Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, and our guest today is Roger Charles, and he's got quite a resume here, former reporter, producer for 2020 ABC World News Tonight, Nightline career, Marine Corps officer, and boy, I can't go through this whole thing, but he's certainly an award-winning investigative journalist, and co-wrote many articles with my old friend J.D.
Cash, who died last spring, and worked with him quite extensively on the story of the Oklahoma City bombing, which has always been very important to me, and I welcome you to the show, Roger, thank you for coming.
God, it's an honor to be here.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, and of course I was shocked and saddened when I heard that J.D. had died last spring, and I guess my second concern was what happened to all his material, and whatever happened to that guy, what's his name, who was, which was you, who was J.D.'s partner, and who got all that paperwork, and does J.D.'s legacy of all of the work that he did on the Oklahoma City bombing with and without you survive?
Well, first of all, yes, it was quite a shock.
I had no idea J.D. was in that condition.
I actually flew out to Tulsa to visit with him for three days in early April, after he had stabilized and was doing good, really thought he was out of the woods, and we had some time, we were going to write a book together, and he took a downward turn after he left the hospital.
He was staying at his mother's in Tulsa, and she called me, I think, on a Sunday early morning and said he had died the preceding night in Tulsa, had to go back into the hospital, and did not make it this time, so it was a shock.
I have been able to get hold of a good bit of material, I won't get into too many specifics right now, but J.D.'s legacy is alive and well, and I hope in this near term to be able to announce a formal project by myself and a British writer to do a book on the Oklahoma City bombing, and this is the first time it's been mentioned publicly.
Do you mind if I ask the British writer, would that happen to be Ambrose Evans-Pritchard?
No, Ambrose is over in England doing other things.
I would love to work with him in any way.
I have the greatest respect for Ambrose.
This is a fellow out in California.
He used to be with the Bureau of a London newspaper in Los Angeles.
He's written several pieces on Oklahoma City bombing, was very much in contact with J.D.
I had a little bit of contact with him, a guy named Andrew Gumbel, but he was visiting this summer and I had a bunch of things that I had just received and we got to talking.
I liked him, I respected his work, and one thing led to another and we kind of agreed to work together to get this book going, so that's kind of where that stands.
Well, that's great news.
I can't wait to see the finished results of that.
I'd like to say on a personal note how fond I was of J.D.
Cash.
I interview a lot of people on this show, but he and I really hit it off and I talked to him on the phone many, many times on and off the air, and unfortunately I never got to meet him in person, but he really was a very decent and kind man.
As much as we talked, particularly about the Oklahoma City bombing, I always had so much respect for his judgment in terms of what seemed to be important information and what was okay to go ahead and discard as irrelevant or unimportant or a red herring and that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, when you have a massive government cover-up of a massive crime like the Oklahoma City bombing, mostly the only people who are interested are people who are kind of wingnuts anyway, so you end up with all kinds of who-knows-what sort of information, and it really does take somebody like J.D.
Cash to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I'm really going to miss him.
I have missed him already.
I told my wife several times over the last year and a half, I just almost automatically reach for the phone when I get up in the morning to have my first cup of coffee.
I want to catch up with J.D.
We take a lot of things for granted, and the future is not guaranteed to any of us, and J.D.'s passing was certainly a reminder.
It shouldn't have needed one, but it was a brutal reminder that none of us are guaranteed tomorrow.
That's absolutely right.
I guess that's something 169 people found out the extra hard way there in Oklahoma City back in 1995.
I talked with Jesse Trenadue earlier this week, and he has a very important story to tell, obviously, but only one piece of this story.
I think if we can get into the substance of this case, I guess I'd like to start it by telling you that I believe the last time I spoke to J.D. was the Sunday night that the BBC documentary about Oklahoma City played earlier this year.
I didn't get a copy to watch for a few days, and then it wasn't long after that, and he was gone.
That was the end of that, and I never got a chance to follow up, but I guess where I would like to start this conversation with you is to tell you that, in all honesty, that BBC documentary cast more doubt on some things that I thought that I knew were certainly true than I had thought before.
Particularly, the one that sticks out in my mind is the part of the BBC documentary where they interview, I think it's John Millar, the son of Robert Millar, who was the head of the Elohim City neo-Nazi compound out there in eastern Oklahoma.
The son explains to the reporter, look, conspiracy theories are fun, and I've taken part in this kind of thing myself a lot, and I like conspiracy theories and whatever, but I've got to tell you, when it's about you, it's kind of different.
I know it seems like there's a lot here, and yeah, some bank robber guys stayed here one time, and yeah, Andre Strassmeier stayed here one time, but I've got to tell you, there's just no there there.
I'm sorry.
It just isn't right.
And I thought, you know, this guy, obviously, who knows exactly what was on his mind, but that answer from him seemed pretty damn honest to me, and I had to, I think, face up to myself how little I really knew for sure about the connection between the Elohim City neo-Nazis and Timothy McVeigh and this bombing.
So I wonder if I could just start with, after having said all that, just tell you what you think of that.
Well, first of all, there's every chance, I mean, I don't have any proof, but just looking at the record, the pattern, the number of people at Elohim City that were on the government payroll as informants, or informants maybe not getting paid, but a number of them were getting paid, as Jesse brought out.
The Southern Poverty Law Center stated in FBI documents, again, not John Cash documents, not Roger Charles documents, not Jesse Trandu documents, and not your documents, Scott, but in their own documents, the FBI refers to informants that were involved from the Southern Poverty Law Center, including at least one at Elohim City.
And it says, Roger, it says in that document that were involved in the plot.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean...
Williams Day says that.
John and his publisher, Bruce Willingham, kind of ambushed Morris Dease down in Durant, Oklahoma, I believe it was, and he was visiting a college down there and giving a paid presentation on how smart he is and what great work his outfit does.
And so John and Bruce, and they recorded this on an audio cassette, and I believe there was a TV station there filming the presentation of this great man.
So it's recorded in a couple different ways, and Dease refused to answer the question with a simple yes or no.
They got cute, said, well, if I told you, I'd have to kill you, that kind of stuff, when John asked about, did you have informants at Elohim City?
And of course, Dease has written in a book and bragged about his extensive connections to the FBI and to the CIA in a cooperative basis and joint projects where he works with them to rid the earth of evildoers, so to speak, in his view.
So this guy is tightly connected.
Earlier, he's talked about how he warned Janet Reno in advance of the Oklahoma City bombing sometime in the fall of 94, I believe it is, about levels of violence that were being discussed that were beyond anything his snitches had detected before.
So that's just one angle of it, but let me just kind of cut to the chase on this thing.
Andreas Karl Strassmayer, I believe, is the key guy in this whole thing.
You referred to Ambrose Evans Pritchett earlier.
Right.
He wrote the book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, the whole first section of which is devoted to this story.
The first 108 pages, I believe.
The book was supposed to be about Bill Clinton, but because of the explosive information that Ambrose was able to gather, the publisher decided to make the first 108 pages about the Oklahoma City bombing, and Ambrose's just great, great investigative work on that.
You know, Ambrose did something unusual in journalism, Scott.
Ambrose actually got in a car and drove around the dirt roads of Oklahoma, of Missouri, of Texas, and interviewed some of these people.
He didn't sit at the press room in the Department of Justice building in Washington or at the FBI press room in Washington and just kind of regurgitate what spinmeisters were giving him.
He got out there and did some original investigative work, and I think the book is going to be a classic in the future years because of his interviews with Strassmayer.
Well, and you know how that book begins, and if this isn't something that will make you want to turn these pages to the end, the book begins with Bill Clinton bragging to the White House press corps aboard Air Force One, multiple sources of mainstream reporters, Times and Post, and people like that, the Oklahoma City bombing saved my presidency, he said.
The people all rallied together around the government.
Me.
Yeah, I will take credit, actually, for calling that to Ambrose's attention.
Well, good for you.
I saw it in the Washington Post.
That may be the most despicable thing Bill Clinton ever said, and he said a lot of horrible things.
He was flying back from Little Rock after the 96th election.
The day after the election, he was flying back to Washington to celebrate four more years, to do good things for the country, and he was feeling good, as he should.
I mean, here was a guy that in 1993 was basically looked upon as a failed president already, and there was no chance that he would ever recover.
If you remember, that first year was just a disaster.
So anyhow, he's on the airplane coming back the morning after the 96th election, and he walks back to the press section of Air Force One, and he just says what you've just cited, and he's feeling so good, and he's just, oh, man, the Oklahoma City bombing saved my presidency.
Yeah, it did, and they knew how to spin it.
Let me just ask one simple question, not that you haven't thought of it before, or maybe even John Cash has raised it on your show.
Why has there not, why was there not ever to this point a single congressional hearing on the largest act of domestic terrorism in our nation's history?
Well, that's the question that I bring up every single time.
I mean, that's been the point from the very beginning, that Arlen Specter and Dan Burton, who were supposedly the anti-Clinton when it came to oversight, and again, the Republicans had had majority control of Congress from when they came in at the beginning of 1995, after the election of 94, when they came in in 1995, all the way through the beginning of 2007, when they relinquished power to, except for a short time in the Senate, when they relinquished power to the Democrats.
There were a couple of years where the Senate was evenly divided and all that.
But anyway, here the Republicans have had carte blanche to practice any oversight that they wish, and as you correctly say, not one single subcommittee of any description ever has held hearing number one on the Oklahoma City bombing.
If they did, they would bring in Jim Woolsey to push the lie that Ramzi Youssef did it and that he was really Iraqi and a bunch of garbage like that.
You know, it's interesting to look at this as somebody who's been inside the beltway for too long, but that's an accident that I can't correct at this point.
First got out to Oklahoma.
I did not work on the Oklahoma City bombing story, Scott, for the first about 16 months.
My first trip out there was with the 2020 news magazine, ABC's news magazine, and a producer named Don Thrasher in the first of August, first week in August of 96.
Now, John Cash had been working on this since day one, so he had a 16-month head start on me, but I talked to him on the phone and gave me some contacts and whatever, and Thrasher had been out there and had his own contacts.
So I got out there, and after just a few days on the way back to D.C., I got to thinking, one of the real anomalies that still puzzled me to somewhat some extent, I think I have an answer now, but it really puzzled me then, why with a Republican governor, Frank Keating, a Republican senator, James Emhoff, another Republican U.S. senator, Don Nichols, and I believe the entire congressional delegation in the House of Representatives was Republican, five or six of them.
There may have been one Democrat.
I'm not certain about that.
It's been a while since I looked at it.
But anyhow, the evidence is clear, an overwhelmingly Republican political structure in Oklahoma.
Why did they roll over and allow Janet Reno and Bill Clinton and Louis Freeh to peddle this hogwash version of the Oklahoma City bombing?
Why was the Republican state political structure, oh, and by the way, I believe there was a Republican attorney general named Drew Edmund, why was the entire Republican political structure in Oklahoma failing to raise these obvious questions?
And in fact, when people like Glenn Wilburn and his, what at the time, Kathy Wilburn, John Cash and others would visit and ask questions, they would get treated with real contempt and disrespect, most unusual.
Yeah, there was one state assemblyman named Charles Key.
Charles Key, I know Charles well.
I worked for him actually for a while.
Oh, there you go.
After the Carroll Howell trial in the summer of 97.
Well, and they completely destroyed his political career, at least for a time, because he was the only elected politician in all of Oklahoma to say, well, wait a minute here.
I've got the committee report that his team produced and I worked with right here on my desk.
Oh, very interesting.
Yeah, I actually have a copy myself.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm not sure.
There's so much to discuss.
I guess I diverted you off of Strassmire and Ambrose Evans Pritchard there.
Well, you just cannot look at Strassmire's role.
The fact that, you know, and these are government documents that we got from the Carroll Howell trial in Tulsa Federal District Court in late July of 97.
And Carroll Howell was the ATF informant inside the FBI's ring of informant neo-Nazi guys.
Elohim City, friendly with Strassmire, knew him, knew Dennis Mahon, knew Reverend Millar, knew Brescia to a degree.
Michael Brescia, one of the Midwest bank robbers that lived at Elohim City.
But anyhow, when you look at some of these documents, which show that the ATF intended to raid Elohim City in mid-February of 1995, that would be two months before the bombing.
They had plans.
There are documents referring to the plans.
There are documents referring to the request for help from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as it was then called.
There are documents saying we're waiting on a finding by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C. when they do a check to ensure that this guy, Strassmire, is not a legal immigrant.
Well, they got that document in mid-February.
But at that point, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol pilot who had flown an ATF agent, Carol Howes Handler, and some photographers over Elohim City as a reconnaissance for the planned upcoming raid to arrest Strassmire, this pilot happened to mention, oh, by the way, you know there's an ongoing FBI investigation in Elohim City, don't you?
Well, the ATF did not.
The plane lands, and within a matter of a few hours, that same day, there's an emergency, urgent meeting between the U.S. attorney in Tulsa named Steve Lewis and the local head of the ATF office and the local head of the FBI office.
The bottom line to this is it's kicked upstairs to the regional level and to Washington.
Carol Howe is summarily fired as a confidential informant, paid confidential informant for the ATF, and there's a bombing in Oklahoma City.
Well, so it's pretty obvious, I guess, why no Republican dared talk about this.
You're talking about, you know, the whole thing happened not just on the FBI's watch, which somehow they escaped blame even for that, but, well, basically it was a bunch of government informants or people who'd been flipped, turned state's witness or other kinds of things.
If not, I don't know, I don't mean to be too close-minded about this, if not actual cops who were the ones who did this.
Was it actual cops?
Because, you know, when we're talking about Andre Strassmire, the speculation has always been that he was basically on loan to our government from the German government, sent to infiltrate the Nazis, that he wasn't really a Nazi.
You know, up until about two years ago, I was about 97% convinced that that was the case, just based on inferences and the patterns and documents and things, but there was no real piece of evidence that would allow me to say 100%.
Well, two years ago, I got that last 3% of doubt erased by a meeting with a now-retired, very senior U.S. government intelligence official, who confirmed to me that Andre Strassmire was indeed a sent operative of the German government over here, working against the American neo-Nazi movement and reporting his information to the FBI.
All right, well, as long as I'm prepared to drink Kool-Aid here, let's talk about, well, first of all, the possibility, maybe likelihood, that his job actually was to foment a bombing.
As crazy as that might sound, maybe this wasn't a failure.
I'd like you to address that, and then along with that is the accusation, which I've always put on the low end of probability, as best I can tell, but I'm not really sure, that Timothy McVeigh did not wash out of the Special Forces, that he stayed in the Army long after the official story says he was gone, and that Timothy McVeigh himself was some sort of undercover agent for the DOD or for somebody else.
Well, I know Jesse's talked about some statements made by Terry Nichols, which would support that kind of a finding.
I'm a skeptic by nature, and I try to be a skeptic by training.
I let the evidence kind of inform me and help me to draw conclusions.
There is increasing evidence that what I would have summarily dismissed a few years ago may not be worth dismissing, the issue of what is Tim McVeigh's actual role.
Let me just give you one piece of information, again, from government records.
This is not Roger Charles or John Cash or Scott Horton making this up.
These are government documents.
Tim McVeigh did not wash out of the Special Forces training.
I've read the report of the FBI agent who interviewed the Army major, the Green Beret major, at Fort Bragg, who was in charge of the screening for the applicants for Special Forces training that included Tim McVeigh.
Really?
Really.
Tim McVeigh had bad feet because he had been riding around in an armored vehicle so much.
He didn't have tough, leathery feet, which most infantrymen that don't ride in armored vehicles get.
So when he had to do some forced march exercises as part of the screening, he developed some severe blisters.
Tim was not unhappy.
He had been offered, I think, the chance to get in better physical condition, toughen his feet up, but for whatever reason decided he wanted to go through this earlier screening program.
He was offered explicitly by this major representing the United States Army Special Forces the opportunity to come back when you think your feet are tough enough.
So it wasn't a question that Tim didn't have the upper body strength.
He didn't have this or that.
His feet were just not conditioned properly for the kind of work that would be required, and it was because Tim had not been a straight infantry kid out walking in the boonies all the time.
He had been riding in an armored vehicle.
And Tim was not unhappy.
He understood this, and he left without any anger.
You know, the government's version that he was bitter, angry, because he had been kicked out of the screening program, not so.
But you don't have any paperwork that says that he came back and said, my feet are fine now.
Well, no, he did not come back.
He decided he just wanted to get out of the Army rather than.
.
.
That's one version.
Now the other version could be that he was recruited there, and this was a pretext for him to drop out of the program and go into some black operation.
What did you think of that video that came out that purported to show McVeigh at an Army base that the footage wasn't taken until 1994 or something like that?
And I heard Art Jones refer to that as, in his view, he says it's clearly Tim McVeigh.
I've looked at the picture.
I can't be quite as certain.
I say it could be Tim McVeigh.
I don't say that it is Tim McVeigh.
Yeah, that's what it looked like to me, too.
And, of course, there's the fact that apparently he wrote a letter to his sister, McVeigh did, saying that this is what had happened, he'd been recruited into some black ops thing, and nobody knows really if that's true.
And then this guy Paul Hammer on death row apparently claims that that was the case.
I just want to bring up David Paul Hammer's book, which I helped edit before he put it out for publication.
If you've got a copy, good on you, Scott, because he has some very interesting things in there to say about conversations that he and Tim McVeigh had while they were both on death row at Terre Haute Prison in Indiana prior to Tim's execution.
Well, how believable do you think that guy is?
Because there were some things in there that made me suspect, I guess, that this guy has just been on the receiving end of every conspiracy theory publication in the world.
He's heard every string of possibility around this case, and he's weaving them all together, as far as I know.
I do not believe that to be the case.
I believe that David Paul Hammer has given as honest a portrayal of what Tim McVeigh told him as he could do.
I don't think that David Paul Hammer initiated, created, or fabricated any information to add into his book.
I think it is an accurate portrayal of what Tim McVeigh told him.
Now, Tim McVeigh is certainly capable of feeding lies to David Paul Hammer.
So I'm not saying that the information, because Hammer accurately portrayed it, I'm not saying that's evidence that it's true.
I'm just saying I believe it's what McVeigh told him.
Now, here's another little wrinkle.
I have seen a document, again a government document, Bureau of Prison document, which referred to the fact that the Bureau of Prison folks had a directional microphone and were recording the conversations of Hammer and McVeigh as they walked around the exercise yard for an hour every day or every other day, whatever it was.
Well, there's some MP3 files I'd like to get my ears on.
Yeah, and of course they deny those exist, and I've been unable to find the paper again in my files.
But I'm looking, and hopefully I will find it.
All right.
Now, do you have any other indications that McVeigh may have actually still been working for the government?
Or do you think it's mostly true that, well, what do you think his role in this is?
Because if all these people are involved and he took the rap for them and took the gas chamber, the lethal injection for them, I guess I always wonder, you know, I used to think that he was just the idiot, that somebody told him, you're the truck driver, and he said fine and obeyed his orders or whatever.
But I don't know even how central to the plot this guy really was or whether he was the ringleader or who even made the bomb or any of these things at this point.
Let me just address again some government documents to give a little insight to that last question.
What was McVeigh's role?
What kind of person was he in terms of the conspiracy?
Some of the documents where they interviewed soldiers that had served with McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the Army together say that Terry Nichols was the alpha male in that pair, that Tim McVeigh was kind of a little puppy dog following around the bigger dog when they were in the Army together.
The evidence that I've seen is that Tim McVeigh was assigned a task in the conspiracy that he willingly, even eagerly, accepted the role as a soldier going on a basically suicide mission behind enemy lines and that I believe Tim, in his own mind, expected that 50 years later, 100 years later, that there would be a statute for him on the Mall in Washington as a great patriot who would expose the viciousness and the corruption in our federal government.
What did he make of the license plate?
Is that why he drove away in a getaway car in the license plate?
Because he wanted to get pulled over?
Well, that whole issue of Tim's arrest is one of the more bizarre in this whole set of bizarre circumstances.
Why does he drive a car that's a junk heap if he wants to get away?
Why does he put some money into getting a pretty reliable car?
Why does he take the license plate off?
According to Terry Nichols, McVeigh left the license plate in a storage shed up in Harrington, Kansas.
Nichols found it on Friday morning, I believe it was, the day that McVeigh is arrested, right before he's getting out of prison, arrested for the bombing.
That's Friday the 21st, and Nichols is out cleaning out a storage shed that he and McVeigh had had together.
This is following McVeigh's instructions to Terry.
So Terry's cleaning it out, and in it he finds the license plate.
And he says he found a grenade, and he threw both into the river.
So why would you not throw your license plate into the river if you were going to be using that vehicle as a getaway car?
I'm not sure.
I mean, this is one of the questions.
Would you drive all the way from Harrington, Kansas to Oklahoma City with a car without a license plate, or did Tim have some other phony license plate he was using?
I don't know.
When he got pulled over, he had a weapon on him, and he did not shoot the cop.
He surrendered to the cop that pulled him over.
If you've just killed 168 people, Scott, why hesitate at killing a cop?
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, and it could be that he wanted to be arrested and go on trial and all those things and be a so-called hero and all that.
If I had to guess, based on all the evidence that I've seen, and it is maybe an informed guess, and I'll let people debate how informed it is, but I would speculate that Tim McVeigh was a designated patsy in this thing, that, again, he accepted it eagerly, and that he expected to be pulled over.
Well, what about my crazy hypothetical about Andre Strassmeier's mission to actually be to foment something like this?
Well, I think Strassmeier didn't have to do much.
Between the statements that Carol Howell reported in the fall of 1994 that Strassmeier was making and the statements that Dennis Mahon was making and other people at Elohim City was making, I mean, you had a combustible mixture out there.
Did Strassmeier provide the impetus to say, let's bomb that building?
Well, you know, if you go back and look at the Covenant Sword and Arm group, in 1983 they had planned to attack with a missile that same Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, so Strassmeier, in terms of the target, was not originating any new target.
That was a target that had been on the agenda of this neo-Nazi group for some years.
Now, did he provide, did he, Strassmeier, provide the impetus, the real momentum, to take this thing from talking about it to, let's set an active conspiracy and start procuring the bomb materials and everything to make it actually happen?
You know, Terry Nichols, again, refers to a spontaneous declaration by McVeigh in January of 1996.
Nichols is just back from the Philippines, where he said he had gone in November of...
Ninety-four, you mean?
I'm sorry, no, this is, Terry Nichols had left November of 94, so this would have been January of 95.
Okay.
Terry, thank you, Scott.
Terry is back in Las Vegas, and nobody in the country here, according to Terry, knows he's there.
He shows up unannounced at his ex-wife's place there in Las Vegas.
He never told her he was coming.
He didn't tell anyone he was coming back.
But McVeigh is waiting on him, basically, in Las Vegas.
And so they have this meeting.
McVeigh's pushing Nichols to rejoin the conspiracy, according to Nichols.
Nichols says he had left in November of 94 for the Philippines to get away from McVeigh.
Came back, confronted by McVeigh.
And McVeigh, in his spontaneous declaration, says something to the effect, G.D.
Potts, he's changed the target and the date, cursing Larry Potts, who's Louie Freeze No.
2.
Now, that's really, really explosive, no pun intended, information.
And that's what Terry Nichols says Timothy McVeigh said.
Yes.
Now, is it true?
I don't know.
One, I don't know whether McVeigh said it.
And if McVeigh said it, I don't know if it's true.
But Terry Nichols says, you know, that this is what he heard, McVeigh.
And he said this in a sworn affidavit, of course.
He's life sentence for his crimes to date.
So there's no deterrent in him swearing a lie.
They're not going to, at this point, prosecute him for perjury.
So how much credibility can you give Terry Nichols' claim that this is a statement that Tim McVeigh said?
Well, I don't know.
He's admitted.
It's just there.
I'm not doing anything with it.
I'm just puzzled by it.
Yeah.
It's an interesting thing for Nichols to say.
Did he fabricate it?
Did he actually hear it?
Who knows?
Well, I'd like to see him swear in open court, you know, something crazy like that, a real investigation instead of just rubber stamps.
But, you know, we're almost up against the end of the show here.
How much time do you have?
Do you have to go?
I do need to get some other work done.
But I can go with you up to the end of this hour, and I'll be glad to schedule a follow-up if you want sometime later.
Yeah, I sure would like to do that because, you know, I want to ask about Richard Guthrie and whether he was – I think J.D.
Cash told me that he himself was an informant, not J.D.
Cash, but Richard Guthrie, and that he told me to read this book, Committee of the States, about the neo-Nazi movement and how what I was looking for was in there about Richard Guthrie being a long-term government asset and whatever.
And I got the book, but I never did read it.
Do you know what it was I was supposed to find in there?
I've got the book.
I've read it based on J.D.'s recommendation back in 1997, ordered it, and actually had some conversations with the author that continued up to about three years ago, and then she's kind of dropped off the radar.
But I don't know specifically – I don't recall specifically what it was about Guthrie in the book, but it is a basic reference if you want to understand the neo-Nazi movement in the United States as it existed in 1994-95, how it developed, how it got there, who the key players were.
It is a very essential book.
Well, I'm going to have to go ahead and put that on the read-it-soon list as opposed to the read-it-someday list.
Now, here's one thing, just to kind of try to hook people, because, you know, here we are, you and I, delving into a bunch of details and people that we're already familiar with this story and not really outlining it in kind of a basic way.
And I guess I'd like to give you an opportunity to direct people toward what you think would be the best reading materials for them.
But this is an anecdote.
Beyond Congress refused to hold hearings, and that proves how true it all is, which I think is the most important thing, that somebody went to Arlen Specter and said, no way, and he said, okay, whatever you guys say.
But here's the other one.
I was watching Court TV one day, and it was the trial of two Midwestern Nazi bank robbers named Shane and Chevy Kehoe.
And I'm sure you and everyone in the audience has seen the real stories of the highway patrol footage of the gray and blue Suburban pulled over on the side of the road, and the two Nazi brothers get in the shootout with the cop, 20 shots or five or something, and nobody gets hit, and they both end up getting arrested.
Well, one of them was on trial and on Court TV.
They reported just, you know, kind of out of the blue that, wow.
So this guy testified at the trial, I forget if it was Shane or Chevy Kehoe, that he had come in to a prosecution witness.
He had come into the guy's motel that morning real early, like 6 o'clock in the morning, and said, turn it to CNN, something really big is going to happen on April the 19th, 1995.
It was one of the Kehoe brothers, I forget which, and that was sworn testimony at his trial, apropos of nothing, and, of course, nobody at Court TV, or, obviously, anybody at the Justice Department, or anybody wanted to follow up on that explosive information.
They wanted to say that anybody who was a right-winger and owned a gun was a neo-Nazi, but they didn't want to talk about actual neo-Nazis, because it turned out that they were all cops or informants or friends of informants.
Well, you know, that's a very interesting little data point there.
That was up in Spokane, I believe, Washington, but I might be wrong, but John and I have talked several times about that event where one of the Kehoe brothers, and I forget which one it is, comes in and tells the guy in the lobby at the motel where the registration desk is, why don't you turn CNN on?
I'd like to see this report that's going to be on here in a little bit about a big bombing, or however he phrased it.
Well, and then was really happy when it happened and said, aha, and had a big grin, and it was a success from his point of view, obviously.
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to this.
There are just so many little pieces of information you've got to pull them together, and of course nobody was better at that than John Cash, and we just miss him terribly.
Yeah, well, that's true.
I really appreciate your time, Roger, and I hope that we can make a regular thing out of this.
It's been too long.
I've neglected this story, and I need to get back, because I want to know the truth.
I've got 500,000 questions.
I don't know how many of them you have answers to, but this isn't over by a long sight.
It's not over by a long shot, and with Jesse trying to do his great work, trying to get some justice and truth out about his brother's death and being tortured while in the custody of the U.S. government, I think we've come a long way, and Jesse is going to be key to us making continued progress.
All right.
Hey, listen, yeah, that's certainly true, and we'll be doing our best to keep in touch with Jesse as well.
All right, thank you very much for your time, everybody.
This is Roger Charles.
The website is jamesmadisonproject.org.
I really appreciate it.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Antiwar Radio for this week.
Right?
Today's Friday, right?
All right.
Monday, 11 to 1, Texas time, back here on Chaos Radio.
