For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Roger Charles back to the radio show.
Hi, Roger.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us today.
I'm stumbling and I'm passing it on, but we're going to get it straight here.
Yeah, I'll try to speak in coherent phrases.
All right, well, so April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing.
The story goes McVeigh did it.
What do you say?
Well, McVeigh and others did it.
And some of the others are still out there and have never been prosecuted, convicted, and punished.
All right, well.
I take on it.
I've got to apologize to you because, you know, if I could, I would have stayed up all night going back over all of my old notes and Googling around and seeing what I could see.
But it's been so many years, I've forgotten a lot of what I thought I knew.
And I've got second guesses about some of the things I used to think I knew.
And that BBC show that they did, I guess, about two years ago now, it kind of casts a little bit of doubt on, you know, maybe some of the involvement of what was going on over there at Elohim City and whatever.
I'm not so sure that the Strassmayer interview was all that credible.
But then again, I don't really know.
And I kind of want to just start from scratch again, if you understand what I mean.
It's been so long.
And, you know, I was a lot younger and a lot more willing to jump to conclusions back then.
But I really – Roger, I want to know the truth of the Oklahoma bombing.
I'm not over it.
I want to know what really happened.
I don't think anybody outside of government knows at all.
And I'm not sure anybody, any single individual in government knows even all of it.
What we have, we know bits and pieces.
And the bits and pieces that we do know and we have confirmed are in direct contradiction to the government's version of events in many specific examples, not everything.
I mean, McVeigh was involved.
McVeigh was driving, I believe, that Ryder truck that delivered the bomb that morning.
But you get beyond that and then you get into a whole swamp, as I call it, of conflicting accounts and misinformation and disinformation.
And so what you have to do is, you know, if you're a truth seeker, you have to look at these different pieces and examine each one and say, is this gold or is this pyrite?
Is this real gold or fool's gold?
Because sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
And particularly when you have agents of disinformation and agencies of misinformation that are intentionally trying to stir up things to confuse and befuddle the taxpayer that is supposed to be the recipient of their honest service.
Well, I think I found a great segue right there into the swamp.
Okay.
From the very beginning, there were reports of guys in a brown pickup truck speeding away.
And a reporter for NBC News 4 in Oklahoma City named Jaina Davis decided, I guess she thought, the brown pickup truck to an Iraqi and some Palestinians that she said she thought were involved.
And then, of course, Judy Miller, the famous Judy Miller who lied us into war with Iraq from the pages of the New York Times teamed up with her and with Laurie Milroy and Liz Cheney and Scooter Libby and all these people endorsed this whole theory about, you know, Terry Nichols was friends with these Arabs and went and got training in bomb making in the Philippines.
But that Ramzi Youssef who trained him was really not Ramzi Youssef but an Iraqi intelligence agent.
And that's why we have to have regime change in Iraq.
And there was this whole gigantic pile of misinformation along those lines.
But here's what's blowing me away this week.
As I just read, because Jesse Trenadue sent it to me, an excerpt of this guy Paul Hammer's new book.
And there's a lot to discuss there.
But here's one thing that he said in there.
That when McVeigh was pulled over, a brown pickup truck also pulled over.
This is the famous bus where McVeigh was armed and surrendered his weapon and surrendered to the state trooper that pulled him over.
And I never heard that before.
I went and Googled around and I found the source.
It was a 1995 article in Scripps Howard News Service that ran at the Houston Chronicle.
And apparently there's a whole other angle that this guy Hammer has on a brown pickup truck but apparently quite a different brown pickup truck than the one Jaina Davis went chasing after there.
Let me just say that that's a very credible report in the Houston Chronicle.
These are two serious and experienced reporters.
And they are quoting a federal law enforcement source in Washington.
Those two guys actually worked in the Washington Bureau.
So that report, although it was published in the Houston paper, was not written by reporters in Houston.
The leak to the two reporters came out of somebody in federal law enforcement here in Washington, D.C.
Jesse Trinidude had a partial victory of sorts.
Well, I can't even call it that, I guess.
He put in a Freedom of Information Act request for the Charlie Hanger dash video.
Charlie Hanger, the Oklahoma highway patrolman who arrested Tim McVeigh approximately 90 minutes after the bombing, headed north toward Kansas on the interstate.
Correct?
All right.
Well, the video that Jesse got through this Freedom of Information Act request starts with McVeigh's already arrested in the backseat.
So you can see the trooper up searching through the mercury marquee that he had pulled over that McVeigh had been driving.
Well, I've been told by credible authorities that the way those things operated, those dash cameras, is they basically came on when the trooper turned on his emergency lights.
He didn't have to stop and do it.
It was not automatic.
That sounds like the same footage they showed at the trial.
Look, everybody, a short clip of the mercury on the side of the road, but that's all.
Well, what we believe, and that article, again, is by two credible reporters who would not make up a story, is that the original Charlie Hanger dash video showed everything, McVeigh being pulled over, the officer getting out of his sedan and going up and arresting McVeigh, putting handcuffs on him, taking the pistol and bringing him back, and so on.
It also shows the brown pickup pulling over that was traveling with McVeigh.
There are a couple other reports from long-haul truckers, 18-wheeler drivers, that had no reason to make it up, saying that they noticed this yellow mercury marquee driving north in tandem with a brown pickup.
Well, you know, the license plate is supposed to have been red, but the brown pickup is traced to a guy that McVeigh associated with in Kingman, Arizona, before the bombing, named Steve Colbert.
And our good mutual friend J.D.
Cash, who left this earth three years ago next month, believed that the May 12, 1995 arrest of Paulson in the town of Oatman, Arizona, was in fact a staged event.
That Paulson had already flipped, that the federal law enforcement had succeeded in getting him to see that he better cooperate, or else he was facing the very real prospect of a capital trial, where his life would be on the line.
And so here we have yet one more example of a guy...
Now, wait a minute.
I'm sorry for interrupting you, but who's Paulson again?
Paulson was the fellow that was the head of a good school in California, had a degree, I believe, in one of the sciences.
I'm not sure it was chemistry, it might have been biology, but...
And he was associated with this guy, Colbert.
I'm sorry, Colbert's who I was referring to.
Who did I say?
You said Paulson.
Paulson, I'm sorry.
You were just thinking of the former Treasury Secretary who stole all your money.
Yeah, thank you, Scott.
Paulson, yes, that's the wrong guy.
Colbert is the name of the guy that McVeigh was with in Kingman, Arizona, who owned a Brown pickup, and when they got to it, parked at his parents' home in Bullhead City.
They had kind of a weekend place there out along the river.
There were traces of ammonium nitrate, which is hardly enough to convict a guy, but it's just another interesting little factoid that makes you wonder...
Well, and it seems like from that Scripps Howard story that the sheriff kind of felt like a heel when he figured out, and this is just my interpretation, he figured out, what, McVeigh, the guy in the cell that I arrested, is the bomber guy they're looking for?
Oh, man.
And then he went back and he thought, there was a Brown pickup truck that I let go.
They weren't speeding or whatever, he didn't do anything to them, and apparently he even hid the tape for a couple of days before he admitted he had the tape.
Well, there's all sorts of hanky-panky in this thing from...
I mean, you hardly find anything that happened in a normal way, or in a way that you would have expected it to happen, given the severity of the crime and what we would have thought would have been a genuine desire to seek the truth.
Yeah, well, there's no doubt about that.
I mean, the whole thing was a giant cover-up from the very beginning, and they weren't even trying.
You know, and I still blame O.J.
Simpson.
If it hadn't been for him, people might have asked, well, wait a minute, who was John Doe II?
What do you mean there was no John Doe II?
Everybody, you know, well, you had two or three, four dozen witnesses saw John Doe II.
You got the Chinese delivery guy delivered to the hotel room, and there was a bunch of people in there, and none of them were McVeigh.
You got the, was it Super Dave Williams at the FBI crime lab, who deliberately did not check all of the different fingerprints from McVeigh's yellow mercury against the database.
Yeah, no, there's 1,100 sets of fingerprints, according to the FBI expert's own testimony, that have not been tested.
It was too expensive was the weak excuse that was given.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it just, let me go back to one thing you said earlier in this little segment, and that was about Terry Nichols going to the Philippines to learn how to build a bomb.
Yeah.
Kingman, Arizona is a mining area.
There are all kinds of certified blasters out there.
I'm from southern West Virginia, not too far from where this latest mine disaster happened, and there were lots of blasters there.
In fact, you know, there were hollows where my Boy Scout troop would go on campouts and hikes and so on, and there would be a magazine, you know, just right there, a metal building in the hollow, and it would be, you know, with the do not smoke within 50 feet and so on, but it would be where they stored explosives for the mines.
So you don't have to go to the Philippines to learn how to build a bomb, and that's not to even mention the different handbooks and manuals, some of them official Army manuals.
They're not hard to get.
They're not classified or anything.
Yeah.
Well, and I think from J.D., went and did all the timeline and said, look, he was in the Philippines because he needed an alibi.
Hey, I was in the Philippines.
That's all.
Well, Terry has said that the reason he went to the Philippines in November, mid-November of 94, and did not come back until mid-January of 95, is that he fully expected McVeigh to have struck during one of the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year.
So he thought when he came back, it hadn't happened, it's okay, I'll come home.
Of course, that's another part of the story that hopefully we'll get to next year.
Yeah.
Well, all right, so let me run some names by you here, and you tell me what you know or think their role in the bombing was.
I'm sorry that we really should always schedule these for an hour, Roger.
There's just too much to go over here.
Well, today a half an hour is plenty for me, thank you, but an hour would be good some other day, but a half hour today is good for me, too.
Sure.
So tell me about Pete Langan.
Who's Pete Langan?
Pete Langan was one of the two founders, co-leaders of something called the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi group that had declared war on the federal government, what they called the Zionist Occupied Government, ZOG.
And beginning in late 1994, he and his co-leader, Richard Lee Guthrie, decided that they were going to rob banks and armored cars to fund operations, which they hoped would lead to the overthrow of the federal government.
Now, nobody said these guys had a full load.
They were smart, but, I mean, the idea that you can go out and rob some banks and so on and overthrow the federal government of the United States is beyond ludicrous.
But anyhow, that's what they were scheming about, and there is strong evidence, as you know, that John Cash basically was the first one to develop and did more on it than anyone else, showing that McVeigh was involved with these guys on several robberies.
We're investigating a couple right now and hope to be able to make a strong, compelling case that McVeigh was, in fact, participating in these robberies at least in 1994 and maybe even earlier.
Yeah, I know.
Well, I read somewhere anyway, I guess I don't know it, that McVeigh had sent a bunch of crisp $100 bills to his sister.
Yeah, to his sister.
And then a letter said, you know, it came from my involvement in a bank robbery, no further information involved, involvement being what, we don't know.
But John Cash thought and made a strong case that McVeigh, whose nickname was Speedy, was a wheel man that drove the getaway cars.
Because the way these guys operated, they had this thing down to the science, they had successfully robbed 22 banks, maybe as many as 28, maybe one, pretty likely one armored car.
But anyhow, what they would do is they would use one vehicle for the scene of the robbery, drive it a short distance, that was a drop vehicle, get out of it, go into then the getaway car and take off.
But they did not use one vehicle to actually arrive at the scene of the crime and then drive off with that vehicle.
They had a drop car, they called it, that they would have at the scene of the bank robbery or armored car robbery, drive it a short distance to a prearranged place where they had staged their actual getaway vehicle and then drive off in it.
Just, you know, complicating law enforcement's job.
They also had scanners that they listened to local law enforcement communications and FBI communications so that they knew where the roadblocks were going to be and things like that.
So pretty sophisticated guys and successful for quite a while actually.
Well, you know, this is where the thing all gets really tough for me is finding real concrete ties.
We do have some indications, you know, lots of circumstantial things that say McVeigh was friends with these guys.
But I've got to tell you, and I could be completely wrong about this, just a personal thing, but when I read this guy Paul Hammer, either McVeigh told this guy everything, this is McVeigh's death row roommate or death row buddy who is writing these tell-all books now, the second one.
I've just read it, yeah.
Well, I've only read an excerpt of this one.
I've read the first one, but it was a few years back.
But the guy, you know, it says right there in his bio, he's a lifelong career criminal and master con artist.
That's his number one specialty.
And all this work, Scott, the one thing I've probably learned more than anything else is any single fact, whether it's a document, whether it's a witness, particularly if it's a witness statement, but even a government document, they can be fabricated.
They can be written to present disinformation or misinformation.
Or just be wrong.
Or just be wrong.
Human nature, we all screw up.
We all make mistakes.
Exactly.
It could just be an innocent mistake.
So any single piece of information, you have to look at it and say, is there other information to confirm it or refute it?
Well, and I guess that's really what I'm getting at, because he tells this narrative here where, you know, he's got the whole story of making the bomb that morning and McVeigh was a soldier or a cop and the major put him up to it and, you know, Richard Guthrie and Michael Brescia, both of whom have been accused of being John Doe too at different times.
Conveniently, both of them are riding in the truck with McVeigh that morning, so that takes care of that problem for us.
But anyway, I wonder whether, well, I don't know, but I guess J.D. said that he thought that the second bomb was assembled that night or that morning, or, you know, it was finished, and in a garage somewhere in Oklahoma City.
So he believed that part, I'm sure, separately from what this guy Hammer said.
But, I mean, do you think that this is right, that this ARA bank robbery crew, these neo-Nazis did it, and then we got to, in the last few minutes here, we got to talk about the role of the FBI in the continuation of this ARA bank robbery ring for so long without all these guys already being, you know, imprisoned by April 95?
Well, first let me just say that in terms of circumstantial evidence, I'd just like to remind the listeners that Tim McVeigh was tried, convicted, and executed based on circumstantial evidence.
The flimsiest case of all, in fact.
They did not place him at the scene of the crime when, in fact, over 20 people would have been willing to do that.
But the government decided they had a problem because all these witnesses that saw McVeigh in Oklahoma City either before the bombing that morning or on his way out of town after the bombing saw him with someone else.
So the government decided, we will take a chance on losing this case rather than put witnesses on the stand that will place McVeigh at the scene of the crime.
And oh, by the way, we now know thanks to Jesse Trinidude and other evidence, there were surveillance cameras that captured McVeigh and another person getting out of the Ryder truck when it was parked in front of the Murrow building.
Those videotapes have never been released.
They were not used in court.
Right, they were once seen by an unidentified source for Channel 4 News in Oklahoma City and by an L.A.
Times reporter.
And they are referenced in a U.S. Secret Service timeline.
And they released some of the tapes to Jesse Trinidude, only they were very edited.
Yes, but this U.S. Secret Service timeline...
Real quick though, we've got five minutes, so tell me about, do you think these Nazis did it, and do you think these Nazis were cops and all of that?
Because everybody knows those trials were a joke.
They might as well have been held at Guantanamo.
Well, you know, here's what I believe.
I believe clearly other people were involved with McVeigh.
I believe some of those people were also members of the Aryan Republican Army.
I'm not prepared right now to say specifically who was in Oklahoma City with McVeigh.
I still need to do more research on that, but I have no doubt that some members of the Aryan Republican Army were there with him that morning.
I have no doubt also that it's a confirmed fact that Pete Langan was an informant for the U.S. Secret Service for a period of time before the bombing and before the bank robberies.
We know that after arrests of the Aryan Republican Army bank robbers, that everybody with one exception appeared to become, well, let's see, I guess two exceptions.
Langan, I'll leave him aside.
I don't think he has flipped yet.
And a guy named Scott Stediford did not flip, but Mark Thomas, Michael Brescia, and Kevin McCarthy all flipped.
Interestingly, the deal was not tell us what you know and you'll get a lighter sentence.
The deal was keep your mouth shut and you'll get a lighter sentence.
So they've done that.
Guthrie committed suicide, maybe.
He died in July of 1996 in custody.
So it's still to be determined, I think, whether it was a legitimate suicide or a staged murder.
Well, I think everybody who's looked into it is reasonably certain that Kenneth Trenodue was tortured to death in custody probably because he wouldn't admit that he was Richard Guthrie because they got him in a case of mistaken identity.
That's how Jesse Trenodue got into this.
And we just had this long interview with Jesse just the other week all about this, which people can find at antiwar.com slash radio.
So talk to me about Andre Stroessmeier.
He denies it.
Why does he deny it?
Andy the German is conflicted, shall we say, Scott.
He's got problems.
I think he wants to do the right thing.
And if you've read Ambrose Evan Pritchett's great book where he has substantial excerpts from a series of interviews he did with Stroessmeier, Stroessmeier wants to give it up, if you will, but can't quite bring himself to break his oath of omerative as an undercover government operative that he took.
So I don't know if he'll ever come clean, but we know that based on, again, all the facts we have collected to this point, I think we can safely say that Andy Stroessmeier was working undercover for some entity while he was at Elohim City, and we hope to identify who he was working for.
It was not the neo-Nazi National Alliance, for example.
He was a pretend Nazi.
He was an undercover cop, if you will.
He was not a real Nazi.
Are you in contact with Carol Howe, the ATF informant?
No, I'm not.
She has assumed a new identity and is living under that new identity somewhere.
I read somewhere that Meg Ryan had bought the rights to her movie.
I sure wish they'd made that one.
It would have been a good one, but maybe the timing wasn't right.
Meg Ryan is probably a little bit too old for that role anyway.
She probably looked a little like her back in the day.
I'm sorry that we're all out of time here.
Can you just tell me real quick, you're writing a book, or you have written a book, or you and J.D.'s book, what's the deal?
I have a co-author named Andrew Gumbel, who's a British journalist who lives in California.
He is working with me on writing a book that J.D., Cash, and I were going to write.
When J.D. passed away, I was fortunate enough to have contact with Andrew, and he had interest and talent and motivation, or as they would say in maybe crime stories, he had means, method, and motive.
Opportunity.
Opportunity, that was the other one.
It all fit, and we're writing a book, and hopefully it will be out sometime next year.
All right.
Well, listen, I encourage everybody to just go and Google your ass off.
There's a ton of mud out there you've got to wade through, but there's some really good stuff, too.
Google J.D.
Cash.
Google Roger Charles.
You can look.
I have, at ScottHortonShow.com, tons and tons of interviews on the subject, including at least half a dozen of them or more with J.D.
Soon, I promise, I will have copies of all of Jesse Trenodue's PDF files online in the archives section there at Antiwar Radio on this interview and at the Trenodue interview.
So thanks again very much, Roger.
I really appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again soon.
Scott, my pleasure.
Anytime, my friend.
