/10/39/Peter-Dale-Scott/3835/article.html. Secret liaison agreements—with Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan—may have provided the cover for the CIA to secretly withhold information before 9/11 about the designated 9/11 culprits Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. In this way, 4/19 in 1995 paved the way for 9/11 and ascendant fascism in the U.S. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 288; Roberts, The Medusa File II, ch. 16; Thomas Lake, “Why Does This Cop Turn Up Dead?” CNN, March 3, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/us/oklahoma-city-bombing-yeakey-death-cec-cnnphotos/. The shot also came from a downward angle, ruling out suicide, because a large man like Yeakey would have had to have shot the gun at an upward angle, or at most level. The media claimed Yeakey was wracked with guilt about having survived the bombing and led a troubled family life, which led him to commit suicide. However, Canadian County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Ramsey, who drove Yeakey home the day of his death said he did not appear to be suicidal. He had received death threats beginning days after the bombing, and members of his family were spied upon and had their homes broken into afterwards. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 295. Yeakey also allegedly was demanding information from Oklahoma City Councilman Mark Schwartz, who was later appointed to a high-paying job in the Department of Energy’s legal department in Washington, D.C. in December 1998, even though he had no previous legal experience in the energy area. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 292, 293. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 296. Sergeant Don Browning, a K9 unit police officer for OKC who himself pulled many living and dead out of the Murrah rubble that day, stated that no autopsy should have been done and that the OKC police chief Sam Gonzales and the FBI had covered up the circumstances of Yeakey’s death. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 297; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 365, 366. In August 1997, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ted Richardson was found dead in a church parking lot with a shotgun wound to his chest. Oddly, the medical examiner found no powder residue on his chest when he had allegedly pushed the shotgun to his chest before pulling the trigger. Richardson was the bombing and arson specialist for the Western District of Oklahoma; a man with a good conscience who was skeptical of the government’s case. He was inexplicably transferred to the bank robbery detail after the bombing—an area about which he had no expertise. ↑
Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, 87, 88. ↑
Roberts, The Medusa File II, 107, 108. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 186, 187. The uncanny resemblance between Guthrie and Trentadue led the latter’s brother Jesse, an attorney, to believe that McVeigh was right. ↑
James Ridgeway, “In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Mother Jones, July/August 2007; Hammer, Deadly Secrets,150-75; Roberts, The Medusa File II, 273, 274. Trentadue’s cell itself was covered in blood on the floor, ceiling and walls, requiring a mop to clean it all up (no blood was found though on the light fixture and air vent where he had supposedly hanged himself). A forensic pathologist, Miles Jones, ruled Trentadue’s death a homicide, saying he died by strangulation. A lot of the evidence afterwards disappeared. The physician at the jail admitted to lying about performing CPR. The inmates in cells next to Trentadue were warned to keep silent and then sent into isolation, and the chief medical examiner for the state of Oklahoma was threatened by two guards while conducting an investigation of the holding cell where Trentadue died. Then Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was considered a “point man” in the coverup of Trentadue’s death.
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 182. Another inmate had been warned that Baker would “be found swinging from a bedsheet” if he continued to speak out. ↑
Hammer, Deadly Secrets, 194, 195, Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 232.. ↑
Gumbel and Charles, Oklahoma City, 301. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 288. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, x, xi, 277. Keating served as Assistant Attorney General under Edwin Meese, who refused to investigate the firebombing of MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia in 1985 by the Philadelphia police in a raid that killed 11 people, including five children, and destroyed several square blocks of the city. Meese would later be implicated in the October Surprise scandal—which put Ronald Reagan in the White House through a secret deal for the release of hostages in Iran after the defeat of Jimmy Carter—and then helped cover up the Iran-Contra affair and Inslaw affair. Keating served in the first Bush administration as Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Iran-Contra investigations. Keating was connected to Bush as part of the old boy network at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa—with the word in Tulsa being that Bush was Keating’s political godfather. According to the Portland Free Press, “in his position, Keating could control both the investigative and prosecutorial side of any scandal that came his way.” Keating was in perfect position to do damage control for the Oklahoma City bombing—he could have halted the hurried demolition but did not. He was the one to stumble across the axle of the Ryder truck a block away from the bombing, allowing for identification of the VIN number that was used to identify the truck. Incredibly, Keating’s brother Martin wrote a book telegraphing that Oklahoma City bombing in 1991. The attack in Keating’s book was carried out by a character named Tom McVey who is arrested by the Oklahoma Highway patrol because of a cracked headlight, very similar to the reason McVeigh was apprehended. ↑
Several months after his scandalous smear campaign against Key, Governor Keating was accused by the Oklahoma Ethics Commission of 32 violations of using state-owned vehicles for political fund-raising, including the state’s $2.9 million airplane. ↑
Charles Key, foreword to Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, x, xi. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 269. The Tulsa Worldfurther accused Key of profit-making from the sale of his bombing videos. Unmentioned by the Tulsa World was the recent loss of Key’s insurance business due to his ceaseless efforts to investigate the bombing and his attempts to support his wife and three children in a ramshackle house on a $33,000-a-year salary. Polls showed, however, that an overwhelming majority of Oklahomans supported Key’s efforts. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 23; DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up, 345. General Partin, along with Senator James Inhofe and Charles Key, had asked Congress that the Murrah Building not be destroyed until an independent forensics team could be brought in. the official reason for demolishing the building was allegedly because of health concerns—a similar reason why the Branch Davidian compound in Waco had been destroyed, hence covering up evidence that the Feds had fired from helicopters into the roof of the building during the early part of the raid, killing several people, including a nursing mother. The rubble from the Murrah Building was afterwards hauled by Midwest Wrecking to a landfill surrounded by a guarded, barbed wire fence, sifted for evidence with the help of the National Guard, then subsequently hauled off to BFI Waste Management and buried. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 23. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 253. ↑
DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up, 343, 344; Stickney, “All American Monster,” 255. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 416. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 160, 161; Booth, “The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.” The FBI ignored information from a federal informant, Gary Gagan, and Tulsa police veteran Craig Roberts about involvement of Mexican drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists in the bomb conspiracy.
Rappoport, Oklahoma City Bombing, 75. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 262; Roberts, The Medusa File, 34; Painting, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, 51, 52. This was reminiscent of the confiscation of Abraham Zapruder’s footage of the Kennedy assassination and confiscation of photographs taken by Scott Enyart at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 263, 280. The pickup was allegedly driven by Steven Colbern. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 264. Juror Hoppy Heidelberg said that “the FBI relied on a man, Fortier, who really couldn’t provide anything important to them. You need to remember that. That’s important.” ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 6; Booth, “The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing;” Painting, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, 52. As a whistleblower, Whitehurst was treated severely and fired by the FBI who ultimately settled in court, paying him $1.2 million and an undisclosed sum for damages. His complaint was verified by the Justice Department’s Inspector General which found that the FBI’s crime lab investigations contained “serious flaws,” used “unscientific practices,” and had made “unjustifiable conclusions which lacked scientific foundations.” ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 6, 7. ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 7. The same report concluded that the FBI lab made “scientifically unsound conclusions that were “biased in favor of the prosecution” and that supervisors approved lab reports that they could support and that FBI lab officials may have erred about the size of the blast, the amount of explosives involved and type of explosives used in the bombing. The draft report shows the FBI examiners could not identify the triggering device for the truck bomb or how it was detonated. It also indicates that a poorly maintained lab environment could have led to contamination of critical pieces of evidence.
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 321. It has been speculated what was in the documents. Author David Hoffman asks “were the files records incriminating The Octopus (government-organized crime network) for its drug running at Mena or records incriminating the ATF for their actions at Waco? It may be more than a coincidence that the ATF agents who raided Waco wore black uniforms with no identifying badges. ↑
Robert, The Medusa File II ↑
Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, 415; Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, 73. Matsch served with a U.S. Army counterintelligence unit during the Korean War. He kept a portrait of General George Patton behind his desk. Sam Roberts, “Richard P. Matsch, 88, Judge in Oklahoma Bombing Case, Is Dead,” The New York Times, May 29, 2019; Nolan Clay, “U.S. Judge Who Presided Over Oklahoma City Bombing Case Dies,” The Oklahoman, May 30, 2019. ↑
Wright, Patriots, Politics and the Oklahoma City Bombing, 2. Jones had a libertarian streak and once represented a dissident college student who had been arrested for carrying a Vietcong flag into an ROTC gathering, and the famed activist Abbie Hoffman when Oklahoma State University refused to let the political activist speak on campus. ↑
Jones, Others Unknown, 353; Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 75, 166. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 161. ↑
Sanders, After Oklahoma City, 161. ↑
See David A. Hughes, “9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, February 27, 2020, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0304375419898334 There are other parallels between the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 criminal conspiracies, including the use of patsies and doubles, failure by police agencies to evacuate the buildings despite foreknowledge of the attacks, and official cover-ups afterwards. ↑
Hughes, “9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline.” ↑
Excellent work Jeremy! I've seen alot of these shenanigans in my lifetime. Having been shamefacedly responsible for targeting like this in Central and S America as a young Army Ranger performing for the CIA, without doubt only internal charges could have possibly fractured such reinforced concrete. Thank you for your work.
Anyone who didn’t suspect the government from the beginning is a naive fool or just ignorant!