07/23/09 – Roger Charles – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Roger Charles.
Geez, I wish I had pulled up a bio to read to you.
Welcome back to the show, Roger.
God, it's good to be with you again.
Now, I was going to say you're the author of something, but I forget, you're writing a book about the Oklahoma bombing, right?
Is that thing ready yet?
Well, no, but we're actually having some conversations next week and later this week with some publishers, so we're moving forward.
Well, that's great to know.
Is it fair to say that you basically are the heir to all of J.D.
Cash's work?
I know that you and him were partners for a long time and you've rescued all his files and you've got the whole story that nobody else has been able to compile right there at your offices.
Am I right about that?
I'd say that's a fair description.
Well, good deal, because I consider J.D.
Cash a friend.
We talked many times on and off the air and I always thought that he was willing, of course, to follow the story to conclusions that weren't necessarily popular or wanted to be heard by the mass of the media, but also didn't go off the deep end and was willing to second guess and question his own conclusions and go back and do real journalism on this story, which basically leaves him standing almost alone in this society full of thousands and thousands of journalists who just couldn't take the time to bother one bit.
I'm glad to know that you have his legacy and you're taking good care of it for me.
Well, J.D., I think I would appreciate your evaluation of him, Scott.
That's the way I saw him.
He was always letting the evidence lead him.
He did not try to lead the evidence and he gathered a lot of information.
He had incredible persistence and was just smarter than any three guys that you'd run into on the street just about.
He really was a groundbreaker in this story and kept it alive, I think, more than anyone else for a number of years.
Yeah, yeah, he certainly did and certainly led the way.
So let me try to give some background for the audience here.
I've been, I guess, what you could call an Oklahoma City bombing truther from the very beginning because the day it happened, I went over to a friend's house after school and a mutual friend was there, or I'm sorry, his friend was over there too, and he was a former Marine Corps Special Forces, force recon in Vietnam, taught bomb-making school, was a serious Marine Corps killer for this government.
And he was pointing at the TV and saying, oh man, you could tell that there was a charge here attached to this column and whatever.
This is my first introduction to even pictures of the building.
And then my friend, whose house I'm at, says, yeah, well, all morning long they've been saying it was a car bomb outside and only, or all morning long they've been saying it was a giant explosion inside and then now they've just switched to now it was a car bomb outside, they're saying, but I've been watching it all day and the story's been changing.
So from the very beginning, I've been certainly willing to listen to the various dissenting views about this thing.
Of course, there's a whole train of conspiracy theory that says that Al-Qaeda did this or that Ramzi Youssef was the one who taught Terry Nichols how to make a bomb and that, of course, the American Enterprise Institute hack, Laurie Milroy, likes to push the story that Ramzi Youssef was really an agent of Saddam Hussein and all of this nonsense.
So that to me is always, well, not always, but for a great many years now, I've seen all that as really red herring, but I still have put stock in J.D.
Cash's narrative, which I'm not even sure if I can really summarize correctly or concisely anymore, Roger, but basically that the neo-Nazis did it.
And they were, many of them were federal informants.
They were centered around a place called Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma and that one of them was a man named Andre Strossmeier who was actually some form of undercover agent, he's a German national, and that these men were the John Doe 2 and 3 and 4 that got away.
And while the rest of the country was eating up O.J.
Simpson for the rest of that year, they were able to basically get away scot-free because the government coulda, woulda, shoulda, known, coulda stopped it, and of course some say even deliberately made the bombing happen in order to discredit the right-wing militia patriot movement as it was coming up in those days and that kind of thing.
So is that base narrative what you think is right?
And can you please flesh out some of this story for us and tell us what really are the connections between Timothy McVeigh and Elohim City?
And what government documents do you have that verify this narrative, if any?
Okay, Scott, let me just take it from the top there.
First, the one area of disagreement that John and I had, and we just kind of agreed to disagree over it, and it was a matter, really, of spending time and resources.
John felt that he had looked enough at the question of the international Islamic connections and he was satisfied that it did not exist at all, period, in the story.
I said that I had not looked at it in enough detail to make that determination, but that I was not going to bother to look into it, because the metaphor I used, Scott, was you're out prospecting for gold and you hit the Mother Lode, which is Elohim City and the neo-Nazi connection, I think, which was found by John, of course.
So at some point where you're still working the Mother Lode, just pack up your donkey, put all your mining gear on a couple of pack mules, and head off to look somewhere else.
No, you continue to mine the Mother Lode, and that's what John and I agreed to do.
So while he thought that he had looked at the issue of foreign Islamic connections sufficiently to make a flat determination, there was nothing there.
I had not done that, and I had a couple unanswered questions, but I agreed with John that there was more than enough to keep us busy trying to get all the nuggets, if you will, out of the Elohim City and neo-Nazi connection.
And by the way, we're still digging, and we're still finding nuggets.
Well, let's do a...
I want to talk at length about Elohim City, but on the foreign connection, it can at least be said, my understanding of the timeline, although I don't have it in front of me now or anything, but the way I remember it, it seemed pretty clear that Nichols had gone to the Philippines just to be out of town at the right times to try to create himself a little bit of alibi room here for being out of town.
But the idea that he had really gone and studied bombs with Ramzi Youssef, I'm not sure if there was really ever anything to back that up.
I mean, you don't have to go to the Philippines to get explosive expertise in how to build an ammonium nitrate fuel oil bomb.
Well, and I'm not even certain I believe that Nichols helped build that bomb at this case, at this point, but that's another part of the story, but one thing that can clearly be said about that is that the Laurie Milroy American Enterprise Institute story that Ramzi Youssef is not the real Ramzi Youssef, but an Iraqi agent pretending to be Ramzi Youssef completely fell apart when, right after September 11th, James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA and one of these neocon Kool-Aid drinkers, they call him World War 4 Woolsey, went to Britain to attempt to prove that that was true and failed to do so with his fingerprint match and what have you.
Ramzi Youssef is Ramzi Youssef, he's not an Iraqi agent, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with any of this.
That was a complete red herring.
That part certainly can be dismissed in its entirety, but I think Peter Lance, who I also think is a credible journalist on some of this, says that I think, I believe, if I can characterize him correctly, I believe he says that he's open to the possibility that Nichols did have contacts with Youssef in the Philippines, but certainly he wasn't buying the Iraq angle.
Well, you know, I did follow up on that enough, just through a kind of a lucky coincidence, a very senior national security official in the Philippines was someone I had gone to school at the Naval Academy with for one year from 1966 to 1967.
I was a senior and he was a freshman.
He was an exchange student from the Philippines and he ended up graduating on time, went back to the Philippine Navy, got out, went into politics, became a congressman, and for a while was the national security advisor to one of the presidents of the Philippines.
So I had occasion to ask him about this connection between Terry Nichols and Ramsey Youssef, and he told me flat out, he said, look, if there's anything to it, it's in your government's files, it's not in ours.
We have nothing on that in our files.
And having a lot of respect for the security services in the Philippines, that tells me if they don't have it in their files, we will not have it in ours.
Yeah, and you know, there was the guy who supposedly identified Nichols and said he was the farmer or whatever, but then he did a police sketch that looked nothing like Terry Nichols and that whole thing fell apart, I think.
That guy, Edwin Angelis or something like that.
We talked about Angelis, and Angelis was actually a paid informant for the Philippine intelligence services, and the Philippine government actually had penetrated the Abu Sayyaf so extensively at that point that they considered they had him completely under control, and there was no reason to disrupt their control by arresting any more of them.
They knew what was going on, and this is a classic example of how when you're successful in counterintelligence, counterespionage, you don't go in and arrest everybody, you just monitor them and see what they're up to, and then if it looks like they're getting ready to conduct some sort of activity that you don't want, then you can move against them.
But as long as you've got it under control, just leave them alone.
Well now, is that what the FBI was doing at Elohim City, infiltrating and attempting to control these Aryan Republican Army Nazis?
Well, they clearly had a number of operations throughout the country.
They had several intelligence operatives at Elohim City.
In fact, just this week, we've obtained a little more information, which I think makes a compelling case that yet one more of these folks that we know, with ties to McVeigh and ties to this whole circle of neo-Nazis, was in fact a government operative.
So I don't know if you remember the old 1950s TV series called I Led Three Lives, about the FBI agent that was undercover as a communist cell member, and the standard joke was that if you had a cell of four people meeting as communists in the 1950s, two of them at least were FBI agents, or paid FBI operatives.
And we're finding the same thing at Elohim City.
Well, and they did say, I think the first time I ever heard that turn of phrase was in reference to the Klan, that if there's a Klan meeting of four guys, three of them are FBI.
But so, well, tell me, this new information you got this week confirming these guys, I think I'm still pretty familiar with the names of the more famous Nazis connected to that place.
Who was it that you confirmed this week actually was an informant?
Well, it's someone we've had pretty strong suspicions, but I think a fellow named David Holloway is now, I don't think there's much doubt.
Not that there was before, but so you have, and he worked for a fellow named Kirk Lyons, an attorney in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and Holloway was a former special forces and had worked for the CIA.
So immediately, you know, you start checking off the blocks on your little list, likelihood of being a government operative, and, you know, our government needs people willing to take these risks.
That's not an issue.
We owe them our respect and gratitude.
But on the other hand, when something happens and it doesn't go right, instead of burying it under a avalanche of lies, which is what the government always tries to do, I think we the people are better served if there's an honest, full investigation and the mistakes that led to the disaster, whatever they are, are fully aired and the appropriate lessons are drawn.
But that's not how it works.
So we had this almost cats and jammer kids kind of operation, it looks to me like, where these informants were tripping over each other, left hand, right hand, not having a clue about all the co-mingled investigations that were going on.
And it just turned into a disaster at 9.02 a.m. on April the 19th of 1995 when the bomb went off.
Well, in fact, I think J.D. even related a story.
Perhaps this was in Ambrose Evans Pritchard's book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, section one there is on the Oklahoma bombing.
I think it's in there that they talk about a Cessna plane ride with the, I guess, special agent in charge of the Tulsa office, who at that time was Bob Ricks, who was famous as the spokesman for the FBI during the Waco massacre, who mocked the dying children as they were burning to death in his agency's fire.
But anyway, he was in the plane with the head of the local ATF office, and they had a discussion about Elohim City, and apparently Bob Ricks had told the ATF agent, oh, no you don't, you're not doing anything.
I think you're probably referencing the ATF's informant Carol Howe there when you talked about the left hand, the right hand, and these different investigations tripping over each other.
And the FBI, Bob Ricks, told the ATF, no, you're not going to cause another Waco here.
We are going to handle Elohim City.
But then, of course, they didn't handle Elohim City.
The building blew up, and 180, however many people were murdered, 168 people were killed, right?
Well, you've got the gist of your comments are right on target, Scott, but let me just, Bob Ricks was not up in the plane.
It was actually, Oklahoma Highway Patrolman was flying a couple of ATF agents, one from Tulsa and one or two had come up from the regional office in Dallas, and they were looking at Elohim City from the air to identify escape routes and things that they could block so that when they raided Elohim City to arrest Stroessmeier, which was their announced intention, we have documents backing that up, that they were going to do that sometime in mid-February of 95, two months before the bombing.
But anyhow, this Oklahoma Highway Patrolman pilot of this small airplane had these ATF folks in there, and he quickly realizes the purpose of their sightseeing, if you were, and says, well, guys, gals, there's a female agent, actually the handler of Carol Howe is in the airplane, and he says, if you're going to raid Elohim City, and this is me paraphrasing, you probably ought to be aware that there's an ongoing FBI investigation, and that's a quote from the ATF report, an ongoing FBI investigation at Elohim City period, end of quotation.
And at that point, the ATF realizes they've stumbled across some FBI operation, so when they land the airplane, there's then an urgent emergency meeting of some supervisors at the Tulsa level, and then about, we're trying to pin the date on this, it's probably within three or four weeks.
I think we have a tentative date, but I don't want to give it until we nail it down, that Bob Ricks, who is the supervisory agent in charge of the Oklahoma City FBI office, does meet with his counterpart, his regional counterpart in the ATF, who's a fellow named Lester March out of Dallas, and at that point, the 800-pound gorilla, the FBI, tells the chimpanzee, you've got to get out of my banana patch, meaning leave Elohim City, end your investigation, so the ATF summarily fires Carol Howell as a paid informant, and a month after that meeting, the bomb goes off, and almost immediately, the ATF contacts Carol Howell, and we've got paperwork saying they request an emergency reinstatement of her as a paid informant, doubling her pay, by the way, and sending her back to Elohim City.
She goes one time to find, quote, the big secret, end quote, that is supposed to be out there, and she's going to go back again, but it is discovered that somebody at Elohim City is aware of her role as an informant, and her life would be in danger if she went back to Elohim City.
Well, and it was clear that they trumped up charges against her in order to keep her from being able to testify at either McVeigh or Nichols' pretended trials in Denver, and even that was in the AP, like, oh, come on, this lady's being set up here just to keep her off the stand, I don't even think there was any other interpretation of it.
But now, help me nail down some things here, I know that Timothy, I believe that I think that I know, I guess, that Timothy McVeigh used his Liberty Lobby calling card or something to call and leave a message for Andy the German at Elohim City just a few moments after finalizing reservations for the Ryder truck, and clearly there's all kinds of witness testimony, dozens and dozens of witnesses who saw McVeigh with John Doe 2, 3, 4, and et cetera, and the Chinese delivery guy said that there were three people in the room, but none of them were McVeigh, and they deliberately did not dust either the yellow mercury or his hotel rooms for fingerprints to compare against the FBI database, and you know, there's all kinds of things to make me believe that there were other Nazis involved with this, with McVeigh, that in all likelihood they are all tied to Elohim City one way or another, to Andre Straussmeier one way or another, but I want more concrete, you know, rivets and bolts tying this story together for me here.
Okay, well let me just pose one question for you and your audience.
At the federal trial in Denver of Tim McVeigh in the spring of 1997, the U.S. government declined to call about any one of about two dozen witnesses that could, on the morning of the bombing, before the bombing, have placed Tim McVeigh in Oklahoma City.
But the problem was he was always with one, two, or three other people, and maybe even in different vehicles.
So here's the issue.
What was so important that the Justice Department would risk losing the case against Tim McVeigh by not calling witnesses that could place him at the scene of the crime?
Because remember this, Scott, Tim McVeigh was convicted, sentenced, and executed based on a circumstantial case.
No, you're absolutely right, and it's also abundantly clear in the case of Terry Nichols, he was, the original vote was, it was all in the papers, the original vote was 10-2 to acquit him.
They did such a lousy job making a case against Nichols that he almost got away.
And then they compromised with the two hardcore on the jury, and they convicted him of involuntary manslaughter.
And the forewoman of the jury deliberately explained that that was to make a statement, that the government did not do, in her words, did not do a very good job of proving that Terry Nichols had anything to do with this.
And I don't believe for one minute it's because he's innocent, and I don't think you do either.
It's because the government dare not, as you point out in the McVeigh trial as well, they dare not make an ironclad case because it leads to, now here's where assumption kicks in more than bolts and rivets in my connections in my mind to this story here, Elohim City and the Neo-Nazis.
Prove to me, show me, Roger, how Andre Strassmeier was in on this.
Well, the best evidence I have is from a now-retired, very senior, national intelligence officer, career intelligence officer with the U.S. government, who told me that he had seen a document, a CIA document, where they had done an in-house examination of the Oklahoma City bombing to determine if they had any exposure, is the phrase or word, meaning did they have any contract employees, any retirees, active, past, whatever, anyone ever had any association with the CIA that had a role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
This detailed investigation determined that they were clean, they had no one that had any kind of role.
But while reading this report, my source said he saw reference to the problem the FBI had with a fellow named Strassmeier, who was reporting to the German government and to the FBI.
Now there's also, there's other evidence that I would call circumstantial, for example, I took the government's own immigration records on Strassmeier that were provided for the McVeigh trial to a retired ambassador, a career foreign service officer, and he pointed out that according to the government's records, Andy Strassmeier got three visas approved on one day from the U.S. consulate in Munich, Germany.
And this fellow had actually been a consular officer in charge of a German consulate, American consulate in Germany, and he says you get one visa approved at a time for a specific period and then you have to come back for another application.
He said he had never in his life seen three visas approved on one day for the same person.
So this is obviously a case of someone just putting in crap in a database in a computer thinking that it would never be a big issue, but in this case it came back to bite him a little bit.
And let me just mention Tim McVeigh's calling cards, which you referred to earlier, Scott.
The records of that calling card used by McVeigh and Fortier, Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols, these are reconstructed records.
The FBI constructed those records.
That was not just hit a button and print out what's in the database.
So those records are based on data that was evaluated and then put into another form.
We do not know for certain what phone calls Tim McVeigh made because, again, these are constructed records.
These are not the complete, accurate readout of his records.
Plus, we now know from Terry Nichols that McVeigh had more than one calling card.
He may have had a pager and we have not seen any of those records.
Well, and who was Richard Lee Guthrie?
I think it's a pretty much established fact.
We could talk about important parts of the court case or whatever if you think any mentioning current developments and so forth.
I think it's pretty much an established fact beyond debate that Kenneth Trinidad was murdered because whoever it was, local or federal officials, whoever it was that tortured him to death thought that he was Richard Lee Guthrie.
So are you going to tell me now that Richard Lee Guthrie was part of this white supremacist neo-Nazi movement?
Well, there's no question, yes.
Richard Lee Guthrie was an avowed racist.
He was a nasty piece of work.
He was a very disturbed individual.
In fact, he was kicked out of the Navy for his racist conduct, spray painting a swastika on a ship and so on.
He had attended SEAL training, did not complete that.
He had actually gone through Explosive Ordnance Disposal School, familiarization level.
He was not one of their highly trained career guys, but this is a guy that had talent.
But he was a disturbed individual and he was the co-leader along with a guy named Peter Langen of the Aryan Republic Army, the Midwest bank robbers they're also referred to.
We have documents, Scott, which show that the FBI was so concerned about the connection between Oak Bomb, the FBI codename for the Oklahoma City bombing, and Bomb Rob, their codename for this Midwest bank robbers and the 22 bank robberies they pulled off, that they were planning to hold a conference in January of 1996 to discuss the connections and including an Army warrant officer investigator from the Criminal Investigation Division who was going to talk about the connections to the active duty Army side of things that were involved in both of these cases.
So we know there was an active duty Army sergeant named Sean Kenny that was brought back from Fort Benning to Cincinnati, Ohio in early January of 1996 and baited the trap that led to the arrest of Richard Lee Guthrie and Kevin Peter Langen.
He was a neo-Nazi.
How he got enlisted into the Army and made Master Sergeant is something we'll get to in our book.
Well, and despite the fact that when they tortured Kenny Trinidad to death they had the wrong guy, do you believe that they had good reason to understand that Richard Lee Guthrie himself actually was John Doe number two or John Doe number something involved in the bombing plot?
Well, you know, there are a number of John Does and you're right to point out it's just not one, two, and three, and four.
But there are a number of people that could be John Doe one, for example.
There are two guys, Tim McVeigh and another guy, one of the Ward brothers that I happen to believe is a more likely candidate to be John Doe one.
John Doe two could be Richard Lee Guthrie, probably more likely.
Pardon me, you're saying this other guy is more likely to be John Doe one than McVeigh?
Yeah, I don't think McVeigh rented that truck on that Monday as charged.
I believe that this other fellow did.
His description, McVeigh is four inches taller and 20 to 25 pounds lighter than this other fellow.
So everybody looks at the sketch and sees the similarity to McVeigh.
They don't look at the physical description of height and weight that goes with it.
Even the sketch, I could see that being someone else, but it's also close enough to McVeigh that you could certainly just assume that that must be who they're talking about.
But you're saying that this guy is one of the two who brothers, who are we talking about here?
Actually, there are about four of them.
They lived at Elohim City and then suddenly left Elohim City, their family did, just a few days before the bombing and kind of packed up in the middle of the night and left.
But it's the Ward, W-A-R-D brothers, and I'd have to go back and check my notes.
I believe it's, well, I won't say which Ward brother.
There are two in my mind and I'm not sure I've got the right one, so I won't say which one.
But he is more of a, certainly fits the description, height and weight, and I think is more of a match with the sketch.
There's no way that McVeigh fits the height and weight description that accompanies the sketch.
Well, of course, the eyewitness description can be a bit vague, and it does look a lot like McVeigh, but I can see your point, though.
Yeah, an FBI agent pointed out, regarding John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, the government's claim is that the very same witnesses that nailed John Doe 1 with such accuracy totally were wrong about John Doe 2, who they claim did not even exist.
Right.
This FBI agent says, you know, it doesn't work that way.
These are the same three people identified, both these guys, they were together with the FBI at the same time getting interviews and so on.
He said you cannot have 24-carat gold information on John Doe 1 and then have it be fool's gold on John Doe 2 from the same witnesses at the same time.
He said he's never seen a case like that.
Right.
All right.
Now, you know, J.D. had mentioned that he thought that the bomb, and I always have problems with this story.
There are clearly contradictions riddled without it or within it, throughout it, but I guess, you know, J.D. said that he thought the bomb was not made at Gary State Lake in Kansas, that it was made in a garage in Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing.
And by two, at least, I don't know who all he says was there.
I guess, you know, McVeigh being there would be part of the story, too.
But that it was two Arizona gold miners, one of whom was himself an FBI informant, and that they were the ones, the experts in, you know, using ANFO explosives and so forth, and that they built the bomb there in Oklahoma City that morning.
What do you know about that?
And who are these guys?
In fact, I think he named them on my show.
I just don't remember who he said they were.
Well, that is, John and I often kind of laughed about the last kind of, I don't know if it would count up the hours from when the truck was rented at 4.30 p.m. on Monday, the 17th of April, until the bomb went off at 9.02 on Wednesday, the 19th.
That's kind of the black hole of this story.
But what John had me convinced, Scott, is that, and not just John, but other evidence that I'd looked at, I shared John's conclusion that the bomb was not built, as the government claims, at Geary Lake on Tuesday, the 18th of April.
Now, there may have been some activity out there around a Ryder truck, but when the FBI put a roadblock on a road that went by Geary Lake right after the bombing to ask people if they saw a Ryder truck there on that Tuesday, because this road went up over a kind of a rise, and you look right down to where the government claimed the bomb had been built, the people said, well, you know, I don't remember that, but I saw one the week before, and this was, again, this was several people, and these people were able to specify the day and the time of day that they saw that truck there the week before McVeigh rented the Ryder truck, they saw a Ryder truck at this location.
Some of them, a woman had to go to a grade school to pick up a sick child, so she remembered she had to take off from work and go pick her child up and take her to the doctor.
Somebody else was going to some other social engagement, so these people, a number of them, had very precise dates and times that stood out in their memory as to when they saw another truck at that spot before McVeigh even rented his truck.
Yeah, and you know, it's funny, because I think this is the part where we either start losing people or they start really sitting up and paying attention.
Sounds like we might be going off into cuckoo land here, but it came out, I remember, at Terry Nichols' trial, defense testimony from witnesses who said they certainly saw the truck on Easter Sunday, the day before the truck was rented, and the lady said, you know, look, there's no mistake, okay, I had to walk around the big yellow Ryder truck to get to my daughter and granddaughter who came to see me on Easter.
It was Easter Sunday in the parking lot, that was, you know, public sworn testimony at the Nichols' trial, so, and I think there was also a pretty good discrepancy between some witnesses saying that the Ryder truck that they saw was a really old, faded yellow one and others saying that the one they were talking about was brand spanking new, never mind, you know, how many people with a baseball hat are sitting shotgun in the think.
Yeah, no, and the witnesses you're talking about at the Dreamland Hotel, motel there over Easter weekend, are in addition to the witnesses I referred to that were stopped at the roadblocks, so you have this two groups of witnesses that saw a Ryder truck, one group saw the Ryder truck the week before the bombing out at Geary Lake, then you have the second group of witnesses that saw a Ryder truck at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kansas, the weekend before McVeigh rents his truck, he picks it up Monday afternoon.
These people saw the truck Saturday and Sunday.
Alright, and so as far as the gold miners, the Arizona gold miners, you know who he's talking about there?
I think I have, I'd have to research to make sure, so I'm not going to use any specific names, but again, there's a lot of mining around Kingman, Arizona where McVeigh spent time, where he had buddies that were in the movement as it's referred to, the Neo-Nazi movement, and I don't know how they kidnapped the phrase, but they sometimes are referred to as the Patriot movement, but I like to refer to them as what they are, the Neo-Nazi movement.
Well, and I think it's even notable that...
He had a number of friends that were in that business, and one of them, I will say, a guy named Steve Colburn, who we had real questions about exactly what his role was and who he worked for.
Well, I think it was notable, I wanted to, I'm sorry to interrupt you with all your name and names here, but it was notable at the time that they blamed the Patriot movement in general.
In fact, even, you know, anybody to the right of Rush Limbaugh at all, basically, was in on it somehow, and yet they didn't focus on the actual Neo-Nazis who were the ones who did it.
You know, everybody commented like it was some strange thing that McVeigh went to his lethal injection with a skin-shaved head, and, whoa, huh, he's a Neo-Nazi?
Yeah, well, that's the one angle they didn't want anyone in media to pursue at all, that this guy wasn't just some militia guy, he was a Neo-Nazi, and his Neo-Nazi buddies, oh, no wonder you don't want us to investigate.
So many of them were on the federal payroll, turned state's witness, or whatever already.
Well, I mean, you know, the real crux of the issue here, Scott, is was Andy Strassmeier an agent provocateur?
Was he over here stirring things up, promoting illegal conduct so that the U.S. government would be able to arrest these Neo-Nazis?
And people say, well, why would a German come over here to do that?
I have a quote from the former Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, and this is a couple years after the Oklahoma City bombing, in which he says the number one threat to the domestic tranquility, to the economic and social peace in Germany, is Neo-Nazism.
The number one threat that the German government was dealing with at the time, they had no foreign threat, and this is before Al-Qaeda, their number one threat, and it's not much less today, is Neo-Nazism.
It's very virulent, it's very powerful, and it drives them nuts.
And the problem with the United States was that most of the support, or a great deal of it, almost all the literature, for example, was printed in the United States and shipped over to surrounding countries, and then trucked into Germany, where it's illegal to present it, to print it.
Right, and I think, if I remember right, it was even announced that they were going to have some joint programs to try to take on this terrible new danger.
Well, a month before the Oklahoma City bombing, they enticed the number one purveyor of Nazi literature in the world, who was this American from Nebraska named Gary Luck, at the time, they somehow enticed him to Denmark, arrest him, he's immediately extradited to Germany, later tried, sentenced, and spent several years in jail there.
And oh, by the way, the German government, we have a press release, a press report, referred to this as the successful conclusion of Operation Atlantic, Roman numeral 2.
Now, Scott, I've been in the bureaucracy.
If there's a Roman numeral 2, there's a Roman numeral 1.
What's Atlantic 1?
Is that Andreas Stroessmayer?
Well, I think that's a very good question, and a very credible question, at this point.
I'm kind of torn about this.
On one hand, I'm kind of just as mad as I always was, that the Congress has never investigated this, that real famous journalists who could really get this kind of thing on TV in an important way won't ever deal with it.
And yet, I'm kind of beginning to just accept the fact that this story is just never going anywhere.
And by the way, for those in the audience concerned, this is not a conservative right-wing populist issue by any means.
You can read James Ridgway all about it in Mother Jones magazine.
I mean, what you have is a bunch of Nazis blew up a building and killed 170 people, and the government covered it up because, at the very least, they could have, should have known and stopped it.
You know, that's as good a summary as I think you're going to get from anybody that's really followed this thing.
Oh, well, good.
All right, well, I'll tell you what.
Why don't you tell me this.
When can I expect to read this book, Ronald Charles?
We don't have a publisher yet.
We have an agent, and we're in the process now of our proposal just went out last Thursday.
And so we have some initial responses, and we're going to be talking to people, and we'll see where we go.
But it's a strange business.
My first time through it, Scott, so I would say it'll be two years at a minimum.
We'd like to have something on the street in two years.
All right.
Well, I sure look forward to taking a look at that.
I'd like to keep you coming back on the show.
We didn't hardly even get to talk about the murder of Kenny Trinidou and all the import of that.
But surely the story is going to go on in bits and pieces, and so I'd like to have you back.
We can keep discussing this.
Well, it's a privilege to be with you, and it's an honor to pick up the banner that John Cash carried on your program, because J.D. was a special friend, and part of my interest in doing this book is to continue his work, which was tremendous and very important, both.
So thank you for your continued interest, and I hope your audience has found a little bit of it of interest, at least.
All right.
Thank you very much again, Roger.
All right, Scott.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
The heir to the journalism of the great J.D.
Cash.
This is Anti-War Radio, and we'll be right back.