All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
And our final guest today is J.M. Berger.
He is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, CTC, Sentinel, The New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, NPR, The National Geographic Channel.
He's the author of the book, Jihad Joe, Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.
And he's also been keeping up, as you heard earlier in the show, with the story of Jesse Trinidou and his deceased brother Kenneth and the links of that story to the PatCon investigation of the 1990s and the Oklahoma City bombing.
And he's got a new piece here in Foreign Policy called Patriot Games.
How the FBI spent a decade hunting white supremacists and missed Timothy McVeigh.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Very interesting article that you have.
And as I just mentioned, Jesse was on the show again earlier and said that you were the one who knew the most about PatCon.
And I think he said that as far as he knew, and he hadn't had a chance, he hasn't had a chance to read Roger Moore's new book yet, and neither have I.
But he says as far as he knew, there was not 100% known connection between PatCon and the Oklahoma City bombing.
But that if anybody knew there was a connection or if anybody ever would be able to prove that connection, it would be you.
So I was wondering if you could start with that.
Is there any reason to think that people who are suspected John Doe's in the Oklahoma City bombing were actually connected to this PatCon FBI investigation of the radical right in the 1990s?
Well, there's definitely some connections.
Now, how meaningful those connections are is up to interpretation.
One of the groups that PatCon targeted initially was a group called the Texas Light Infantry.
And two members of that group were called by Timothy McVeigh within weeks of the bombing.
One is Andreas Strassmeier, who you've probably heard about.
He's often been named as a possible suspect in the bombing in some capacity.
At first, it was thought he might be the John Doe II character.
Later, there's been more ambiguity about whether that John Doe II identification was a specific person or not.
But Strassmeier met McVeigh in 1993.
Shortly after, he'd been involved with this Texas Light Infantry group and in the middle of the PatCon investigation of that group.
So there are some connections.
The other guy he called was a guy named Dave Holloway, who was also known to the investigators of PatCon.
He was a former member of the TLI.
Holloway says he talked to McVeigh the day before the bombing and that McVeigh may have indicated that he was thinking about something but didn't say anything specific.
So both these guys deny that there was any kind of meaningful connection with McVeigh, but there are questions that remain.
Well now, I've been interested in this story for a long time and I don't know exactly the years anymore.
Maybe you can nail it down better than me, but I'm under the impression that a lot of the meat of what J.D. Cash reported and what Ambrose Evans Pritchard reported in the story of Carol Howe, the ATF informant inside Elohim City that warned about the upcoming bombing, a lot of that started coming out in 1996, 1997.
Here we are still talking about Strassmeier and Mahon and Carol Moore after all these years.
You know, somehow this information was there but nobody ever cared.
But now even Michael Isikoff is writing about it at the Daily Beast and it's okay to admit that maybe there were John Doe 2's, 3's, and 4's and maybe they have connections to at least...
See, I always thought, I'm sorry I'm kind of rambling, I'm trying to figure out where I'm going with this.
I always thought that the reason for the cover-up, at the very least, if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt, is that they could have stopped it but they screwed up.
Maybe it was a sting operation and McVeigh showed up at the wrong time.
Maybe it wasn't even that.
Maybe they just were connected because they had some state's witnesses and some informants who were involved in the plot and so it made them look bad.
And so they just wanted to blame it all on this one guy.
But it's been clear that they've been lying about the neo-Nazis and their involvement, some of their involvement with McVeigh and the run-up to this thing.
Well, it does, you know, I can report on what I know and then I have suspicions beyond what I know.
And, you know, what I know is that there were certainly, McVeigh had some connections to these organizations that the FBI was watching prior to the bombing.
How concrete those connections were, we still don't know.
I mean, you know, you correctly note that a lot of these names and a lot of these elements have been out there for a long time.
There's also been a lot of really, you know, bad reporting on this that's been out there for a long time.
You know, I think what's happened to a lot of mainstream media have gotten to a point where if somebody calls them up saying they want to talk about the Oklahoma City bombing, they're just like, oh God, not again.
And, you know, they get tired of chasing down these kind of dry holes.
You know, I'm sympathetic to that, but the fact is that there's really, you know, a lot of evidence that suggests something else, something more than the official story is what was going on here.
Well, I can sympathize with their frustration.
It's just that the least credible conspiracy theory of all is that McVeigh's nearest co-conspirator was two states away at the time and that's all you need to know about it.
I mean, that is just patently ridiculous.
Well, I mean, it's clear, you know, if nothing else, that McVeigh was really, you know, wired into a community of people who were talking about revenge for Waco and they were talking about bombing buildings.
And, you know, that he was connected with some specific guy who even, you know, some of them themselves.
I mean, Dennis Mahon, you know, in his prison cell a couple of years ago, right after he was arrested, was saying that he was the third guy in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Oh, you're talking about Dennis Mahon, the former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan?
Yeah.
And he has other... he's a very widely connected guy.
Yeah, he one time admitted this to J.D. Cash, too.
It's in the book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton by Ambrose Evans Pritchard, that they were out driving around and Mahon mistook Cash for a fellow Nazi type and I think they were drinking and he went ahead and spilled his guts.
Yeah, well, he's made statements like that a couple of times now.
You know, the problem is that because there has been so much erratic reporting about this, you know, there was a real burst, especially in the late 90s, of efforts to tie everything, you know, tie Al-Qaeda into this and tie all kinds of different groups and collections of people.
Saddam Hussein.
That stuff wasn't completely being pulled out of thin air.
There were some serious questions that pertained to that stuff.
But, you know, people get so invested in it that they start reporting that it's absolutely true and then, you know, when it turns out that it's clearly not, it just gets that much harder to get the story out in front of people afterwards.
So, you know, I mean, that's been my frustration with this.
I mean, I've been working on this for years and it's very difficult.
You know, I mean, if you look at the Pat Conn story that's on Foreign Policy today, a tremendous amount of reporting had to go into that before it was ready for somebody to look at it.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, that's an incredible piece.
So, I mean, you know, I'm continuing to work on this.
I'm working on a book and I'm hoping to be able to take it all the way through and really try and, you know, get as close to the truth as we can.
But it's an uphill battle.
I mean, it's tough and, you know, it's tough and it's also, these are complicated stories and people don't have a lot of patience for complicated stories these days.
They want something, you know, I can't walk in and say, da-da-da-da, the butler did it, you know, we're done.
It's like, no, first you have to hear about, you know, 18 different guys and all these groups and what they were doing.
So, you know, it tests the patience of most readers, I think.
Right.
All right, now, we have very little time here before we have to come to the break.
And then when we get back, I want to let you tell the story, you know, the part of the narrative that you want to focus on from the article Patriot Games at Foreign Policy because it's obvious that almost a book worth of work went into this thing just to write this article.
It's really something else.
But I just want to ask you real quick on, you know, from my angle, what's important.
Did you have any information that Roger Moore was an undercover cop or an FBI informant tied to this Pat Con group at all?
I don't.
A lot of people suspect that.
I can't say that for certain or I can't say that I've seen a strong claim of it.
And the A.R.A. bank robbers at all?
I left them out of this for various reasons mostly because I didn't want to complicate a story that was already so complicated.
The A.R.A. bank robbers, there are good reasons to be looking at some of them, too, separately from Pat Con.
But yes, I mean, there is definitely an interest to me as I go forward with this.
Sandstone War Radio.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with J.M. Berger.
Is it Berger or Berger?
I just realized I should ask you.
Berger.
Berger.
Okay, good.
J.M. Berger.
I think I got it right the first time accidentally, didn't I?
You did.
Okay, good.
J.M. Berger.egoplex.com or just search for Intel Wire.
You'll find it.
And when I clicked the tag, when I clicked the tag, Oak Bomb, I found a lot.
And I need to go back and look at a lot of this stuff.
But we're talking now, at least, we're talking about this new piece in foreign policy.
It's called Patriot Games.
And it's all about Pat Con.
And I'd like to give you almost all this segment to just go ahead and tell us the important parts of the story the way you see it.
But to get us started off, I wanted to ask you something based on our conversation with Jesse Trenadue earlier.
And that was that he has an informant, a former agent, who says he didn't understand then.
But looking back on it now, he thinks that the purpose of Pat Con was to provoke the radical right.
Now, that leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Maybe they want to provoke them just to discredit them, that kind of thing.
I don't know.
But he thought that Ruby Ridge and Wake Up and all these things were basically deliberate provocations of the radical right in the 1990s.
Your comment on that?
I have not seen anything to make me think they were deliberate provocations.
But there were things that they did that were deliberately provocative.
One of the reasons that I took on the story at this time and it's going to be the subject of a forthcoming report from the New America Foundation is that there's been a lot of talk about these infiltration kind of programs in the current context in the Muslim community.
And, you know, the idea here was to sort of look back at a different community and see how some of these tactics affected that community.
These guys were very sensitive to government investigation.
And they felt like they were being persecuted by the government.
And, you know, sometimes, in the case of Pat Con, they kept it secret for all these years, until now really.
In the case of and in other instances, they let these guys know that they were being watched very deliberately.
In one case, they did it to build up an informant.
An informant they wanted to make more credible.
So they pulled a bunch of these guys in Texas that I wrote about.
They pulled them in and showed them pictures and surveillance pictures and things they'd been doing and asked questions about the informant as if they were investigating the informant.
So this was, the idea behind this was to build up the informant, which they did.
But at the same time, it also let these guys know they're being watched.
Made them feel like they're under siege.
You know, and so then you sort of have these things that really build on each other and create a self-sustaining narrative that, you know, the Patriot community really revolves around.
That the government is out to get them and is going to crack down on them at any moment.
Well, that's the thing, too, is that Patriot community is a really broad designation.
Whereas I think if you ask the average Joe off the street, do you want the FBI to infiltrate the Klan?
Infiltrate people who have a history of lynchings and murders and, you know, very serious, you know, pipe-bomb style white supremacist neo-Nazis?
People say, hell yeah, infiltrate them.
But not to make them worse, but keep tabs on people like that?
Sure.
Well, part of the dilemma, you know, I mean, I'm pretty neutral as far as I, when I look at all this stuff, you know, in total.
And the longer report that's going to come out probably, within a few weeks, gives you more of a sense of really what was going on.
The FBI was getting information.
They were getting information from informants.
And you can question, like, informant by informant, which guy was reliable?
What were they saying?
You know, but they were getting information from informants about really alarming stuff that was going on.
That even, even in a pre-9-11 environment, you would sit up and take notice.
And you have to at least put yourself in the position of the FBI and say, you know, are we just not going to investigate a rumor that a bunch of guys are going to hit a nuclear power plant?
You know, so, it's a tough call.
And there's really, like, so much that goes into the question of when these programs work and when they don't.
And the source that Jesse was mentioning earlier, who he was talking about, you know, I mean, I've talked to this guy and I asked him, I said, do you think these guys were serious?
Should they have been concerned about these guys?
And he's like, yeah.
You know, they were either watched or arrested.
You know, it's a question of, you know, there are specific things at every juncture.
You know, there's something you look at every, and you're second-guessing to a certain extent, but you're saying you look at everything that happens and say, what could we have done differently?
How did this have unintended consequences?
So, one thing that almost went terribly wrong in this investigation was that one of the PatCon undercover agents was assigned to the SWAT team at Ruby Ridge.
And, you know, a couple of weeks after that, um, another one of the PatCon undercover agents was at an event where Beau Gritz was, Beau Gritz was attending.
And I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was a patriot leader.
He was a, you know, running for president at the time, actually.
He had gotten involved at Ruby Ridge to be an interlocutor between the federal government and Randy Weaver and played a crucial role in getting Weaver to surrender at the end of this thing.
Mm.
If he had, if that undercover agent had not been pulled off of PatCon because of his involvement in that SWAT team, if he had, if they'd decided they were on the fence about whether to pull him, they'd left him in place and he went to this event where Beau Gritz was speaking.
And Beau Gritz saw the guy and realized that this was the guy who he had seen walking the SWAT team at Ruby Ridge.
It would have been an unbelievable storm of something that I can't say on the air.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, I mean, so, you know, even after the fact PatCon, you know, even after the fact, it's kind of shocking that this guy who was so closely linked to this movement who had gone undercover in this movement was on the scene at that, at that signal event for the Patriot movement.
So there's a lot of stuff, you know, there's a lot of layers to this.
You know, it's kind of easy to say, you know, this was overreach or it's easy to say the opposite.
It's easy to say, to look at this and say if they'd investigated this a little harder they might have gotten information on Timothy McVeigh before the bombing and it's tough.
I mean, I don't, you know, I don't envy anybody working in law enforcement trying to make these decisions and it's a difficult situation and there's a lot of, really a lot of blame and a lot of complexity going around on both sides.
And now, I'm sorry, because at the break I was trying to ask a little bit about the Aryan Republican Army Midwestern bank robbery ring and I remember seeing on Court TV that I forgot if it was Shane or one of the brothers who were in a shootout with the state trooper in New Jersey, I think, there was testimony at his trial that he was eagerly anticipating the Oklahoma City bombing that morning at his friend's motel in the lobby there and that was, you know, they apparently had knowledge of what was going to happen that day and I was wondering if you could explain any ties that you can tell at least so far between the PatCon operation and the Aryan Republican Army?
Well, that's still a work in progress for me.
There's a very good book called In Bad Company by a professor named Ham, his last name is Ham, H-A-M-M, that really explores the Aryan Republican Army in a lot of detail.
I have developed some information that puts them in the same body of people.
One of the ARA figures was apparently a member of one of the organizations that was targeted by PatCon.
There have been other people who have remarked on the similarity between the Aryan Republican Army and the cover story that was being used by the PatCon undercover operation.
The PatCon undercover agents were posing as their own group, their own patriot militia group.
It was called the Veterans Aryan Movement and it was the same template of the Order, which had been a group in the 80s that took these kinds of activities on.
It was the same template that was used by the Aryan Republican Army They told people that they robbed armored cars and banks and then were using the money to fund extremist activities.
So their cover story was basically that they were the Order or that they were the Aryan Republican Army.
It was extremely similar and so that, you know, it raised a lot of eyebrows with people I've talked to but I can't point you to a specific...
I did pursue some leads about ARA figures possibly having more direct contact with the PATCON people but so far none of those have panned out.
Well, you know, that's kind of something I picked up in reading your articles that seems like a lot of these different groups only come into contact with each other by way of the undercover cops that maybe they are really the center of the wagon wheel when it came to the white supremacist movement in America in the 1990s.
Is that overstating it?
Yeah, probably.
You know, the FBI's reporting on these groups reports that they were working together and that they had connections and when I interviewed members of the groups for the longer report they're featured more in the longer report than they were in this one.
All of them denied that pretty uniformly.
However, you know, there is some physical evidence and some reliable testimony that suggests to me that they were, in fact, they did have some contact that the FBI was legitimately following.
I mean, you know, you see this guy Pat Khan and this agent who's using the alias Dave Rossi moving among these groups and he does seem like he's connected to tissue but you have to remember that he's being introduced at every level.
You know, he goes from one group to the other because somebody from this group introduced him to somebody from that group.
So, you know, they did know each other.
There were interactions.
There is a dispute between the FBI's records and what these guys remember or claim to remember about their activities.
You know, there's a disconnect there and these guys are saying that they didn't really collaborate that much.
The FBI at the time thought that they were.
The truth is still a work in progress I would say.
Right now, I'm sorry, we're already a little bit over time but if I could ask you one more thing, I just wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about the parallels here you mentioned briefly earlier to the current round of undercover government work with Muslims in America and all the different, I don't know if you were directly referring to all the different almost comical entrapment cases on this kind of thing.
It seems like, you know, in the 1990s they used this overbroad definition of the patriot community when they should have been focusing on the most, you know, hateful of the Nazis, that kind of thing.
Sort of the way they painted the entire militia movement with McVeigh but they refused to ever admit that McVeigh himself was a Nazi.
He wasn't just a militia guy.
He was a white supremacist because they didn't want to talk about the white supremacists because that led back to, you know, the story that we all weren't supposed to care about until 2012, I guess, here with Elohim City and the rest of it.
But that's what they're doing here.
They're not just investigating, you know, this or that sect of Muslims.
They're investigating Muslims in general and especially they're not looking just at individual connections it doesn't seem like.
You know, Trace, who knows somebody who knows the blind shake?
You know, find that out instead of just picking on everybody.
You know, the longer report that's going to be out in a few weeks will really kind of drills into that issue a little bit more.
I don't think there's a direct comparison and although I think that we need to be talking about the way these tactics are used in the Muslim community I think that most of these cases have been held up in court and most of them are, you know, people who seem to be legitimately dangerous.
You know, that being said, I think we need to look at what the secondary effects of this kind of tactic are and how they fray trust and how they may contribute to some radicalization down the road and I don't claim to have the answers to those questions.
I'm saying those are the questions we should be examining and studying.
Well, you know, I keep saying that you know, we're going to end up having a situation where there's going to be a terrible terrorist attack and it's going to be because the FBI was chasing their tail on one of these entrapment cases of somebody who had never had any ties to anyone or really meant to do anything until making contact with the FBI informant and yet, we've actually had that only it didn't work but we had, you know, the Times Square attempt, the Detroit attempt and you know, how many FBI man hours were spent on, you know, picking on the slow kid down at the Islamic bookstore and seeing if they could get him to say something stupid into a microphone when they could have been paying attention to real threats?
You know, that Times Square bomber especially, that could have been a serious one right there.
Well, you're going further than I'm willing to go in characterizing these cases as entrapment.
I think that they need to be examined.
I think we need to talk about it.
I do think that, I mean, overall, I think there's a lot of credible blockage that's stopped or prevented and it's very difficult to know what would have happened if the FBI didn't have this presence.
Would there be more?
Would there be less?
We just don't know.
I mean, these are questions, these are all hypothetical questions and they're worthy of closer examining.
The one that's always a concern is the person in the United States about what he's doing.
It's like $5 for that.
Those are the ones that really keep people up nights.
They're not likely to do as much damage as a 9-11, but, you know, they're almost impossible to detect if they really keep their mouths shut and what's worked for us in our favor is that these guys rarely keep their mouths shut.
Right.
All right.
Well, I'll let you go, but I want to tell you that I really enjoyed reading the piece.
I learned a lot and I can't wait until, I guess, the forthcoming report that this is kind of a new America foundation, you said?
Yes.
Great.
All right.
And we'll also be keeping our eye on Intel Wire for that.
Everybody check out the book, Jihad, Joe, Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam by J.M. Berger.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you.
