12/04/12 – Roger G. Charles – The Scott Horton Show

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So today, a very special show, just the one interview for both hours.
Our good friend, our old friend, our old good friend, Roger G. Charles.
He is a retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps, an award-winning investigative journalist who has worked with a wide variety of media outlets, including Newsweek, Vanity Fair, ABC, Nightline, and Primetime Live, CBS's 60 Minutes 2, and the BBC.
In 1996 and 97, he was a consultant on the Oklahoma City bombing for ABC's 20-20.
He also worked as an investigator for Stephen Jones and the legal team defending Timothy McVeigh in his federal trial.
And he is the co-author with Andrew Gumbel of Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters.
Welcome back to the show, Roger.
How are you doing?
Scott, it's a pleasure and honor to be with you, my friend, and I'm doing good.
Thank you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
We've got a hell of a lot to talk about.
First of all, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to finally get this book read, but I sure am glad that I have now.
It's a long time I've been waiting for this thing.
Okay, so straight to it.
First question, who was J.D. Cash?
John David Cash was one of the more interesting characters I've met in my 67-and-a-half years of traveling this process, whatever we do.
He was a very unique individual.
He was from Tulsa, Oklahoma, basically, the only son of a World War II fighter pilot and an Oklahoma girl that went to New York City and became a model at the age of 18 or so and came back and married this larger-than-life Navy fighter pilot who got out of the Navy after the war.
They had a kind of tempestuous relationship after John was born.
They divorced, and so John grew up in kind of a tough family situation in some respects, but he went to the University of Tulsa and then on to the University of Tulsa Law School, got his degree, his J.D., did not take the bar exam.
While he was in college, John had started a business having to do with brokering real estate and so on and title searches and was so successful at that, he never had to practice law.
But to get to the point of interest, he became an investigative reporter specifically due to the Oklahoma City bombing.
In 1995, John was paying attention to the news from down in McCurtain County, the southeast corner, the most southeastern, most county of Oklahoma, and he noticed he had a couple people from Tulsa Law School that he knew that had died.
One of them was a pretty close friend.
And so he began to pay very close attention to the reports that came out, and it wasn't long before he realized something wasn't quite smelling right about the government's version of what they were putting out, some conflicting information.
I did not get to know John until the summer of 1996, Scott, so the first year plus, a couple months, that he was involved in investigating the Oklahoma City bombing, I was not part of that.
I came in after basically John had solved the case in all its essentials, and that is that it was a government sting gone bad with prior warning, prior knowledge, on the part of the government, and the question remained, why did they fail to prevent the bombing?
Now, I think I can safely say that neither John Cash nor myself, for that matter, believed that the government intentionally wanted the building to be blown up.
I think there was some just blithering incompetence and maybe some bad luck, and the end result, though, was that Tim McVeigh and a Ryder truck with an ammonium nitrate fuel bomb did detonate outside the north side of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, at 9.02 a.m., and killed 168 of our fellow citizens.
So John had basically worked the case for that first year plus when I got to know him, and we began an association that only ended with his death in May of 2007, way too early.
But be that as it may, he did some incredible work.
He brought a very burning intellect, I would call it.
I mean, John looked at things, and I guess maybe because he was in an industry that was fraught with fraud, that he was a skeptical guy.
So if some FBI spokesman or Justice Department representative in Washington or Oklahoma City got up and said black is white, John didn't believe him.
He said, no, black is still black.
It doesn't change just because a government, a highly placed government official says it has changed.
And so he brought that burning intellect and his skepticism and applied it to the Oklahoma City bombing, and I think history will record that he and his editor, he began to work for a paper there, a daily paper in the county seat, the McGirton County Gazette.
The publisher-editor was Bruce Willingham, and the two of them I think will eventually be given credit for having kept this story alive at a time when no one else seemed to care.
And John's hard work and his smarts and his ability to ferret out information that others either were not interested in or had missed, and he was supported in this endeavor by his publisher and editor, Bruce Willingham, and the two did some incredible work.
Unfortunately, the establishment media headed by the Associated Press office in Oklahoma City had a conscious effort to smother, to ignore the groundbreaking work that John and Bruce had done, and so they never got the professional credit that they should have gotten.
I think there's clearly evidence supporting a Pulitzer Prize for John and the paper had they been able to get anything out on the AP wire, but they couldn't get a story covered by AP.
And it's a sad commentary about how the establishment press doesn't want to really rock the boat and upset the establishment in Washington.
Okay, now, so you got involved in this story because you were working for ABC 2020, is that correct?
Correct.
I had worked for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., as an investigative reporter focusing on the Pentagon from 1993 to 1996 and had lost that job in the summer of 96 and got picked up immediately by a producer with 2020, the Friday Evening News magazine for ABC, named Don Thrasher, who was a very talented journalist that won a Pulitzer Prize as a print reporter in Indianapolis working on a story about FBI corruption and shenanigans there.
And, by the way, he got beaten up twice in the process of that series of stories, but it did not deter Thrasher.
And so he then got picked up in later years there by ABC News, and I had worked with him on some Pentagon stories.
And so when I left that job and was available, he immediately was able to bring me on board as associate producer on a month-to-month basis with 2020 to help him, Thrasher, on the Oklahoma City bombing story, which he had just gotten involved in in the spring and summer of 96 also.
And you were just saying that by the time that you guys got involved and went to Oklahoma City, J.D. had already solved the case.
I believe that's an accurate statement, Scott.
I think that J.D. and with Glenn Wilburn and Kathy Wilburn, but I think J.D. was the principal agent in it, but he was assisted in important ways by the Wilburns, and Glenn is no longer with us.
He died.
Well, go ahead and tell their story, too.
It's a very important one.
A little bit of it is in the book.
Yeah, well, Glenn and Kathy Wilburn had a very comfortable life there in Oklahoma City.
Glenn was a CPA with a small but thriving practice.
It was as big as he wanted it to be.
He didn't want to have, you know, a staff or anything.
He basically had a very good life.
And Kathy had a daughter from a previous marriage named Edie Smith, and Edie had two of the cutest little toehead boys you'd ever want to see, Chase and Colton.
And they spent a lot of time with Glenn and Kathy.
And the morning of the bombing, and this is in the book, Glenn has got the boys up and he's dressing them and going to drop them off at the daycare center there in the Murrah Federal Building.
And there's a very moving description of how that morning went.
And so he and Kathy dropped the boys off.
Kathy goes on to work a couple blocks away at the IRS building where Edie worked.
And Glenn goes on to his CPA office, and the boys are in the daycare center.
And at 9.02 that morning, they and a bunch of other children die in the daycare center.
And so Glenn, bringing the same kind of intellect in many ways that John had, not quite as feisty a guy as John.
Their personalities were very different.
John, by nature, was a fighter, and Glenn's more of a laid-back, go-with-the-flow guy.
But he was until this morning.
But that event and the blatant government misstatements and trying to treat him like he was too stupid to catch the contradictions, the ATF started it all by saying there was no alert to the ATF on the morning of April 19, although that was a notorious day in the right-wing, what I would call ultra-patriot movement because of Waco, which happened two years earlier to the day, because of other significant events in that movement, including the Covenant Sword in the Arm siege ending on the Arkansas-Missouri border several years before on that day.
And the execution, having been previously scheduled that evening in Little Rock, Richard Wayne Snell, a patriarch of that movement, and the movement saw it as a studied insult to them that one of their stronger figures, Richard Wayne Snell, was going to be executed on that very day.
So there's plenty of reason to be suspicious to this day.
The Oklahoma and Dallas, Texas offices of the ATF initially said, oh, there were no warnings about it being a special day.
But the national office of the ATF in Washington said, well, of course we put out a warning that this was a day of concern because of Waco and these other events.
So that was one of the first things that got Glenn's attention and Kathy's there in Oklahoma City.
And then they began to hear from people that said, well, there were no ATF agents in the office that morning.
That was strange.
The ATF office was on the ninth floor, the top floor of the Murrah Federal Building, and not a single badge-carrying special agent was in the building.
Well, as Glenn and Kathy and John Cash and others began to ask some probing questions, the ATF then tried to say, well, yes, there was the resident agent in charge, Alex McCauley, was actually in the building in an elevator when the blast took place, and he and a DEA agent named Chickadance that had been working with the ATF on some investigations were in the elevator together.
And when the blast went off, they fell five floors in the elevator, and it varied from three to five floors as the various stories were told.
And they were able to pry the doors open, and one official version is hard to believe, Scott, but this is just how our government employees sometimes think the American public is stupid.
They'll swallow anything.
In an official filing with the court, the U.S. attorney in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, special attorney, even wrote up a version that Chickadance and McCauley were in the elevator when it fell five floors, and they were able then to pry the door open and found an office that had sheets and made a kind of escape ladder using sheets that they tied together and then were able to get out of the building climbing down the sheets that had been tied together.
Well, I doubt there were any sheets in the building other than in the daycare center, and that was destroyed.
So they're just ludicrous.
It was a totally made-up, fabricated, fantastic story, but they smoked it by the judge, and it was accepted in the court record as trying to justify that, yes, there was an ATF agent in the building.
Then later, they come up with this Luke Franey character that claims to have been at his desk and knocked unconscious for 45 minutes, and Judo kicks his way through three wallboard-separating walls and gets into an office, and he's pictured on the ninth floor holding a box so everybody can see it.
He's made a signed ATF that he's got in the window with him.
Unfortunately for the story that they spun, there's some other video of Luke Franey without any dust, without any damage to his head or his hand where he claimed to have been injured, shaking hands vigorously with this hand that was supposedly injured and bandaged, and there's not a speck of dust on him.
If you see the people that came out of the building that were present when the explosion took place, a lot of them are just covered with this paint, very fine white powder from the particles of the wallboard that were like a fog, dust in the air, and he doesn't have any of that on him.
That's another hokey story made up to try to show people in the country, in Oklahoma City, that, yes, there were ATF special agents in the building when, in fact, there were none.
Yeah, well, I remember even in probably the Associated Press reporting about it, the elevator repairmen, of course, had gone straight there on just the idea that maybe someone could be trapped in the elevator kind of thing.
So the only elevator experts in the city of Oklahoma City were there that day, and they said one of them was quoted as saying that Alex McCauley's story was pure fantasy.
That's what he said.
This elevator did not freefall not one inch.
In the 2020 piece that I did with ABC that aired on January 17, 1997, we have those guys, a couple of them on the air in interviews, laughing and saying this is ludicrous.
I mean, they had physical evidence.
They took pictures showing that the safety brakes had engaged at the time of the bombing and stopped the elevators where they were.
Right.
All right?
So there was no freefall of an elevator.
And one of the guys says it would be like jumping off a five-story building.
If you're in an elevator that freefalls five floors, it's the same as jumping off a five-floor building.
You'd be dead or seriously injured.
Yeah, these ATF guys, they can't tell just a plain old lie.
They have to make up some ridiculous thing.
All right, now, so we've got two major things going on here already.
One of them is you show up in the summer of 1996 with your 2020 producer partner from ABC News, and you find J.D. Cash and Glenn Wilburn.
They've already got this puzzle pretty much put together then, a year and a few months later.
They're pretty much done solving the case.
And then we're also picking up here already on various, you know, the beginnings of proof of prior knowledge that, you know, never mind the little old ladies in the Agriculture Department office or the Social Security office, the ATF cops made sure that they weren't there that day.
They protected themselves, but they didn't give warning to anybody else.
And so I wanted to, you know, get you to pick up on both of those if you could.
I think the item that would have bothered people the most, and hopefully yet we'll be able to get some people to pay attention, because we're not through with this story.
I'm working with a guy named Jesse Trinidad that you know and you've had on the air, and we're continuing to work this story.
There's more to come.
The book that you've cited is a good first step, but it's not the final story by any means.
So what we are doing is continuing to get information, and we are determined to get more of the truth out.
But to go back to your point, that first trip to Oklahoma City in August of 96, we sat down, Thrasher and I did two consecutive evenings with Glenn and Kathy Wilburn at their kitchen table in Oklahoma City, and they laid out to us, and I have the contemporaneous notes to back this up, they basically laid out the solution.
Sting gone bad, Elohim City, Andrea Strassmeier, that was all there.
They had already, at that point, 16 months after the bombing, had pretty much broken it wide open.
And all we've done subsequently is flesh in more detail, get more proof of the government's prior warning and prior knowledge of the threat, and confirm that the connection to Elohim City was strong and real, and that the government knew it.
In the book, for example, my co-author did get a retired ATF senior agent to go on the record named William Buford, who had been the senior agent in Little Rock, Arkansas, for years.
And he said, again, on the record, that the FBI and the ATF placed Tim McVeigh at Elohim City, that neo-Nazi compound on the east side of the state bordering Arkansas, that McVeigh had been at Elohim City before the bombing.
The FBI knew it.
The ATF knew it.
They wrote this up in a report submitted to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department sanitized the report taking that information out.
And when my co-author asked, Mr. Buford, is this something you heard or something you know?
Mr. Buford said, on the record, it's something I know.
Now that is quite a powerful statement.
And, of course, it tracks with other information we had, other information that John Cash had developed.
Right now, here's the thing.
Pardon me for interrupting here, because I do want to get to all the details.
I want people to know we've got another hour and a half still to go here.
I want people to understand as best as we can possibly get across to them about the Aryan Republican Army and the Elohim City and Andre Strassmeier and everything we need to know, the trials, whatever.
But, to me, a major part of this story, and this is a major part that's actually missing from the book, unfortunately, is that, for example, J.D. Cash and other people have known all along.
And, you know, for example, all the right-wing patriot militia guys, they all went to testify before the Senate, before Arlen Specter, and it was on CNN back in maybe the early summer of 95, and they were telling Arlen Specter, hey, we know who did it.
They were a bunch of neo-Nazi guys.
They weren't part of our group, and we'll tell you all about it, Mr. Specter.
We're already giving you all the same information, because all the people on the radical right with their own alternative media at the time, they were all getting the blame for it.
And, actually, they were the ones who were keyed in enough, clued in enough on the rumor mill and whatever that they were finding out very quickly who it was that really did it, and they were more than happy to say it was a bunch of neo-Nazis.
It wasn't militia guys, and those things at least were somewhat different.
It wasn't the Michigan militia that did it, even though that's what the TV said.
So, in other words, the story that a bunch of neo-Nazis did it has been around, like you're saying, has been around this whole time.
So what does that tell us about the society we live in and our major media and the Congress, the House and the Senate and both political parties that have never held a single hearing on the Oklahoma bombing this entire time, except maybe Dana Rohrabacher trying to pin it on Saddam Hussein or some nonsense in some subcommittee.
But, I mean, this is a big deal, because I've known of J.D. Cash's reporting since at least, I don't know, when the John Birchers started picking up on it, which would have been 96, 97, you know, at the very latest.
Yeah.
Well, John, I think his first article in the McCurtain County Gazette was early May of 1995.
And so, to give Bruce Willingham the credit he so richly deserves, Bruce realized what a good mind he had and that John's natural interest and passion and everything would be an asset.
And you marry that up with his first-class intellect, this was a real good investigative journalist beginning to start at that new career.
And one of the things I regret in the book is that my co-author referred twice to John Cash as an amateur investigative reporter.
I caught it in one place and had it corrected in the rough draft of the manuscript.
I missed it in the second place, and it's in the final published copy.
And I take personal responsibility for that, what I consider an insult to John Cash, and it was not an accidental insult.
John Cash had done a lot of really great work, but for whatever reason, my co-author was reluctant to acknowledge that.
Yeah, that really is, I think, too bad.
But you know what?
I kind of don't like the way it's sort of like American graffiti, the way the book is written.
It skips around a hell of a lot, kind of makes me dizzy.
But you know what?
For all the flaws, this is the most mainstream any real media about the true story of the Oklahoma bombing has ever gotten with the New America Foundation paying attention to it and a little bit of major media, it's getting good reviews.
It's not like the politics of terror that came out in 97 or something that was just for alternative media and got no other attention than that, you know?
Yeah, well, thanks, Scott.
I agree.
We got some really good reviews across the political spectrum from the right, from the center, from the left.
And, you know, I think the book is going to be seen as an important first break into the mainstream media.
The really first journalistic work that questioned the major media was the ABC 2020 piece that aired on the 17th of January of 97.
And that was titled The Families Want to Know.
And what Don Thrasher and Tom Jarrell, the reporter, and myself on the production team, we were able to get some family members, Glenn and Kathy Wilburn, several others from Oklahoma City, that just raised these issues, questions about where were the ATF special agents?
Why did they lie about them?
Why did they lie about the elevator falling when it didn't fall?
Why did they lie about whether or not there was a threat warning passed to the Oklahoma City Fire Department on Friday the 14th?
Good Friday, Easter Sunday, was the 16th that year.
So that was five days before the bombing.
But in reality, there was.
And then people later admitted it.
But initially, the FBI pressured these fire department representatives, and they all kind of towed the line.
But then later one of them says, well, I've decided I'm not going to lie for anybody.
Yes, there was a warning.
It came in telling us to be on the watch out for some people that may be coming through Oklahoma City in the next few days.
And, you know, just so much stuff.
You know, you go back and you look at it, and you come to the conclusion that the mainstream media, by and large, with few exceptions, as we've noted, had to consciously ignore this evidence and these credible witnesses.
For example, you know, there were over 20 people that saw McVeigh in Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing.
Not a one of them was called to testify and place him in Oklahoma City.
There is no hard evidence directly connecting McVeigh to Oklahoma City that morning.
It's all circumstantial.
When they had 20 witnesses that could have placed him there, why were they not called at either of the federal trials in Denver?
Well, the answer is simple.
McVeigh was never alone that morning.
He was always in the company of one or two or three other people.
Wait, wait, wait.
Just to make sure we got this nailed down here and everybody's listening.
Hey, everybody, listen.
You're telling me there are 20-something witnesses.
My count, I think, was 24 witnesses that saw Timothy McVeigh the morning of the bombing in Oklahoma City, but not a single one of them could place him in town alone.
And so the prosecution refused to call a single one to testify because they couldn't find a single person.
David Jones in his book raises this as a major issue, but the mainstream media largely ignored it.
So, I mean, if you're a prosecutor, let's just role play this a second, Scott, for your audience.
You're a prosecutor.
You've got 24 people that can place the perpetrator, the accused, in this case, Tim McVeigh, at the scene of the crime, within a block or two blocks, three blocks, whatever, of the scene of the crime.
Either right before or right after the bombing.
Wouldn't you call one of these people?
I would.
So why were they not called?
Probably for the same reason that the Secret Service agent that did all the telephone analysis for the first month of the case, she was not called.
I've looked through several hundred thousand documents and her pages of documents, and she shows up in the material provided to the defense teams for the federal trials in Denver on one FBI interview report.
Clearly a mistake that allowed it in there.
All the rest of her reports, all the other mentions of her name, have been removed.
And why is that?
Because when you look at what was going on, you see more evidence that there was some sort of government prior warning, prior knowledge of a threat.
All right.
Now, in fact, I hate to interrupt just to play a soundbite.
I mean, I have a lot that could be useful here, but I'm skipping most.
But this one I want to play.
It's a clip from 60 Minutes, Roger, of one of the McVeigh jurors.
And, well, first I'll play the clip, I guess, and then I'll commentate on it for just a second here and get your reaction.
I was sure that there would be someone who would step forward with an alibi.
I just I was waiting for the day that someone said, hey, wait a minute, I saw him here, there or wherever.
And it never happened.
So, I mean, really what she's saying there is the government emotionally blackmailed me into changing around the presumption to guilt and that if they say McVeigh did it, then he must have done it.
I waited through the whole trial for finally a defense witness to come and say, no, he was with me that day.
And since he did not have an alibi, I guess, fine.
In other words, the national government, the prosecutors did not prove their case against this most guilty mass murderer because to prove their case against him would have led to the others unknown.
But why, Roger, why would they want to cover that up and let these mass murderers get away with it and let McVeigh take what he considered credit for this thing?
Well, you know, that is the crux of the story, really.
And we stress this in the book is that McVeigh's objective was the same as the prosecutors.
They both wanted to contain the case, the, quote, solution, end quote, to the case to McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier, period, end of story.
That was the objective of the federal prosecutors, which were being micromanaged out of Washington, D.C.
And that was the objective of Tim McVeigh.
Contrary to his own interest and in opposition to his defense counsel, Stephen Jones' efforts, McVeigh would not allow Jones to present and fought very nastily against any information coming into the case that would have brought in other people.
And I believe, and John Cash and I talked about this quite a bit, Scott, that McVeigh brought Terry Nichols in as a designated patsy.
Now, Terry Nichols had a role, and Terry Nichols now regrets that he didn't stand up to Tim McVeigh.
But I think when you look at the evidence we present in the book and other evidence hopefully will be presented later, but I think it's sufficient in the book that a reasonable person can conclude that Tim McVeigh picked out Terry Nichols, supposedly his best friend, and used him as a designated patsy because McVeigh knew it was going to be a tougher sell that he did this all by himself.
He needed to have somebody with him and building a bomb and so on.
And that was the role he picked Terry Nichols to be the patsy for.
Now, McVeigh, there should have been some warnings because, and I don't know whether Nichols knew this in advance or not, but McVeigh had had an affair with Terry Nichols' wife, Mary Faye.
And there's some suspicion in the county law enforcement back in Michigan where a toddler son of Terry and Mary Faye had died of suffocation with a plastic bag over his head.
The county sheriff back there, his people indicated that they were suspicious as to whether McVeigh might have had a role in that.
Now, here's something you would think the federal authorities would have wanted to investigate in some depth because if a guy is heinous enough in his criminal activity to kill, in this case, Mary Faye's Filipina, so McVeigh with his racist attitudes, although he would have sex with this woman, given his beliefs in the Turner Diary and the racism in that, it's very plausible that McVeigh would have seen this little mixed-breed kid as he would have seen him as just a mud person, the term used in the Turner Diary.
And Tim McVeigh had this kind of personality.
He could be very polite and calm.
Well, in the book, I don't think you guys leave any doubt that he was the ringleader of this thing.
The way you describe him punking Nichols over and over again and threatening him and I'll kill your kid if you don't do what I say and all this kind of stuff, it doesn't sound like he's – well, I don't know.
He sure is into it anyway.
I don't know if he's ultimately the boss.
When you say it's a sting gone wrong, does that mean you really think that – and I'm sorry because we're kind of jumping around but we kind of got to – does that mean you think that really Strassmeier put him up to it?
Is that the angle you're working there?
That's the bottom line.
Strassmeier was a government operative for the German government.
We have that in an end note.
I got it from a retired CIA senior officer who looked at a document after the bombing in which the CIA looked at any possible exposure it might have to contractors, retirees, or whatever.
And this individual told me that he saw Strassmeier's name in this report and that Strassmeier was identified as a German operative whose information was being shared with the FBI.
Now that has been a suspicion for a long time.
I remember in the book – it's unfortunately titled The Secret Life of Bill Clinton which sounds like it's all about Jennifer Flowers or something.
But it's actually really solid journalism by a guy named Ambrose Evans Pritchard as I'm sure you've read it.
But anyway, he cites in there a document that identifies Andre Strassmeier as something called AO.
Did you guys ever figure out exactly what that meant?
We were never able to.
We tried during the Jones – when I worked for Stephen Jones during the trial and the government would never come up with an explanation, would never tell anybody.
And the judge – and that's another thing we don't get to in the book, but I hope in the next book to lay out the role of the presiding judge Richard Mache in Denver, the federal district judge.
And he had a chance to be the John Sirica of his generation.
And I don't know if you've noticed last week they released a lot of new information, new documents, 850 pages of new documents on the Watergate episode in our country's history.
And what comes out of it is the key, even more important role of Judge Sirica, the federal judge, when he did not accept the guilty pleas of the Watergate burglars.
They were going to cop pleas and serve their time and keep their mouths shut.
And Sirica knew that they were being paid off to do this, and he refused to go with it.
And he broke the whole thing wide open, was on Time Magazine Person of the Year and all this.
Judge Richard Mache in Denver, unfortunately, I think was – my own take on it, Scott, is so outraged at this attack on the federal government that he was determined to see McVeigh convicted and executed regardless.
And regardless meant that he was willing to go along with the government strategy and McVeigh's own wishes to contain the damage and not get into the others unknown that were clearly crucial to the conspiracy and to the successful bombing of the Murrow Building.
Yeah, well, and again, for those of us who are already paying attention to this, this was so obvious on the front page of the paper every day that Judge Mache might as well have been an assistant to the prosecutors here.
I mean, it was a joke.
It was a farce.
I called it back then a star chamber pretended kangaroo court.
Oh, yeah, we're going to let everybody testify who has hurt feelings, and we're going to let no one testify who actually knows anything about what happened here.
I mean, come on.
It was a farce.
It was ridiculous.
And look at the stark contrast between how the judge allowed the prosecution free reign on introducing terrible emotional stories by the victims and survivors and by family members who lost loved ones.
I mean, it was referred to every day there was at least five gallons of blood just spilled around the courtroom to incite and inflame the jury, and Mache just aided and abetted this in the McVeigh trial.
You get to the Nichols trial, it's like it's a different judge, almost a different case.
There's very little of that.
And so I think McVeigh had somebody that was very sympathetic to his own desire to be executed, and that was Judge Mache.
The three parties worked together, the judge, the prosecution, and the accused all wanted to have the case end with McVeigh being sentenced to death and taking full responsibility, and the only other person involved was Terry Nichols.
And Michael Fortier copped a plea.
That was the Kingman, Arizona guy that had guilty knowledge, and McVeigh could have put him and his wife away for a long time and possibly exposed them to the death penalty too.
But again, McVeigh was protecting them but trying to incriminate as much as possible his supposed best friend, Terry Nichols.
So that's all part of the mystery of this thing, Scott.
Well, I mean, the utmost symbol of Mache's corruption here was when the Department of Justice indicted the ATF informant, Carol Howe, just to keep her from being able to testify.
And Mache did not smash them down and order the bailiffs or the marshals to go and release her from her cage and bring her before him, which he had every power to do.
And instead he went, oh, you want to indict a witness so she can't testify in the most important trial ever, ever?
Oh, okay, sure, fine, and went along with that.
I mean, he ought to be in prison.
Well, you know, that brings up John Cash again because John, of course, is the guy who broke the Carol Howe story, got the initial interviews, got all the great information.
And, you know, in a way, the government, by indicting and trying Carol Howe, did us all a favor because what came out of her trial in discovery are all these documents, Scott, that J.D. got initially, John Cash got initially, and these documents have the Oklahoma City bombing investigation case number all over them, and they were never provided to the federal trials, to the defense teams, as they were required to have been.
So what we now know is even more evidence of how the Justice Department, by prosecuting Carol Howe and succeeding in shutting her up, I mean, that was their principal objective.
So I have to say they did achieve that because she was not allowed to testify in the McVeigh trial at all, and only in a very limited basis in the Nichols trial, which is bizarre.
There was no evidence of Terry Nichols being at Elohim City, but there was evidence of McVeigh, so why is she allowed to testify in a trial which doesn't attempt to tie Terry Nichols to Elohim City?
Yet, in the trial which ties McVeigh to Elohim City, she's prevented from testifying, one of those conundrums that when you come up with a solution or answer to that one, I'd like to hear it.
But anyhow, back to John Cash.
He got these documents, and we've got one of them in our book, in the photograph of it, which is very telling.
I'm going to turn to it right here.
Let me just read it.
This is a copy, and this is from an ATF report dated the 18th of May of 1995, and it's a request for funds.
An agent in Tulsa is asking for money to support the investigation of Elohim City, and I'm going to read this, the explanation block here.
This investigation involves the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
It is suspected that members of Elohim City are involved either directly or indirectly through conspiracy, period.
It is suspected that suspect number two may be at the location.
Funds will be used for CI, that's confidential informant, subsidies, expense, and travel, and then we have Angela Finley, the case officer, asking for $250 to support Carol Howell's investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing.
So, I mean, you tell me how that document is withheld.
Well, yeah, I mean, it was criminal, and this all came out, it started to come out, not it all came out, the documents, but it came out that they were still hiding documents right before McVeigh was executed.
Dan Rather had on some FBI agents, including Rick Ojeda, who I also interviewed.
Yeah, good man, Rick Ojeda, stand-up guy, and paid the price for speaking truth to power.
Yeah, I mean, and what he told me was, yeah, I was investigating Elohim City, because these were the leads I was assigned, and I did my work, and I turned it in, and they patted me on the head, and then had me do something else, and that was the last I heard of it.
And he was saying that that wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary, that his work would be then handed off to someone else, only, you know, in theory, if it's worthwhile leads to be worked, then someone else will actually be tasked to do it.
But in this case, they just took all of his work and just put it in a box and put it away and hid it as long as they could.
Well, the interview that Rick Ojeda did with John Cash, they filed under a different case number.
It's not even under the Oklahoma City bombing case.
Well, they had a lot of that, right, deliberate misspellings and all that kind of thing to keep it from being searchable.
Yeah, just every trick you could think of.
The bottom line to it is today what it was when Don Thrasher and I went to Oklahoma City in August of 1996.
The government had informants inside the conspiracy.
They knew there was a threat, and they did not want to explain their failure to prevent the bombing.
Now, whether it was because it would involve the German intelligence operative being allowed to come to the United States and operate against U.S. citizens, that's certainly not unique.
There's another case involving the Keogh brothers where, on the record, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Federal District Court, a fellow admits that he is an operative of the Canadian Secret Service.
And he was operating up in Idaho against the Aryan Nation, and his information is being shared with the U.S. government, but he's operating as a foreign intelligence agent inside the United States against U.S. citizens.
And our government, the U.S. government, knew about it, permitted it, enabled it, facilitated it.
So that's what's going on.
And that's an interesting tie back to the Oklahoma bombing, too, because the Keogh brothers and people, this may be too long ago now for people to remember.
It used to be when I talked about this on the show, it was at least worth a shot that people would remember if I said, did you ever see the episode of Real Stories of the Highway Patrol where the state troopers get in a shootout with the two neo-Nazis in the big blue and gray old suburban?
And there's probably 25 shots fired and nobody's hit, and the two Nazi brothers end up being arrested.
They used to play that clip just all the time, and it would make, you know, montages, like, you know, if there was a cops montage, that would be in it.
There they are, the Keogh brothers.
And it was at, and this was even made court TV one time, that there was testimony at the trial of one of the Keogh brothers, you may know if it was Shane or Chevy, that said he showed up at, what, 6 a.m. the morning of the Oklahoma bombing, said, turn on CNN, and he was sitting there glued to the set, and then when finally the news broke that the bombing had happened, he was absolutely thrilled.
We've got that in the book.
It was in Spokane, Washington.
He's staying in a camper at a kind of combined motel campground operation, and he goes in 45 minutes before the bomb goes off and asks the manager to turn on the TV in the lounge or something he wants to see.
And he's obviously, in the comments that he makes, he's obviously aware of and expecting the Oklahoma City bombing to take place.
Now, we've been, I was told by a credible source, and this was somebody, a guy named David Paul Hammer, who, again, my co-author and I had a disagreement on this.
David Paul Hammer was on death row with Tim McVeigh for two years before McVeigh was executed.
He wrote two self-published books, and this is not to say that it's gospel chiseled and granted, but the information he got from McVeigh, when they would exercise together for 45 minutes a day over those two years, Hammer would go back and write it up in notes and so on, and one of the things McVeigh told him was that one of the Keough brothers, I think it was Shane, drove a second Ryder truck from Bullhead City, Arizona, to Kansas the week before McVeigh rented the Ryder truck that was actually parked in front of the Ryder, the Mirror Federal Building.
Now, I wonder about that.
I'm not sure if you ever heard, Roger, my interview of Paul Hammer from death row, where Jesse Trinidou got him on three-way, and I interviewed him.
But it's been a number of years, Scott.
I have listened to it, yes.
Yeah, and I think the Keough's bringing the truck, that was one of the things that's different in the two different versions of the two different books, and one of them, the extra truck is driven by Coburn, I think, from Arizona, or Fortier, something like that.
And then in the other one, and I remember asking him about the contradiction there, and he didn't have an explanation, and I remember thinking, you know, if there was one thing honest in his book, it's that he admits he's a con artist.
Yeah, no, he's a very slippery character, but, you know, just like you have to take everything the government says with a grain of salt, and just – it can't be accepted on its own.
It's got to be looked at and evaluated for contact in the comparison with other information that will either support it or refute it.
There's nothing in this case that I take at face value.
Right, and certainly not from him.
I look at every data element and say, all right, does this fit?
Is it reinforced by other information?
Is it refuted by other information?
And at the end of the day, you end up making judgments on the weight of the evidence, the preponderance of the evidence supports that this happened, that happened.
For example, leave David Hammer's stuff out of it altogether, and there still is no doubt there was a second Ryder truck in the Junction City, Kansas area the week before the bombing, the week before McVeigh rented his truck, and how do we know that?
Because the FBI, without letting the prosecution, the federal prosecutors know about it, put roadblocks on the roads around Gary Lake where they thought the bomb had been built, and asked people if they saw a Ryder truck there Tuesday, the 18th of April, the day before the bombing, the day the bomb was supposed to have been built.
Some people, about 20 people again, said, oh, no, but I did see a Ryder truck there the week before, and these people could tie it to specific events.
One woman had to go home, leave home, go to school, pick up a kid, and take to the doctor, and so she knew exactly what time and which day it was.
It was the week before McVeigh rented the truck that she saw the Ryder truck, the second Ryder truck, at the Gary Lake site, and there were almost two dozen people with similar stories.
Now, by the way, I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused on this point.
How far away is the Gary Lake, the site where, according to McVeigh and Nichols, they built the bomb?
How far is that from the Dreamland Motel?
Are those in different states now, or what?
I forget.
They're all within Dreamland to Gary Lake.
I don't think it's more than 20 miles.
I'd have to look and see.
Okay, because now I think people remember probably, and we certainly had covered this on the show, that the lady said, oh, I know, at the Dreamland Motel, oh, I know it was Easter because my daughter and granddaughter came to visit, and I had to walk around the big yellow Ryder truck to get to them, and that was at least the day before McVeigh had supposedly rented the truck.
Yeah, yeah.
And so now, but you're talking about then there were also multiple witnesses who saw a second Ryder truck before McVeigh supposedly ever rented his at the bomb site at Gary Lake.
Yes, absolutely.
And let me just say the reason this is important, among other reasons, but I was in attendance in May of 2003 in Oklahoma City when the state of Oklahoma had a show calls hearing for about 10 days for Terry Nichols.
He was not indicted by a grand jury for his role when they were trying to try him in the state of Oklahoma and get the death penalty because, as you know, Terry got life and sentence in Denver in the federal trial, so the state of Oklahoma wanted to get a death penalty verdict, so they decided to try him in state court.
McVeigh and Nichols were only tried in federal court for the death of the federal law enforcement agents and the use of a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb, and so on.
They were not charged with the specific murders of the non-federal law enforcement officials, so those charges were then used to try Nichols in state court.
So at the show calls hearing in May of 2003, I'm in the courtroom when Brian Hermanson, Nichols' really superb state trial defense attorney, has the vice president of operations for Ryder Rental Corporation on the stand, and he's asking him about a conversation that this fellow Anderson had shortly after the bombing in May, this would have been early May of 95, about two weeks after the bombing, maybe a little more than that.
He's talking to a woman named Sandy Kriegler who, with her husband, had the franchise in Lake Havasu City, Arizona for Ryder Rental.
They had a Ryder Rental franchise there.
So Hermanson is asking this fellow, the Ryder executive, well you had a conversation with Sandy Kriegler, and Hermanson starts getting into it, and he says, didn't she admit that she had the same problem?
And it's clearly in the context of the conversation, is she was missing a Ryder truck, a Ryder truck that had been rented and was now missing.
And at that point, and he says yes, we did have that conversation, and Hermanson tries to follow up.
There's an objection from the state of Oklahoma prosecutor, and a judge sustains it, and will not let Hermanson go further into that issue, but I can guarantee you, having sat in the courtroom that day, Sandy Kriegler had confirmed to this fellow Anderson of Ryder Rental that yes, she too was missing a truck that had been rented.
And Andrew Gumbel, my co-author, went and tried to interview Sandy Kriegler a couple times.
She is still under an order from the FBI not to discuss the case.
Her husband is willing to intercede, but she is still petrified and will not talk about it.
We did get an admission that I think it's three months of records for that office were taken, all rental records for three months before the bombing were taken, and have never been returned.
And they did not show up, by the way, in the federal trial records.
But so what's the explanation for that?
That's just the Nazis wanted to have two trucks to confuse the cops a little in case they were onto them, or what?
I think that's exactly it, Scott.
I've done a lot of research on this, and I wasn't able to get it in the book.
Maybe in the next book it'll be there.
But I'm satisfied that there was a decoy truck.
And one of the reasons the bomb did go off and blow up the federal building was that federal law enforcement had been following this decoy truck, which had some sort of electronic tracking device on it, and they thought they had everything under control.
And McVeigh's group had identified this tracking device and made sure it was on the decoy truck.
Had it been placed on the bomb truck itself, it was moved to another one where it may have been placed on the decoy truck altogether.
I don't have an answer to that.
But the reality is the McVeigh's truck was not being tracked.
The decoy truck was being tracked, giving the feds a false sense that we've got everything under control.
So perhaps, you're saying the Nazis maybe, they found the tracker and said, oh, okay, here's what we'll do.
We'll get another truck.
Yes, I believe that is exactly what happened.
And they put it on the decoy truck.
And if I had to guess, and this is guess, I would say the decoy truck was en route to Little Rock, Arkansas, where they expected trouble because of the execution of Richard Wayne Snell.
And in fact, they were so concerned that the officer in charge of the state prison that was going to oversee the execution of Snell moved his family a few weeks before the bombing onto a U.S. military base for protection.
He was so concerned about reprisal either before or after the execution from these neo-Nazis.
So he took it very seriously.
And I think the federal government did not want to explain why they failed to have that daycare center and the mural building closed.
Oh, man.
All right, listen, we're at the top of the hour.
I think we should take a little break, give everybody a chance to get a drink of water, stretch a little bit.
We'll be back here in just a few minutes with more with Roger Charles, co-author of Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters.
And still to come, we have to talk all about why I kind of want to go through and talk all about the Aryan Republican Army and learn who all these characters are and how sure you are, which ones were involved.
And then also want to talk about really your opening statement here.
Sting gone wrong versus a bunch of compromised.
You know, people did something that could have embarrassed me.
That's the lesser explanation.
Anyway, we'll get back.
We'll talk about all these things more on a whole other hour with Roger Charles coming up after this.
Hang tight.
The government didn't do a good job of proving that Terry Nichols was greatly involved in all of this.
We asked some simple questions and we can't get any answers that make that much more curious.
You know, where, where, where the hell were they?
Kathy, I know you have been so concerned about this execution because you've spent the recent years of your life looking into whether or not there was a conspiracy that was larger than just McVeigh, Terry Nichols and a couple of others.
Do you feel any differently now, having seen this or having gone through the execution this morning?
Oh, absolutely not.
You know, this was just a bump in the road on just a bump in the road to me.
I feel absolutely no difference.
There absolutely were other people involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.
And I've been working with MGA Films the last two years.
And we're going to be releasing a documentary entitled A Cry for Justice, The Untold Story.
And I think the American people are going to be surprised at what they're going to see.
Clearly, there's a conspiracy of some six to eight people with perhaps another half dozen inadvertently helping.
That is to say, they didn't precisely know what the objective was.
Based on a sketch of two men believed to be the bombers.
One sketch showed a dead ringer for Timothy McVeigh, but John Doe number two, according to the FBI, turned out not to exist.
So authorities focused their attention on Timothy McVeigh.
All right.
Well, there's just a few random clips from my Oklahoma City bombing folder.
You can find all of those on some of my various Web sites if you search around.
For your downloading and replaying pleasure.
All right.
I'm talking with Roger Charles.
He is the co-author of Oklahoma City.
What the investigation missed and why it still matters.
And, you know, a lot of us have cared about this story for a long, long time.
And we've been really hoping that a book or a movie or something would break through and get mass media attention, official attention, attention from people who are within the acceptable frame of debate in Washington, D.C. and in New York, where the TV channels live.
And this is it.
It's finally happened.
Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles have put out this book, Oklahoma City.
What the investigation missed and why it still matters.
And they've gotten good mainstream reviews and they've gotten a bit of cooperation from the New America Foundation, which is Steve Clemens group up there.
They're friendly, mostly with the Democrats, I guess, but they're sort of a semi prominent foundation there in D.C.
So we're making progress.
And there's so much important stuff in the book.
We're talking with Roger Charles.
I want to pick up where we left off there before the break, Roger, is you said this is a sting gone wrong.
Now, I got to tell you, I assumed at the time I was in high school and when this thing happened, I never believed their lies for a minute either.
And I always assumed there was a much bigger thing and that they were covering it up.
And my explanation was probably the nice version would have been that it was a sting gone wrong.
I figured they blew up their own building just to try to discredit the radical right that they feared was, you know, on the rise after Waco and all that kind of thing, that they were that cynical and would do it on purpose.
And now I'm quite a bit older and it seems like the sting gone wrong, perhaps, is even the extreme interpretation and maybe the at least easier interpretation.
I think this is pretty much the case you'll make in the book, although you don't even really outright say it in the book, is that many of the participants in this thing were close enough to FBI agents or federal prosecutors for whatever reason.
Either they were literally working for the FBI or some federal agency like Andre Strassmeier, or they were some kind of flip states witness or undercover informant, or they talked on the phone with Bob Ricks every week on the telephone or some kind of thing.
And so to carry the story beyond McVeigh and Nichols was to, or to even the people who were with McVeigh in downtown Oklahoma City that morning, was to immediately compromise the investigating agencies themselves, the ATF and the FBI.
It didn't just happen on their watch.
It was people that they knew who did it.
That's probably the way I look at it now, but then again, believe me, I ain't trying to debunk.
I'm perfectly open and willing to accept, if you can convince me, a much more nefarious explanation, which is that this guy, Strassmeier and or others, were sent to deliberately provoke McVeigh and or somebody else into doing this thing.
And then, like you're saying, it got out of hand.
The stupid gumshoe Keystone cops were chasing the wrong truck, etc., like that.
So convince me that Strassmeier's job was to get a bombing plot going, if not an actual bombing to go off.
Well, I think that's the distinction.
I don't take it to the second stage, Scott.
I do not think that Strassmeier's provocation of these guys into starting a bomb plot included the successful detonation of the bomb.
I believe that Strassmeier was over here as a sent agent of the German government.
Let me just stop a second.
At the time, in the late 90s, early 2000s, part of the decade, the German neo-Nazi movement was seen, and there is a quote by the Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, to this effect, that the number one threat to the political and economic and social well-being of Germany was neo-Nazism.
And the neo-Nazism in Germany relied on the neo-Nazi movement in the United States for all its literature, its materials.
It's against the law in Germany to print it.
So the stuff was printed here in the States and shipped over to Europe, to countries around Germany, where it was then clandestinely trucked in or taken into Germany.
And the Germans were saying, look, we can't stop this.
We can't contain this growth of this dangerous cancer if you guys continue to give it life from the United States.
Now, connected to that is a little-known event.
On the 23rd of March of 95, almost three and a half weeks before the bombing, the number one purveyor, provider of Nazi literature in the United States, was arrested in Copenhagen a guy named Gary Luck from Nebraska.
Well, Gary Luck is not the lightest bulb in the chandelier, shall we say.
He's clearly a hand puppet for some more intelligent and more savvy individual.
But anyhow, Luck was at the time the public face of Nazi literature in the United States.
He's somehow enticed to Copenhagen, Denmark, and arrested, immediately extradited to Germany, and spent several years in prison in Germany for his role in providing Nazi literature to the neo-Nazis in Germany.
Well, when the German government announces his successful arrest in Copenhagen, Scott, the spokesman says this is the result of Operation Atlantic 2, Roman numeral 2.
Well, you know, I had 26 and a half years inside a bureaucracy called the United States military, and I know enough that if there's an Atlantic 2, there's an Atlantic 1.
What was Operation Atlantic 1?
I believe that Operation Atlantic 1 was very likely Anders Strossmayer's insertion into the Elohim City group and his role in trying to foment some sort of large conspiracy, in this case the Oklahoma City bombing, which would then allow federal law enforcement in the United States to decapitate the American neo-Nazi movement and thereby help the German government, which was absolutely almost obsessed with getting the United States to do more, to shut down the U.S. neo-Nazi movement's support for German neo-Nazis.
And so, you know, as John Cash and I talked, these pieces fall into place in this mosaic, this large puzzle we're trying to put together.
You don't have to force these pieces to fit.
They just fall into place.
And then Carol Howe, back to Carol Howe.
She was the ATF informant, and this is the way it always seemed to me, and I guess perhaps it's oversimplification, but it seemed like the ATF had an informant inside the FBI's plot, and they didn't know that each other were working for the government.
And so, you know, here she was reporting way too much about this Strassmeier guy to the ATF.
And then when this whole thing happened, the FBI was freaked out, because look at all the stuff that the ATF has on Strassmeier.
They could have been prosecuting him just for making the grenades that she documented him making, et cetera.
Well, you know, the ATF was planning to raid Elohim City.
We've got documents on this, and it's referred to in the book.
The ATF was planning to raid Elohim City in February, two months before the bombing, to arrest Strassmeier.
He was a non-resident, non-legal resident alien in Washington speak, meaning an illegal immigrant, and he was in possession of firearms, which is a felony.
So they were going to arrest him.
Carol Howe's information was sufficient.
Now, why they had not got an indictment from a federal grand jury in Tulsa is another story.
Maybe they were waiting until the last minute to get the certification from Washington, officially, that Strassmeier was not a legal resident.
Well, that came in on the 16th of February, and we have documents showing that the ATF had requested an INS agent to accompany their ATF raid into Elohim City when they went to get Strassmeier.
We also have ATF documents showing that when the case handler for Carol Howe and some other ATF agents were flown over Elohim City to do a reconnaissance prior to the raid, the plane was being flown by an Oklahoma Highway patrolman, and he mentioned to them when he began to pick up on why they wanted to overfly Elohim City, you know, he said, well, aren't you aware there is an ongoing investigation by the FBI of Elohim City because he had overflown FBI agents in Elohim City?
And at that point, the ATF investigation stops.
There's an emergency meeting with the U.S. Attorney in Tulsa of senior ATF and FBI agents, and the end result is what I call the 800-pound gorilla, the FBI, threw the chimpanzee out of its private banana patch known as Elohim City.
The 800-pound gorilla did not want the ATF mucking around in Elohim City, and they shut the ATF down less than two months before the bomb went off.
Well, I like the way you guys do this in the book.
You go, here are 500 evidences that the FBI was up to their eyeballs in Elohim City, and then, yeah, apparently the FBI was just embarrassed that they hadn't investigated Elohim City in so long.
But it's all right there.
Bob Ricks.
Stories made up by guys like Bob Ricks, who was the supervisory agent in charge of the Oklahoma City FBI office at the time of the bombing, that, well, we were afraid of another Waco.
We were this.
Now, nobody's talking about raiding Elohim City.
We just want you to talk about the informants that you had inside.
Including the patriarch, right?
We had a local Oklahoma highway patrolman that told him that this highway patrolman had his own confidential informants in Elohim City.
McVeigh had made several trips to Elohim City, and Morris Dees is on the record in Denver, Colorado in a recorded press event where he said that the Southern Poverty Law Center had in fact placed McVeigh at Elohim City about a dozen times or so before the bombing.
And, of course, later Dees tries to deny it, but one of the reporters at the event had audio tape of Dees saying just that.
So, you know, there was no question.
Was there any indication who his informant was?
No, we don't.
I think there were so many informants running around.
You know, it's kind of like the Communist Party in the 1950s in the United States.
If all the FBI informants that were members of the Communist Party had quit paying dues, the party could not have financially survived.
Right.
Yeah, well, that's been the story of the Klan since then, too.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All you've got to do is look at Whitey Boulder.
I proposed to my co-author that the chapter in the book about Elohim City and Robert Millar, the patriarch, I won't even dignify by using the term reverend because I don't think he was a holy man, but that I thought the good title for that chapter would have been the Whitey Boulder of the Ozarks and Whitey Boulder being the FBI's top echelon informant in Boston who's now been arrested after 16 years on the lam and charged with 21 murders, which were being forgiven because he was such an important informant for the FBI.
Right, and you do say in the book that Bob Ricks, and does he admit, I forget exactly the context, but you say in the book that Bob Ricks talked with Bob Millar, the patriarch, the head of Elohim City, on a weekly basis leading up to the bomb.
Well, Millar was a crafty old guy, yes, and he talked to the local law enforcement.
So if nothing else, there's your cover-up right there.
Look, but what we also got were some divorce records from a guy in Maryland whose wife was the daughter of Robert Millar.
Millar had moved to Elohim City in the early 1970s from Maryland where he had run a Christian identity church.
And we have in the book, and in fact I think there's a picture of it, of Robert Millar.
This is out of the little school yearbook that this school that Millar had connected to his church.
Millar had posed giving a Seagal salute with his finger under his nose in the Adolf Hitler kind of look-alike competition.
No, it's not in the book.
I thought we might have used that one.
But anyhow, so Millar had moved in the early 70s from this suburb of Baltimore to Elohim City.
This fellow in Maryland had married one of the daughters, and she ran off with two of their kids to rejoin her father there in the cult at Elohim City.
And this guy wanted his kids back, succeeded in getting them, and so on.
But as part of the testimony, we have sworn statements by two neighbors at Elohim City, not members of the cult that Millar had, saying that they had been threatened by Millar and his people, and this is two different families, that if they ever caused problems, these peace-loving people that Millar referred to as his flock would burn these people's homes.
So that's the kind of mentality.
And the FBI was watching Millar like a hawk then, because when this fellow and his lawyer went out to have some sort of a confrontation with Millar at Elohim City, and got run off the road and everything, and they get back to their hotel, suddenly an FBI agent shows up at their motel.
Well, how did he know they were even there?
They were following him.
The FBI had observation on everybody going to and coming in and out of Elohim City, and this is in about 1983.
I mean, this thing just stinks from one end to the other.
Well, yeah, at least it proves that they should have known.
That's the thing.
Absolutely.
The FBI knew what was going on inside of Elohim City.
If the local state troopers got informants inside, you can bet that the FBI's got them.
Now, do you think that Strassmeier recruited McVeigh to do this?
Because at least the way it's portrayed in the book, McVeigh was more than happy to do this himself.
I'm not sure why he needed parading.
No, McVeigh was known in the movement as Sergeant Mack, and he was a good soldier.
I think McVeigh just traded his allegiance to the U.S. Army, to this new army, the army of neo-Nazis.
And this was a mission behind enemy lines, from which McVeigh expected not to return.
That was his role.
He accepted it, just as he would have accepted such a role had he been asked when he was in the U.S. Army.
And I believe that McVeigh, somebody with a guiding intellect, whoever, the evil genius, as I call him, behind the bombing conspiracy, realized McVeigh would be a good person to carry out specific orders.
McVeigh was not the mastermind.
He did not put this together.
Do you think that Terry Nichols was the primary bomb builder?
Terry admits in letters, in correspondence that I had with him, that he and McVeigh built a bomb on that Tuesday, the 18th of April, the day before the bombing, at Gary Lake, Kansas.
You say in the book that his description is far more detailed and probable than what McVeigh told the local newspaper guys that wrote his book.
Yeah, I believe that Terry gives a more accurate description.
Everything Tim McVeigh said was created and had as its purpose to contain the prosecution, as we've discussed, so that it was McVeigh and Terry Nichols with a little minor assistance and involvement by Michael Fortier, and that was it.
That was everything McVeigh said, and you may recall, Scott, that McVeigh, when he's polygraphed by his defense team, shows no deception except on two questions.
Were other people involved?
And secondly, did you have assistance?
And those are the two issues that he showed deception on.
Did you get a chance to ask Terry Nichols about Colburn from Arizona and whether he had helped with the bomb?
It seemed like he was the one.
And I don't think we got a conclusive answer on that.
See, Terry Nichols is still under threat.
Terry Nichols has been very helpful, but it's obvious to me that he is still protecting his family.
He's been told that you can say some things, but don't go there.
Terry has alluded in letters to the Attorney General of the United States and other documents and other statements to other people involved, but he has refused to give up specifics, and I think it's because he knows that his family is basically still at risk if he speaks too much.
All right.
So now let me see here.
Let's talk about Roger Moore.
He's the guy that the official story goes that McVeigh and Nichols robbed him.
I guess Nichols did the robbery at McVeigh's behest, and that's how they financed the bombing.
And at least the way you put it in the book is that that's pretty much all that the feds wanted to know about him, but that there was much more to know.
Oh, yeah.
Roger Moore is another government operative, I'm convinced.
He was involved in a case, Operation Punch-Out, in Ogden, Utah, in the late 1980s, where he was caught up in a sting.
The FBI set up a little office storefront where they were buying military surplus items that were being stolen out of the big warehouses at Hill Air Force Base there in Ogden.
They even arrested a couple guys, the Air Force security police, that were somehow enticed into participating in the theft of two jet engines.
And you can't make this stuff up.
So I think over 100 people ended up being arrested, indicted, and convicted in this sting.
Roger Moore is somehow in the middle of it, but he's not prosecuted.
We have in the book reports from the Arkansas State Police of two other cases that they had started, along with the ATF, investigating Moore for violations of federal statutes involving ordnance, explosives, specific ammunition, and so on.
And both times, they get so far, and the FBI shuts down the investigations.
Terry Nichols, you may recall, in 2005, had told a fellow inmate at Florence Supermax Prison that there were additional explosives not recovered by the FBI under a crawlspace in the house he had lived in in Harrington, Kansas, there.
And the FBI went there, and after several failed attempts, and that's an interesting story in itself, they finally located them.
And the boxes were taken out, and all the things were run through the normal detailed forensics examination that the FBI is famous for doing.
But you know what?
They just happened to not do the fingerprint analysis of the items that were recovered from Terry Nichols' crawlspace in 2005.
Now, a buddy of mine, a journalist in Washington, D.C., who's done a lot of great work on Oklahoma City, named John Solomon, who at the time was the Deputy Bureau Chief of Associated Press and now is running the Washington Guardian news site investigative project.
But Solomon was told by a senior FBI agent that there were four sets of fingerprints on those items recovered under Terry Nichols' crawlspace.
Tim McVeigh's, Roger Moore's, Terry Nichols', and Richard Lee Guthrie, one of the ARA Midwest bank robber heads of that outfit.
So does it prove it?
No.
But we do know, again, the FBI has never released the results of that.
And Jesse Trinidad put in a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, request for that specific information, and they refused to release it.
So whose sets of fingerprints are on the explosives recovered from Terry Nichols' crawlspace in 2005?
We don't know.
Now, we also know that there's more explosives that have never been recovered.
They're still missing several hundred blasting caps, according to Terry Nichols, who's kept a minute accounting of all the items that were recovered, at least as listed by the FBI.
Well, now, you guys make a very persuasive case in the book that Roger Moore was in on his own robbing, that he and McVeigh apparently had agreed that McVeigh would send Nichols to rob him so he would have some plausible deniability for his participation in the financing of this thing.
Is that about right?
It's not just us.
The local sheriff, the insurance company, everybody that's looked at it except the FBI.
And I would think the agents in the FBI actually believe that Moore was a party to his own robbery, a scam, but they couldn't get it in official documents.
But I have to believe these guys aren't stupid, and they looked at it and said, obviously, this was a put-up deal.
As McVeigh told Nichols, it was a put-up deal.
Roger Moore would go along with it.
There would be no attempt to resist or anything.
Yeah, I mean, the next door neighbor, I think you quote the next door neighbor saying that.
One thing after another, this whole government version of what happened is a fairytale.
All right, now, so we pretty much went down the list, not necessarily in list fashion, but we've covered a lot of different indications of prior knowledge that there was going to be an attack.
A couple of things that are pretty specific on the timing, too, you mentioned the local fire department being warned.
There's also the book actually begins with the story of some Air Force bomb squad guys brought in from out of state for a few days.
And then the whole thing happens, and then they're sent out of there.
There was overreaction at the local power plant when there was a malfunction, and it was assumed this was a terrorist attack.
And there's one that's not in the book that I remember from back then.
It's from actually a judge that you quote in the book because he wanted to try them, but they wouldn't let him, and they transferred it to Mache instead.
That's Judge Wayne Alley, and he had told the Portland Oregonian that he had been warned that there was a danger of an attack from right-wing racist types way back then.
When they tried to finesse that, the government claimed that the warning had to do with the U.S. Marshall Alert about Muslim extremists nationwide or something.
But it was very curious that none of the federal court people were really in jeopardy that day.
And I know from talking to the guy in charge of security for all the federal buildings in Oklahoma City that he had been going in with one of the U.S. marshals to talk to one of the judges about enhanced security a few weeks before the bombing, a couple weeks before the bombing.
And he saw two guys sitting in a room with kind of military high and tight haircuts, and they had the classic phony leather, shiny plastic black shoes.
And so this fellow who was in charge of security again asked this U.S. marshal, who are those guys?
And he said, oh, that's a couple of Army intelligence guys that came up from Fort Sill for a while to help us with some intel analysis.
So why does that happen?
And probably to me the most damning of all is the guy named Bruce Shaw, who was on our 60 Minutes – I'm sorry, not 60 Minutes, our 2020 show in Chattah.
But he's been publicly identified and everything.
Bruce Shaw's wife was working in the credit union there at the federal building.
And so he's an air conditioning mechanic, and he's on a job with his boss not far from the Murrow building when the blast goes off and he finds out which building it is.
So he and his boss go running over to the bomb site, and they see a guy with an ATF windbreaker on.
And Bruce assumes this is a local ATF guy.
And he says, hey, my wife works in the credit union.
You might know her.
Any idea of what's happened to the people in the credit union?
And his wife did survive, by the way.
And the guy says, well, I'm not really from the ATF here.
I'm from out of town.
I just came in yesterday or something.
And the guy says, well, did you lose any ATF guys?
He says, no, we were all paged not to come in this morning to the building.
So, I mean, and Bruce Shaw is a stand-up guy.
He's never retracted that.
The government's tried to pressure him.
The government really worked overtime to, you know, try to get these people that gave eyewitness statements that questioned their version.
Sometimes they succeeded.
Or they would just be dishonest and write up interview statements that were contrary to what the people had said.
And we could do a whole show, Scott, on that.
Yeah, just the bad 302s.
You know, that's why the FBI does not tape their interviews, either audio tape or videotape, because then they would have to report what was really said and not what they wanted to say.
And the classic example is Danny Colson, who was the supervisory agent in charge of Dallas, Texas FBI office at the time of the bombing, and comes up, I think, the night before.
But anyhow, in his book, he talks about coming up after the bombing, driving through a rainstorm, and the rainstorms didn't exist, according to the Weather Bureau.
This is before the bombing.
But anyhow, Danny is later, after the bombing, because of the Ruby Ridge killings and his role as a supervisor in FBI headquarters in 1992 and that, he is suspended from his duty and is told he's under criminal investigation.
And Danny Colson says in this book that when he receives this phone call from Washington, D.C., that he's now under criminal investigation, that he immediately determined he would not submit to an interview with fellow FBI agents, that he would submit a signed, sworn statement instead.
And the reason he gives, and this is a guy with 30 years in the FBI, one of the top officials in the Bureau at the time, the first leader of the FBI's hostage rescue team, he says, the reason I would not submit to an interview with FBI agents, fellow FBI agents, is that I had seen far too many cases where interview statements were reworded so as to present a different version of what was said, whether through, and he says, whether through incompetence or blah, blah, blah.
But here's the guy's bottom line is, he's saying, you cannot trust the FBI to record accurately what you say in an interview, because they're going to write it up so that it comes out supporting what they want you to say, not what you actually say.
And again, this is in his book.
I think it's page 361 if anybody wants to look it up.
I could pull the book.
I've got it here on a shelf and read it to your audience if that would be of interest at some time.
But that's just, to me, one of the most astounding statements I've ever seen in print by any federal official, by a senior FBI agent, very senior FBI agent, saying he could not trust his own peers to do an honest interview report.
They might interview him and take down what he says, but the report of what he says is going to be what they want it to be, not necessarily what he actually said.
Right.
Yeah, well, I think the lesson there, always let your lawyer do the talking, is pretty important.
As long as we still have the right to remain silent, we ought to use it when it comes to stuff like that because, of course, he should know whether they can be trusted to write up an honest report or not.
I'd take his word for it that they can't.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, okay, so let's talk about Nazis because, and now, again, I want to remind people back 1995, before September 11th, this terrorist attack was the biggest deal in the whole world, and I know that the O.J. Simpson case came and kind of ruined it, where people would have been much more interested, but this was such a huge thing, and what they did was they smeared everyone on the right between Rush Limbaugh and the Nazis, but they didn't blame the Nazis at all, and they always said Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing extremist militia guy, Timothy McVeigh, the white guy who owned a gun, Timothy McVeigh, a little bit to the right of the Republicans, Timothy McVeigh, but they never said he was a Nazi.
That's what he was.
He was a Nazi, and why didn't they talk about he was a Nazi?
Because the actual Nazis that he was running around with were the actual Oklahoma City bombers, John Doe 1, 2, 3, et cetera.
I guess.
I mean, you make the case in this book that some combination of the Elohim City crowd and the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery ring are the ones what did it, so let's go through some names and make some accusations.
Let's start with Richard Guthrie.
Well, Richard Guthrie, now deceased, maybe.
John Cash was a little skeptical as to whether he really committed suicide or was it a pretend suicide, and they put him in the witness protection plan under a promise to keep your mouth shut and you can have a new chance at life.
But let's assume that he is dead.
Richard Lee Guthrie I think was certainly involved in present Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing.
Well, and there's a lot of speculation that he was actually John Doe 2.
Of course, this is a whole side issue.
We can't go all the way down it, but I'll clue people in just so that they are reminded that this is the most likely explanation for the murder of Kenneth Trenadue and the entire Jesse Trenadue saga on that part of this story is that they mistook him for Richard Guthrie and they tortured him to death, perhaps trying to get him to admit who he wasn't.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
I think they were trying to beat a confession out of him, and it got out of hand and got carried away.
He was a tough guy and wasn't going to admit to it.
It wasn't John Doe 2.
It was not John Doe 2, and a powerful, strong guy, and it got out of control and they killed him, and then they had to stage this pathetic excuse of a staged suicide.
Again, if this is the best our federal tax money can buy in terms of staging a suicide, we ought to be wanting some refunds.
But anyhow, so Richard Lee Guthrie, I think, clearly involved.
One of the things John Cash had in his files, and this is not in the book, my co-author and I disagreed about it, but I believe it's very clear to me at least, Pete Langan, a handwritten note, refers to the cell, the Oklahoma...
Pete Langan, he's one of the bank robbers.
Yeah, and the bank robbers.
This is one of his notes, internal notes that Pete had written to himself or maybe for him and his attorney, and he refers to the Oklahoma, I forget how it's written, whether it's Oklahoma City or OKC, bomb cell.
But C-E-L-L is clearly there.
And so, I mean, here you have Pete Langan, the co-leader of the Aryan Republican Army, referring to a cell of the Aryan Republican Army that is working on the Oklahoma City bombing.
And then you have the great defense work done by the deputy lead defense counsel in the Terry Nichols state trial, who did just some fantastic work on telephone analysis and so on, and he makes a convincing case that the Aryan Republican Army was present just north of Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing, according to phone records that were, again, never provided to the federal trial, but the state defense team got, and Mark Ernest is the guy, and just a tremendous lawyer and did great work.
And, you know, if people want to know the bottom line to some of this stuff in terms of, well, what can you believe and what can't you believe, Scott, just stop a second and ask why it is that a jury in Oklahoma State in 2004 failed to convict Terry Nichols of a capital murder case that justified execution.
They found him guilty of a lesser charge and gave him another, you know, life sentence.
But when you look at Terry Nichols facing both a federal trial in Denver in 1990, I think it ended in early 1998, and then a 2005 trial there in Oklahoma, and two separate juries looking at all this evidence, all this strong emotional connection that's involved, and two separate juries have failed to give Terry Nichols the death penalty.
Why is that?
As the jury for a woman in Denver said after the trial there, we couldn't do it.
There were too many holes in the prosecution case.
Too much question remained about what really was involved, who was involved.
Judge Maitch, if you look in the beginning of the book, this is a great quote, and I credit my co-author for finding it and using it.
Judge Maitch, quote, this is in the prologue, quote, there are, as a result of the investigation and the presentation of the evidence in this case, a number of questions unanswered, dot, dot, dot, dot.
It would be disappointing to me if the law enforcement agencies of the United States government have quit looking for answers in this Oklahoma bombing tragedy.
So when a federal judge who sat through two trials, McVeigh and Nichols, says, guys, there's more to this story that needs to be told, you would think there would be some interest in doing that.
There's been zero.
Yeah, it is amazing.
I've got to say, like, even after all these years, it is almost the twilight zone.
I mean, still, even with this book, it's still, they're not holding new hearings on this.
The story is over.
Dan Rather is gone.
He was the, as far as TV people, he was the only one who would have touched this with a 10-foot pole at all, and, of course, he waited until 2001 before he'd even touched it with a 10-foot pole.
And so, I mean, we still live in a world where everybody who's bothered looking into it knows at least a lot of this stuff, and yet the official story just continues on, and it's almost like nobody cares.
It's amazing.
I think we make a good point in the book that had there been an honest investigation and had some sort of real serious effort been made to see how this tragedy was allowed to take place, what was it that allowed federal law enforcement to put this thing in motion and then fail to prevent the bombing?
Had those questions been dealt with, I think there's an excellent likelihood that 9-11 would not have happened, at least as it did, because what you had in 9-11, of course, was the FBI and the CIA having information, pieces of information about the terrorists that flew the planes and were on the planes on 9-11, but they weren't sharing it, and consequently, there was no coordination and the failure to arrest the guys that were aimed by way of Malaysia to San Diego and then on to Virginia and were on one of the planes.
There was abundant opportunity to have prevented both the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11, and the failure to deal with the bureaucratic and institutional flaws that led to both those events taking place have not been corrected.
I would say they have intensified, and those flaws will lead to another disaster, I'm afraid, at some point, and it will more than likely be worse than 9-11.
Well, you know, that's what Peter Lantz says, that basically the original Al-Qaeda attack in America was against the Rabbi Kane, the right-wing rabbi in, I think, 89, and then the way he explains it is pretty much like you're saying.
Because they blew it then, they could have stopped that, or at least they knew the people who did it, knew they were here, knew they needed to be watched, but weren't watching them.
Because they sort of covered up how bad they blew that, that led to the first World Trade Center bombing, and then they had to cover up how bad they blew that.
And so they didn't follow the leads that led to the next attack, and the next attack, and the next attack, all through the 1990s, the coal and the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam before that, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up to 9-11.
Same kind of thing, like you're saying.
Right now we've got sting after sting after sting, where they go and entrap some idiot into some pretend plot to fly remote-controlled plane bombs into the Pentagon or some nonsense, but meanwhile, the next time some real terrorist is here with a plot to kill a lot of people, they're going to be chasing their tail and trapping some idiot instead on that case.
I think you're exactly right.
We've just been really lucky so far that the only real attackers have been completely incompetent, like Faisal Shahzad and Abdullah Mutallab, that they just haven't been able to do what they were trying to do.
But imagine a massive bombing in Times Square or a plane blowing up over Detroit, for crying out loud.
Well, I'll titillate you and your audience with a little bit of 9-11 information, and this came from a very, very credible guy, and it came to me either the afternoon of the bombing or the next day.
I'd have to look it up in my notes, and I've got to be pretty vague about who he is, but I just will have to say you'll have to take this on faith that this is a credible source with access to the information personally.
This is not something he heard about.
This is something he participated in, that on 9-11 there were supposed to be a series of attacks by time zone.
The ones in the east coast, the eastern time zone, took place as planned.
But when we ordered all the flights grounded, that was not expected by al Qaeda.
And the other attacks, one planned for the two sites in the central time zone, one in Chicago, one in Houston, Texas, and then additional third band of attacks, if you will, for the western time zone, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, two of the three.
I just forget which two it was.
But these attacks were going to be the same MO.
They were going to have people on the planes, take over the planes, train to fly them.
But when they grounded the flights, and just think about this for a second, Scott.
Nobody's gone back and looked at it, but the day of 9-11, when they grounded all the planes, a couple of these terrorists got off the airplane in St. Louis.
They'd been planning to fly it to Texas, caught a train, and were headed to Texas.
They were apprehended on the train and arrested.
And it came out in a couple news stories and then just vanished.
They had the shaved bodies, so typical, you know, a classic.
Well, that was the original plan, the multiple waves of attacks like that, from Operation Bojinka in the Philippines, back Ramsayusa.
Although, you know what, I really want to talk about neo-Nazis and the Oklahoma bombing more.
Okay, anyhow, but that's a sign of how we just got lucky.
Somebody made a decision to ground the planes.
It could have been that much worse.
It could have been an even worse disaster.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, so tell me about, you know, I don't know.
Draw me a picture, if you can, about who all was there in Oklahoma with McVeigh that morning, how confident you are.
I think you say Strassmeier sure had his alibi tight that day.
So who was there in downtown Oklahoma City with McVeigh, do you think?
Was there specifically a John Doe, too?
Was he the same guy from the rental and the morning of the bombing?
I think there were several look-alikes.
I think that, well, first of all, let me say I do not believe that Tim McVeigh was at the Ryder rental office that afternoon of Monday, April the 17th, to pick up the truck.
I don't think he was present, okay?
When you look at the height and weight description, 5'8 to 5'10", 185.
McVeigh is 6'2 1⁄2", or 6'3", and 160.
10 is a rail.
How are you going to confuse that?
The people at the Ryder rental office, the woman that characterized the height, says he's about the height of my husband.
Her husband is 5'8 or 5'9".
McVeigh is almost half a foot taller than that.
Yeah, I think it's usually assumed that John Doe 1 in the sketch is McVeigh because they sort of kind of look alike with being a white guy of the same age with the same haircut.
But if you really look at the sketch of John Doe 1, and I don't know exactly how reliable those sketches can be, but apparently pretty reliable, it doesn't really look that much like McVeigh, just kind of.
Kind of.
And then like you're saying, height and weight is way off.
McVeigh had kind of a rounded top of the head, and that sketch shows a flat head.
McVeigh had a clear complexion.
According to the people at the Ryder rental office, John Doe 1 had some acne scarring.
You know, there was also a fourth witness at the Ryder rental agency that was never called, and I happened to find that information in going through some of these additional files, and that was a mechanic.
And he had seen a car pull up, and these two guys, John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, get out.
And it was a dark Cherokee Jeep.
And that answered a question because we knew from other records that there was an intensive short search for a dark blue Cherokee Jeep in the Junction City and Harrington, Kansas area particularly.
And I had always wondered, well, where did that come from?
Well, it came from this guy that says he saw the vehicle pull up, and John Doe 1 and John Doe 2 get out.
But he's never called.
I don't recall whether that document was one that was ever provided to the defense teams in Denver or not.
But for whatever reason, you know, the government sure didn't want to bring him in there and talk about these guys driving up in a vehicle because their version was that McVeigh had called a ride or something, you know.
And you say in the book that Carol Howe said when she saw the sketches, she didn't say, oh, that's Timothy McVeigh, who she later identified the Nichols trial as being at Elohim City, although that was the first time she ever mentioned it, which I thought was kind of weird, assuming that's right.
But she said, oh, that looks like Pete and Tony Ward, who were a couple of other Nazis from Elohim City.
Were you guys able to back that up at all or even partially, that maybe it was those two brothers who rented the truck?
There's an episode in the book where we describe how the Ward brothers are caught in the, I think it's September of 96, in Medford, Oregon, in a stolen vehicle.
And basically what happens is an FBI agent comes and posts bond for them, and they're let out of jail.
Now, why would an FBI agent post bond for guys wanted for a stolen vehicle?
Well, because they were informants probably.
Yeah, they're informants, I think, clearly.
Yeah.
So, I mean, there are all sorts of these anomalies.
Carol Howe was doing everything except stand on the corner and scream Nazis, Nazis, in the fall of 94, six months before the bombing.
She's talking about Stroessmeier wanting to wage war against Zog, the Zionist-occupied government, wanting mass assassinations, murders, bombings, and Dennis Mahon right there with him.
And, of course, Dennis Mahon, that's somebody else we could spend almost a day talking about, probably another government informant.
Like Whitey Bolger, though, they've now got him arrested and convicted down in Phoenix for sending a letter bomb, which there's all sorts of reason to question whether that was him or not.
But once the ATF took over the investigation from the U.S. Postal Inspectors, who had it because it was a letter bomb through the post office, which should have meant the post office inspectors had priority in the investigation, but the ATF took it over and then it went in a different direction.
The postal inspectors had absolutely no indication that Mahon was involved.
They had some promising suspects of their own, but those were ignored by the ATF when they took over the investigation, and they were able to convince a jury that it was Dennis Mahon.
They failed to convict, by the way, his twin brother, Dan, who the government charged also.
Now, Mahon, he was the former Grand Wizard of the Klan, right?
He was the Grand Wizard and the one that went goose-stepping around bonfires in Germany and was banned from Germany as a result of his inciting neo-Nazis over there.
They can't even give the Seattle Salute in Germany, and here Mahon was running all over the countryside giving it and going to these big bonfires and inciting the latent sympathizers to become more active, real neo-Nazi tough guys, and he's also banned from Canada.
But, you know, every time he turned around, Dennis Mahon got a pass from the federal government until recently.
And now, was he living out at Elohim City at the time, or he could just be found there?
He had taken a trailer out there and parked it for weekends.
He would go out and stay in his trailer, and I think he allowed Strassmire to live in it for a while, and Mike Brescia, who John Cash was convinced, was the John Doe, too, of the story.
And, you know, John, by the way, Scott, I don't know if you had a chance to talk to him about this, but John Cash was convinced the bomb was actually built in a warehouse in West Oklahoma City, the bomb that was used in blowing up the Merrill Building.
Yeah, I wish he wasn't dead, because I would want to know.
We don't have time to get into it now.
Did he have any more about that other than what Hammer said?
Yes, I think he did.
We found a very interesting connection in an Air Force guy who was from up next door to where Mark Thomas, one of the Aryan Republican Army guys, the guy that recruited the skinheads from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Scott Stediford, Michael Brescia, and Kevin McCarthy into the ARA.
Mark Thomas turned them over to Guthrie and Peter Langan.
They needed more hands to carry out the robberies.
And so, Thomas, anyhow, there's a connection for this storage area out where John Cash thought the bomb was more likely to have been built, but we've been unable to get anything conclusive on it.
Well, you know, I always wondered, and I could be wrong about this, and you guys sure have a lot about the building of the bomb out at Geary State Lake and all that.
It seems like plenty of cooperation.
But on the other hand, I remember in Stephen Jones' book he says he asked Scotland Yard, at least about Timothy McVeigh's claimed recipe for the bomb, and Scotland Yard said, well, is your client still alive?
And Stephen Jones said, yeah, he's still alive.
And they said, well, then he didn't make this bomb.
And then, you know, we're supposed to believe that he drove, you know, you take your pick, 24, 48, or 7,000 or whatever pounds worth of this, you know, slurry mix of explosives and drive it from Kansas to Oklahoma City, what, 200-and-something miles?
It seems like even if he didn't blow himself up on the way, that that would have at least been a pretty risky risk and that there would be, you could imagine if he had access to a place where he could build the bomb or have it built in Oklahoma City, that would make a lot more sense than driving it from that far away, you know, in a dually on, you know, the highway.
Yeah, that's one of the things that bothered John.
It bothered me.
And the other thing, of course, related to that is that the federal government could not call any of its forensic scientists really with any credibility from the FBI lab, its bomb experts, because they were all under investigation by the Office of the Inspector General or the Justice Department for fabricating evidence, testifying beyond their competence, technical experience, and so on.
So that's why the government and Stephen Jones called bomb experts from England.
And Jones got the better ones because they had a lot of experience dealing with ammonium nitrate bombs in Northern Ireland.
And the one you quote there, I think that's a key indicator of why we ought to be very skeptical about that aspect of this story.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it was pretty scandalous, and you guys talk about this in the book, about how they didn't even really have a single molecule of evidence of ANFO.
They only claimed it.
And really what they had, the evidence that they had, was a receipt with McVeigh's thumbprint on it at Nichols' house for a bunch of ANFO that they couldn't account for, I guess.
Yeah.
And Nichols says, by the way, that the last time he had seen that receipt, Tim McVeigh had it.
So how did it get from – and I have no reason to disbelieve Nichols here.
Basically what Nichols is saying is that the FBI somehow got that receipt from McVeigh and planted it in his kitchen door.
And if you look at the evidence presented, the standard procedure for an evidence search of a kitchen and the drawer is a photographer, as soon as the door is open, the photographer takes a picture of it showing how the drawer is in an undisturbed condition.
Nobody's done anything yet.
But you have what is a pristine vision of – a photograph of the drawer undisturbed.
Well, guess what?
In this case, the photographer just forgot to take a picture of that one drawer in an undisturbed fashion.
All right.
So now back to the ARA and the Elohim City guys.
In the book, you talk about numerous circumstances where these guys pretty happily point at each other and say, well, I didn't do it, but I think the other guys may have, huh?
Yeah.
Can you take us through a few of those?
Pete Lang and Fingers, Kevin McCarthy, Mark Thomas had said – quotes Guthrie, I think, saying that your young Mr. Wizard blew up the federal building.
I believe the one that really knows is Lang.
And he's got this fantastical idea that he's somehow going to be able to cop a plea, a limited plea, and get out of prison without giving up everything he knows.
But, you know, he can't finesse it because if he gives up everything he knows, he places himself in Oklahoma City and he goes from life in prison, which he currently has, to being on a gurney like McVeigh and having a needle in his arm.
So he's got a tough problem to deal with, and I don't think there's any solution to it.
Yeah, it's not like the DOJ is going to give him a break if only he'll tell the truth.
They don't want it.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
And now tell me about the lawyers from Backey's, Holloway, and then who's his boss?
Kirk Lyons.
Kirk Lyons.
All right.
I couldn't think of the name.
Now, they had at least some kind of prior knowledge, you thought.
Is that right?
Well, it's interesting that they both have tried to create alibis, which there is no independent verification.
They're not in their office.
Kirk Lyons is supposedly attending a reenactment thing down in, I believe it's Alabama or Georgia, I forget.
People have looked at it and found no record in any motel or nobody down there saw him there.
So that's still, to me, a foggy area.
It's more clear on Holloway's case.
Holloway is given false versions of where he was.
Not that he was participating in the bombing, I don't think, but that he had reason to not want to disclose where he actually was.
And both of them had good connections with Ellingham City.
Kirk Lyons had defended people in a sedition trial in 1988 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and had actually stayed at Ellingham City for a while until the commute back and forth to Fort Smith got too much.
Holloway has bragged, married one of the sisters of the hierarchy from Hayden Lake, the Aryan Nation, the high priest group up there, and is quoted in the book as letting his mouth run away.
Andrew Gumbel interviewed him about if he had been plotting it, they would have gotten the right size truck to get it in the basement of the federal building and taken the whole building down.
There's some evidence, which we cite, that they may have tried to take the rider truck into the underground garage and didn't realize until he was trying it that morning that it was too large and would not fit and had to go around and come up with plan B, and plan B was to park it there on the north side of the building and detonate it right there by the child care center.
So we don't have all the answers by far, but what we do know is that the version we've been spoon-fed by our government is a stew of lies and misrepresentations and distortions that I think any reasonable person looking at the evidence would have to agree with that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, there's too many different things now that could serve as the straw that broke the camel's back on that one.
I mean, at the very least, there should be a massive investigation in the Congress about this to get this restarted based on this book alone, but I guess they've got other priorities.
Now, we're already over time, Roger, but if it's okay, I wanted to go ahead and get into the possibility of multiple bombs or at least let you address the fact, and I have all the news clips here.
I'm sure you've seen them and heard them all about how all day long, all day long, I mean, the sun was going down and they were still continuing to allow the medical workers and rescuers to go to the site and then they'd call them back again and they'd allow them to go to the site and then they'd call them back again and you talk about the poor lady getting her leg amputated in the midst of all this, but over and over again, there were reports that they found another bomb.
Now, to try to make a long story short here, J.D. was the one who told me he thought there were no bombs inside the building actually set for the attack, that what happened was, and you talk about this in the book too, that they had a tow missile in there, they had C-4, they had all kinds of weapons and ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades and things, the ATF particularly, I think, that they were not supposed to have inside that building, so they kept calling off the rescue efforts in order that they could get their contraband out of the building so that they wouldn't be embarrassed about that.
But so that aside, that issue aside, I wanted to let you address the possibility of multiple bombs inside the building and if you do believe that they were there, why and what's the significance, etc., like that, because this is in fact what got me interested in it in the first place, was the day of the attack, I was at a friend's house after school, again, I was in high school at the time, and his friend was there and this guy was a Marine Force recon from Vietnam and I knew him already, we'd met a few times, and he was saying, no, no, no, there had to have been a bomb here, here, and here, and he wasn't playing, he was just saying, I'm not asking, I'm telling you, I taught bomb-making school and I'm telling you, the bomb had to have been, at least some of them, had to have been inside, not out in the street.
Well, you know, let me just say there's a very simple question that I pose and I don't have an answer, nobody else has answered it, none of the federal studies have answered it, which tells me that they're hiding something, but if you draw a point where the truck was parked as a detonation, that's point A, and then you draw another point where there's point C, and that's where a column was destroyed, one of the big main support columns in the building, in the interior of the building.
Well, from point A to point C, you would think everything in between was destroyed, right?
I mean, if the blast is strong enough at point A and it goes and destroys this column at point C, there would be nothing between A and C.
Right.
But there's a column at point B.
Gotcha.
Now, I've had a little physics, I've had some engineering at the Naval Academy, and nobody has answered the question, how is it that the blast wave that is sufficiently strong to destroy the column at point C did not destroy the same column at point B?
All right, now let me play devil's advocate, because, and first of all, let me say, I've made that exact case on the show since I've had a show for 14 years now or something like that, okay?
But I've got to play devil's advocate a little bit.
I'm looking, actually, at the picture of the front of the building, and it's column three in the second row deep that's missing, but column four is still standing, and that's the one that's in between the crater in the street and column three.
Okay, that's what we're talking about here.
So what I wonder is, if the blast was powerful enough that it took out the kind of major cross thingamajig at the third floor, where there were like three major pillars, and then at the third floor there was a big cross thingamajig out of concrete, sorry for calling it a thingamajig, I'm not a construction guy, and then there were two smaller columns for every one bigger column down below the third floor level, right?
So now, if the blast was powerful enough that it took out some of those bigger columns at the bottom, and almost that whole first row of columns are breaking and falling due to the truck bomb, then isn't it possible that the floor or the connection somehow just pulled that column B3 down, that it was a matter of the structural failure as the building collapsed rather than there must have been a bomb on that column?
Well, I don't say there had to be a bomb on the column.
I just say the blast, if it's sufficient to have destroyed the vertical column, which I call point B, between the point of detonation, point A, and the standing column, point C, which is substantially further away.
And as you may know, the force of the explosion dissipates with the inverse of the cube of the distance.
So it's not just a, you know, if you go 10 feet, it's, you know, 10 times, I forget the math is, anyhow, it's a sphere that expands.
So the distance away, 10 feet, 20 feet, 50 feet, makes a substantial difference, and it's not a linear thing.
It has to do with the inverse cube, all right?
And so I don't know how that column C, let's call it, is standing, or is gone, and column B is still there because had the lateral reinforcing bars that hold up the floors at column C, collapsed just pancake style, column C, I think, would have collapsed too.
So we have column C still standing.
It's substantially further from the impact at column A, and column, I'm sorry, column C is gone, and column B is still standing.
So why is column B still standing?
I have to have a sketch in front of me.
I should have drawn one out here.
But I have seen no explanation, and I'm aware of the fact that when the blast takes place, it hits the floors from the bottom side that are above the blast.
It's like wind hitting a sail.
It pushes them up, and then as they come down, it's that up and down on the flooring that causes the rebars that are connected to the vertical support columns to break, and leads to the pancake kind of collapsing of the floors on top of each other, which really probably kill more people than anything else.
Sure, yeah.
But nobody's still explained to me why column B, which had the same floors connected to it, is still standing, yet column C, which is substantially further away, is gone.
It's just a question of physics.
I don't understand how it's possible.
Well, it's certainly an open question.
It's not been resolved.
I used to be a lot more sure about that.
Now, I don't know, I kind of wonder.
But anyway, there's some more evidence of multiple explosions other than just that.
A couple of very important things.
First of all, VZ Lawton, and you may know the other gentleman's name.
I actually have the clip.
In fact, you know what?
Humor me for just another minute here, Roger, because I want to play this clip now.
Now, I'll set it up by saying VZ Lawton told the story on this show a couple of times of how he was, when the building started shaking and something, a trophy, a plaque, I believe, fell off the wall, and he said hit him on the head and knocked him down.
I'm not sure if he said all the way out, but kind of certainly knocked him down.
And it just so happened he fell behind this desk.
And then all the glass blew in, and it was because he had fallen behind the desk, he was protected from all the flying glass.
And then he told the story, and the audio here is of his friend, whose name I don't know, telling virtually the same story.
And VZ explained, set it up for us a little bit, that this guy, his friend was from California, and so he was used to earthquakes.
And so whenever there's an earthquake, you hide under your desk so that way if anything falls on you, you're in a void space, right?
Hopefully something will be able to protect the size of your body curled up there.
So he went to hide under the desk, and he likewise was protected.
Of course, the point being that the building was shaking and shaking and shaking before the glass blew in, which sounds like, you know, of course, the truck going off outside.
Let me just play that clip real quick, and then I'll let you say whatever you've got to say about that.
All right?
So if you weren't under that desk, you wouldn't have made it?
Well, my floor was okay, and the ceiling had come down, but there was still concrete above.
So it was just a corner of the office that was left that we were in.
Everybody else that we worked with was gone.
Are you okay?
Just the corner of your office was okay, and the rest of the floor was completely flattened?
We could go over the edge and look, and you could see the sky as far down as you can look, and it was just a hole.
And which floor were you on?
Fifth.
On fifth?
Fifth floor.
Just the one corner of the fifth floor wasn't completely flattened?
No.
I don't know what the west end of the building looks like.
Everybody just crawled out of the desk?
It was like slow motion.
Before the glass started coming and everything, it just seemed to roll in on us.
I thought it was an earthquake when it started.
It was just kind of a shake, and then everything started going like this.
And I dove under the desk, and then all the glass came in, and the ceilings came down.
I probably got cut worse if I hadn't been under the desk.
I just got little scrapes and scratches.
I was really lucky.
Really lucky.
Okay, so now I guess that's not ironclad or anything, but that sounds to me like a pretty strong indication that the building had been shaking before that truck bomb went off outside.
But I'll turn it over to you, and I'll ask you to also include in your answer whatever you want to say about Ray Brown, who is a scientist with the—was it the University of Oklahoma or the U.S. Geological Survey?
I forget now.
I think he was the university professor, but I'd have to double-check.
Okay, so I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I'll just say, first off, I have seen other witness statements where people in the building talked about having some sort of warning, vibration, shaking, and they got under their desk.
So VZ is not alone.
This guy is not alone.
There are other people that had a similar history with that.
So there's clearly something that happened before that blast wave broke the glass.
Now, I have to believe that the blast from the—directly from the truck to that glass exterior would have been quicker than any kind of blast going through and coming up through the floor through those columns and so on.
But, you know, I'm not an expert.
That's just my take on it.
But let me just say, and then also about Brown and the others, I did not get involved in this until August of 96.
So I've never looked at that in detail.
I trusted John's work.
I read his pieces.
And I believe that the government's version, again, is based on selected misinformation and getting people to say what they wanted them to say.
I would go with the professor—the initial comments by the professor who had the seismograph machines and think that that's the most honest version that captured the data best of what actually happened.
Yeah, in fact, now let me talk about that for just a second here because I've seen— there's a video, which I don't remember the name of it anymore, but there's a movie that includes J.D. Cash and, I guess, Charles Key, the state representative, who was good on this for so long there.
And they're videotaping Ray Brown give his scientific explanation of the seismograph readings as he draws it on a white erase board there, a dry erase board.
And what he explains, pretty simply, is that there's a ground disturbance, basically, that is not correlated to the big boom of the truck, that the big boom of the truck has an air blast and a ground blast easily identified, but there's more ground blast than just the truck going on before the truck.
And pretty much simple as that.
And then, even better, they set up seismographs all over the place when they finally demolished the rest of the building, not with a truck bomb, but with demolition bombs spread throughout the building.
And those ground waves correspond pretty much exactly with what was going on before the truck bomb on the 19th.
So, again, I'm not the scientist myself, and I can't say that's as solid as the Big Bang Theory or whatever, but it sounds pretty good to me.
Well, just as a general comment, Scott, I have to tell you that I think an independent observer who's not an employee of the federal government, I'm going to be much more inclined to believe them just because I've seen the government put pressure on people, and people have mortgages, they have tuition to pay, they have children with orthodontic bills, all these pressures not to rock the boat, to keep their job, to get promoted, to get that pension.
So I'll go with the independent observer from civilian life, in this case a professor, way before I'll just accept what somebody inside has to say because of the pressure that is so often placed on government employees.
Well, one more thing about that, too, if it's okay, is that VZ Lawton, I asked him, and again, back then I was a lot more suspicious that if there were bombs inside, and that definitely meant the cops helped McVeigh do the whole thing kind of a conclusion.
But I asked VZ, well, and thinking I already knew the answer to the question, well, VZ, who could have possibly put bombs inside your federal building?
And his answer was, oh, anyone.
Yeah, there's no security whatsoever.
You could have just walked right in the middle of the night, put a bomb wherever you wanted, anybody could have, and it really doesn't prove anything, even if it is true that there are bombs in there.
So, you know, fair enough.
Well, there are credible reports, I mean, reports from credible people, that saw strange events and people a couple days, a day before the bombing, you know, in places they've not been seen before, doing things around the columns, some of the vertical columns that they hadn't seen before, you know.
So to me it's one of these issues that's unresolved, but I've concentrated on the things that are more easily proven.
But it's not resolved, I don't think.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with that word for word there.
Okay, listen, I've got a great two and a half hours here.
There are obviously still avenues that we could go down, but I want people to actually still want to listen to this thing too.
And so I think we better go ahead and leave it here with my thanks for your time on the show today, for this great work of journalism that you're participating in.
And if you could please just tell us a little bit more about this upcoming book and how long you think that might take to come out and we can read.
And this will be much more the story of Jesse Trinidou and Kenneth Trinidou's angle on the Oklahoma bombing.
Well, I think the good news is that more of Jesse's story and Kenny's story, the Trinidou story in connection to the Oklahoma City bombing, will not have to wait for my book.
I think that's going to come out before Jesse's still got actions in front of the Federal District Court in Salt Lake City.
He's ready to file another one on the use of sensitive informants that the FBI has, meaning people in the clergy, in the media, in other law enforcement agencies, and almost certainly even on the staffs of federal judges and local judges.
I mean, we really live in a country where, like East Germany had the Stasi, informants are a way of life for all law enforcement, but particularly for an agency as richly resourced as the FBI, where they basically have unlimited funds to recruit and pay these people.
It's a very dangerous thing, and I don't think there's any real oversight of it, as the Whitey Bulger episode, I think, proves in spades.
Well, hopefully that'll get a lot of attention and bring attention back to the Kenneth Trinidou story again.
Let's hope so, and it's been a pleasure to be with you, Scott, and I'll keep you posted, my friend, but Jesse and I are determined not to leave this story alone until we've gotten some satisfaction and we're not there yet.
All right, well, thank you so much for your time and for your great journalism, Roger, as always.
All right, take care.
Everybody, that is Roger Charles, formerly with ABC's 2020, an investigator for Stephen Jones and the McVeigh defense team, and best buddies of J.D. Cash and keeper of his journalistic legacy on the story of the Oklahoma City bombing.
The book is Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters.
Thanks very much for listening.
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