 Thank you for coming out on this beautiful day to hear Andrew Gumbel talk about his new book, which is a very impressive piece of work. Andrew is a Los Angeles-based journalist and writer, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Guardian and the Independent, covered the collapse of communism, the wars in Yugoslavia, the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, and not the fall though, I guess yet. Mostly for the independent of London. He came to the United States in 1998. He's written extensively about politics, the criminal justice and pop culture. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Vanity Faire. He's the author of another book, Steal This Vote, Dirty Elections and the Modern History of Democracy in America, and this is his second book and he's about to produce a third book. So Andrew, leave the floor is yours. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you everybody for coming. I will talk for a little while and then hopefully we can get some kind of discussion going. I just wanted to start by plunging you into the middle of everything. I don't know, I'm sure all of you remember the Oklahoma City bombing, how Timothy McVeigh was arrested two days later. He was stopped by a highway patrolman who saw that he was missing his real license plate as he was leaving Oklahoma and the official story as it was told was the culprits were identified very quickly, they were arrested, a case was put against them, they were tried, they were punished, case closed, the FBI did a wonderful job and I wouldn't be sitting here if I agreed with that assessment. And things really were much more complicated and a lot of things went very wrong for reasons I want to explain and maybe the best place to start is on the day that McVeigh was brought into federal custody which was two days later, April the 21st 1995. The FBI was immensely active, had been for 48 hours, they were drafting people in from all over the country adding manpower in many states, Oklahoma itself, in Kansas, in Arizona, in many other parts of the country in Michigan and on the 21st over and above McVeigh they had a tremendous interest in the Nichols brothers, Terry who was in Kansas and his brother James who was on the family farm in Decker, Michigan which is in the farm maybe 90 minutes north of Detroit. The FBI with a number of other agencies including the ATF, local law enforcement were gathering what was effectively a SWAT team around the James Nichols farm ready for the right moment to pounce, waiting also for enough evidence to gather so they could have probable cause to go in. In Kansas you had one FBI agent who was looking for Terry Nichols' house, he had the wrong address as it turned out because Terry's ex-wife muddled up the numbers so he was driving around frantically trying to find it, there was a special operations group from the FBI coming in from Kansas City, a helicopter was whirring overhead and the mindset was this, it was okay we know that these two people are of great interest in the investigation but we don't know how far this thing goes, we don't know if they have other bombs that they're ready to detonate in other cities, we don't know if this guy McVeigh who we've picked up is a driver if he's the mastermind if he's somewhere in between so we have got all our options open, we want to keep an eye on these people, we want to keep a low profile, we want to follow them, we want to bug their phones, we want to do whatever it takes to see if we can establish if there's a broader network and then everything comes to a grinding crashing halt because within the investigation there's a media leak, James and Terry Nichols' names are out on the radio saying that the feds are after them and that is really the end of that. James jumps in his car, goes on an improvised shopping trip basically just to get out of the farm so that he doesn't die and what he imagines will be a showdown with the FBI. Terry very similarly panics, goes home, picks up his wife and his infant daughter and they go to the police station in Harrington, Kansas where he volunteers to talk about everything he knows thinking he can bluff his way through and in the meantime try and find out what it is exactly that the feds might know about him. The point being about this moment that all possibility of finding out who else might have been involved essentially crashed and burned and it was really bad luck and it was a function of how high profile the media interest was, it was a function of how huge the investigation was and we don't know exactly who leaked the news about Terry and James Nichols but one thing we do know is that the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was taking everything from every briefing that was occurring within the investigation in Oklahoma City and putting it out to every single one of its offices completely unadulterated so you had hundreds of possible leak sources within the ATF just to name one agency. There was also a particular problem that one of the ATF agents from Texas was sleeping with a reporter from the Dallas Morning News and telling absolutely everything he knew so the Dallas Morning News for about three weeks had the most spectacular series of scoops about the investigation. None of this was helpful to figuring out what had actually happened but what I argue in the book is it wasn't just a matter of bad luck that prevented the investigation from finding other co-conspirators and or other people who might have inspired the plot who might have taught McVeigh and Nichols how to build a bomb because they certainly didn't know by themselves and on and on and on. There were also a number of really big systemic problems to do with how the federal government had been tracking the radical far-right and also how they interacted with each other and it was really looking back on it now with the benefit of the full documentary record which was the basis for writing the book which wasn't previously available. One understands that it was really very similar to the run-up to 9-11 in that you had a situation where the few qualified agents who knew what was going on who knew how grave the risk was were screaming from the rooftops but were not being heard. You had a problem that the ATF and the FBI both had key pieces of information that they weren't sharing with each other. They weren't in many cases doing what was necessary based on that information within their own agencies and so you had a situation where everybody chose to block barriers and close their eyes and hope for the best and the next thing you know a bomb goes off in Oklahoma City. The things that got missed most particularly were the things that the FBI could have done the ATF could have done based on what they had failed to do before but human nature being what it is and institutional cowardice being what it is they chose not to. There were a large number of people we now know from the documentary record who came forward and showed that the number of people had foreknowledge of the bombing none of those people were ever questioned by the FBI. There was for example a man on death row who was executed on the very same day as the bombing by the name of Wayne Snell who happened to have plotted in 1983 to blow up the same building the Murrow Building in Oklahoma City. He talked to his prison guards in very vivid terms about how his friends were going to take revenge for his death. On the night before the bombing he was up all night watching the TV and then when the news came through the bombing he started celebrating like crazy in his cell. He wasn't obviously available to interview because he was executed 12 hours after the bombing but his wife who visited him regularly was in close touch with the militia movement and some of the fringe elements that in the same circles that McVeigh moved in. She was never properly questioned there was one perfunctory interview that was it. The people who Mary Snell his wife had been talking to including Louis Beam who was the biggest propagandist for the radical far right. He'd openly declared war on the government. He was never questioned and on and on and on and it's not that these people were necessarily directly involved in the plot we don't know because that investigation never happened but they were obvious people to go and talk to to press to see who you know what they might have known. Beam for example had been in Waco at the siege at exactly the same time as Timothy McVeigh in the spring of 1993 had they met we don't know they were there at exactly the same time McVeigh knew exactly who he was. Beam had developed this theory of how to fight a guerrilla war called leaderless resistance and McVeigh was a student of that and what he did was essentially a perfect exemplar of that so there are lots of reasons to think they certainly had a lot in common and yet Beam was not touched. The other place which was left almost completely alone is a radical community in eastern Oklahoma by the name of Elohim City which as it was run was purportedly a pacifist community with people who had rather cookie ideas about how to live their lives they homeschooled their children they had their own money system they had their own sense of time they measured time according to the solar clock and every day began at noon and ended at noon instead of midnight to midnight and on and on but in this community there were a large number of people who either passed through or lived there who were radical criminals there were members of a very violent revolutionary bank robbery gang who were extremely successful they robbed 22 banks over a two-year period they talked about financing a revolution to overthrow the government none of them was ever questioned about the Oklahoma City bombing they were pursued for the bank robberies but nothing else there were other violent criminals at Elohim City likewise they were never questioned and I think the explanation for this is twofold number one the federal government and the federal agencies didn't want to dwell on their own past mistakes the fact that they had been tracking or should have been tracking these people and failed to do what was necessary to find out what might have been in the works and in particular the ATF hadn't undercover informant at Elohim City who was pulled out just a few weeks before the bombing not because she wasn't good at what she did but rather the opposite she was giving the ATF such disturbing information they understood that if they were going to keep her there they were gonna have to do something about it and the last thing the ATF wanted was to get into a confrontation like they had at Waco like they had at Ruby Ridge and screw it up again because Congress was after them the Republican majority wanted the agency closed down essentially and so the head of the ATF he told me this quite openly and frankly made a decision that he was going to close down the informed operation and just hoped that nothing bad was going to happen and he admitted to me 15 years later he said you know what if she'd stayed there we probably would have found out about the bombing and we would have probably stopped it so there was a big institutional imperative not to dwell on those mistakes and then going forward with the prosecution of McVeigh and Nichols the imperative then became we need to get these people convicted we need to push for the maximum sentence and nothing needs to get in the way of that goal and it became very tempting for the prosecution to say you know what if there are indications of other people if there's the possibility of delving into the radical far right with who knows what results the problem is that we may just give ammunition to the defense at trial without actually establishing any more facts about who is responsible for this terrible act and so piece by piece by piece every one of those lines of investigation was closed down sometimes the FBI closed it down itself sometimes the prosecutors said you know what we're not interested in this let's let it drop one famous example that was in the news at the time was so-called John Doe to figure there were two people who were reported to have rented the ride a truck that was used to carry the bomb the first one was assumed to be McVeigh and in fact one of the interesting things about the case is the government never really proved that it was McVeigh for a number of reasons we can go into afterwards but the second person was an absolute mystery there was a huge manhunt for him leads came cascading down on the FBI they couldn't deal with any of them all the people they were told about turned out to be not connected to the crime and after about a month they came up with a theory of misassociation based on other people who come into the same rental agency to rent a truck and said you know what the employees there got muddled up between two different days and John Doe to effectively does not exist and one of my contacts in the FBI who was in Washington who was monitoring the investigation from their turn to one of his colleagues and said is the problem that he doesn't exist or that you just couldn't find him which I think is the really opposite question here so John Doe to was made to disappear and again piece by piece by piece all these other things were made to disappear in the run-up to trial the Justice Department one or two prosecutors in particular together with one or two FBI agents went to all the key witnesses and really sort of drill down on them to try and get them to change their testimony if they had testimony that was not in line with the prosecution theory and in some cases get them to admit that an identification they've made earlier was mistaken and they must have been talking about someone else this is actually permitted under the federal rules of evidence it's it's allowed in federal court to coach witnesses effectively you know the theory is you're talking them walking them through their evidence to make sure they're absolutely sure and clear about what they know versus what they don't know but in practice as many of the defense lawyers in the case told me this you know looks like coaching if not even coercion when it's really pushed to its extreme so you came to trial with a sort of a truncated case and even then the case against McVeigh was rather circumstantial there were a lot of things that the government couldn't really say for sure they didn't know how he learned how to build the bomb they didn't know for sure that he was the one who rented the truck when it came to the morning of the bombing plenty of people had seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City but every single person who saw him and there are about two dozen eyewitnesses all saw him with someone else and in some cases with other vehicles there was a whole panoply of information out there none of which was ever followed up again because the government couldn't figure out where it might lead and they were afraid of going down that path and the case that was put on in federal court against McVeigh in particular was very much based on emotion they showed images of the destruction they made sure that every few days after a lot of technical evidence they'd bring one of the bereaved relatives of the victims in to talk about losing a child in the daycare center or losing family members who were working for the federal government and made sure that the jury was really on the brink of tears all the way through and associated that emotion with McVeigh and that was really what got him convicted and got him the death penalty that and some less than stellar lawyering on the other side and I think partly because it was the 1990s and not the modern era with blogs with the internet and so on the government managed to keep a pretty good lid on all of this information there were a whole lot of conspiracy theories out there people seeing things that didn't make sense and guessing as to what they might mean but because the case files for the most part remained you know closed the defense lawyers got most of them they had to fight for a lot of them especially anything to do with other people but a lot of that information did not come out until until Roger Charles my co-author and I managed to get access to it a couple of years ago and because you know nobody in the government really wanted to admit all the things that had gone wrong what the internal discussions were within the prosecution team obviously there was no interest in talking about that at the time now we know a lot more as I say a leader was kept on the whole thing and at a conventional wisdom grew up that this was really basically a success by the federal government to manage to confront this terrible act and bring the prosecution of it to successful conclusion and I think it did the country a great disservice that this truncated version became received wisdom I think it did the country disservice in the run-up to 9-11 because there'd been no opportunity to absorb the lessons about poem city because they hadn't even been articulated I think going forward now there remains a lot of open questions you know clearly a lot of things have changed since 9-11 some of the things that made the FBI leery of conducting intelligence-based operations which were actually banned in in the 1990s this was a hangover from the Watergate era if something wasn't directly related to criminal prosecution the FBI wasn't allowed to do it the domestic terrorism wing of the FBI basically had almost no cases because they were terrified of going down that road at all that's obviously changed completely the other thing that's changed for what it's worth is it's now much harder to buy 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate without a lot of questions being asked but a lot of things have not changed access to deadly weaponry is still pretty easy you have a situation where the federal law enforcement agencies is still very mistrustful each other the FBI and the ATF don't like each other one bit and you also socially and politically have a situation not dissimilar to the situation that McVeigh found himself in except compounded many times that you have people who've gone off to war in the US military they've seen you know combat many of them come back traumatized they come back to a terrible economy very high unemployment and you know whereas of the vast majority of them will find their way muddled through there will be a fringe who may well be attracted to radical ideologies who have the knowledge and the skill to think about becoming a warrior to fight against the system you also have a tremendous wave of anti-establishment feeling in this country at the moment again most of which is entirely legitimate whether it's the tea party on the right occupy on the left or other movements but on the fringes you have people who are radicalized by the fact that there's the first black president in the White House and you see in fact the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked this there's a surge in the number of hate groups unparalleled really since the early to mid 90s at the time when McVeigh was coming out of the army there was the anti-establishment wave of Newt Gingrich's contract with America and the Republican majority that came into Congress in 1994 the anger against gun control that existed then which again you're seeing echoes of that and hints of that with the whole controversy over Trayvon Martin and the standard grand laws and all the rest of it so there are sort of unnerving parallels and I think there's a sense that something like this could happen again and it's not it's an open question I wouldn't pretend to know the answer whether the federal law enforcement agencies are better prepared now to face the risk than they were then one thing I do know for a fact from talking to people who were the leading experts and the most experienced people in tracking the radical far right in the 80s and 90s this is the lot of them have either now retired or been transferred to other duties after 9 11 a lot of them would switch to international terrorism to track radical Islamists and they were no longer looking at the domestic threat so I think it is an open question whether or not this threat is being adequately monitored now I will stop there for the moment there's plenty more to talk about Peter I think wants to ask one or two questions and then I would love it if we could we could get into a conversation the book is Oklahoma City what the investigation missed and why it still matters what do you think what is the you know if you had perfect knowledge of of what the event that happened what was McVeigh's role in it and who are the other conspirators to the extent you can a lot of that is guesswork yeah first thing to say and one of the things is very careful of when writing this book is I didn't want to be accused of being another conspiracy theorist in fact in the preface I talked quite extensively about how that phrase was used and misused by everyone including the government who every time they were criticized legitimately would dismiss their critics as conspiracy theorists I wanted to make it as hard for members of the government or former members of the government who I criticized in this book to come back with that line so let me say first of all this is guesswork but it's some of it is inspired guesswork or informed guesswork I think it's you know my reconstruction of what happened that morning based on talking to people who are involved in the investigation people who are on the ground for example the head of the federal protective service who is directly responsible for safety at the federal building and the federal complex because right next door at the federal building Oklahoma City is the federal courthouse right next to that across an alley is the old post office building which is also full of legal offices and federal courthouses my reconstruction is this is that McVeigh was almost certainly with some other people we don't know how many but probably not that many because the whole principle was leaderless resistance you don't have any more people in on the plot than you absolutely need but it seems there was more than one vehicle and that the original plan was to drive the truck into the underground garage beneath the federal courthouse and blow that up and kill a lot of federal judges they made a very merely very elementary mistake and I heard about this through my contacts in the radical far right but also in law enforcement that they forgot to measure the height of the truck and it didn't fit into the garage so at 8 30 in the morning they try and drive the thing in holy crap we can't fit the thing in what do we do now the next thing that it appears they tried to do was to fit into the alley between the federal courthouse and the old post office building which was where the private garage where the federal judges came in only they could use that garage and that plan was thwarted because there was a federal marshals truck that was transporting a prisoner to court that morning that was sitting in that alley and according to Tom Hunt who was the head of federal protective service who knew the Marshall according to the Marshall and according to one or two others the rider truck went into the alley saw the drop marshals truck reversed came back out again they were seen in various locations around downtown Oklahoma City trying to figure out what to do and then it seems this there was an improvised last-minute decision to park the car in the handicapped spot on the north side of the Murrow building directly beneath the daycare center where a lot of federal workers had their children go to school to preschool and it further appears that this was McVeigh's idea and how do we know this we know this because in December 1994 McVeigh and his friend Michael Fortier visited Oklahoma City McVeigh was seen by the woman who ran the daycare center and her husband who happens to be Tom Hunt the head of the federal protective service he went up to the daycare center started asking a lot of really weird questions he said he was a military recruiter moving from Wichita he had two children didn't want to give their names now didn't want to give his wife's name didn't want to give his own name he didn't have a name badge and all he was asking about was security for the daycare center that was his only interest and Danielle Hunt who was the woman who ran it thought this is the weirdest thing ever her husband when he came in with his uniform spooked McVeigh completely who then left by another entrance so that he wouldn't have to run into him again four months later the hunts look at each other when they see the news on the TV and said that's the guy who came into our office so it seems that it was that was made McVeigh's idea the next thing that I figured out is that the car which was missing the real license plate probably wasn't intended as a getaway car in the sense that it was actually used it was meant as what in bank robbery parlance is known as a drop car it was supposed to be a car that would just get him to the city limits and then he would switch cars and drive off in another one somehow that plan went wrong and we don't know why whether it was because his co-conspirators saw that he blown up the the the federal building instead of the federal courthouse and were appalled at that decision and just melted away as fast as they could and left him on his own or for some other reason we just don't know that is the realm of speculation but I'm pretty convinced that the reason he was driving that car towards the Kansas border rather than another vehicle that actually worked properly because this car was on the verge of breaking down as well as not having a real license plate and on and on and on I don't think he ever intended to be driving that car out of town and that was where the plot started unraveling and once he was caught he decided that he was going to take sole credit to protect the identity of the others and really his you know his reviews on the radical far right after the attack were terrible everybody said you know what was he thinking you know we should have been attacking the FBI we should have been attacking the ATF we shouldn't have been attacking social security workers and ordinary people going to social security offices going to hide offices we should absolutely not have been attacking toddlers and preschoolers you know this is the worst thing they could have possibly done it's killed the revolutionary movements stone dead which in fact turned out to be the case so but that he did move they did have credit in the movement for one thing and that was for not not talking about other people he kept quiet all the way through to his execution in fact he hastened his own execution and I can go into that if you want to make sure that he'll be executed in record time and the extraordinary thing is McVay wanted to take sole credit for the crime the federal government that was worried about news getting out that there may have been others that they'd missed with thrilled that he was willing to take sole credit they stuck with that storyline to and so their interest converged and and those storylines became the received wisdom and you know I firmly believe that's that's a very over simplistic version of it you've mentioned that you had access to documents that people hadn't had previously or what are those documents and how did you come about a lot of it is just the dense detail of the FBI investigation so they interviewed 18,000 witnesses over a two three year period some of those had come out previously a lot of them hadn't was it a foyer thing or how did you get no the way we got access to it is that Terry Nichols gave permission for those documents to be released and his last trial lawyer who represented him in state court in Oklahoma very reluctantly abided by his wishes and handed them over so there were also fire documents that came to light there were other things that came to light in more and about ways some really spectacular documents which show how the federal government was not in the different arms of the federal government not talking to each other one spectacular document we got with the field notes of a social of a secret service agent who was responsible for tracking the phone records in the first few days of the investigation she did an unbelievable job in putting the whole thing together in almost no time she was then airbrushed out of the story completely the FBI accused her of breaking protocol of obtaining things without proper subpoenas of jeopardizing the admissibility of the phone records completely they pretended she didn't exist they read it her investigation from scratch and this document her field notes it was as though it never existed the trial judge never saw it the prosecution never saw it the defense certainly never saw it and when I showed it to the head of the FBI investigation of the bombing and he read it he said I don't want judge mage the trial judge to know that this thing exists because if it is he's going to come off to heads in the first head he's going to come after his mind he was absolutely alarmed that this document had never come to light so you can see the way in which there were these extraordinary intrigues within the investigation information being withheld people's roles being suppressed agencies trying to grab credit from each other it was a real mess you your co-author what's his background and writing a book solo is difficult but writing it with another person must be another layer of difficulty so how was that what Roger Charles provided was access to the documents and access to Terry Nichols Terry Nichols because of the Patriot Act is not allowed to speak to the media and I don't want to go into details but Roger figured out a way to talk to him anyway and because he got to talk to him we managed to get the discovery documents through Terry Nichols and that was you know an invaluable contribution to this project if Nichols under a special administrative measures that's so-called what why isn't he allowed to talk to the media because he is a terrorist under the Patriot Act I you know I hesitate to give chapter inverse because I don't remember chapter right but my understanding is that the federal government now has the ability to deny media access to anyone invoking the Patriot Act and particularly people who are convicted of terrorism and terrorist related activities where is he now he's in the Supermax in Colorado and he's been there since the beginning what do you think the influence of the Turner Diaries was on like they in this plot let me explain quickly what the Turner Diaries is it is a book that was written under a pseudonym by William Pierce who was the head of the National Alliance which was basically the leading neo-nazi organization in the United States and it's a pretty startling read it's basically about a group of revolutionaries who respond to an attempted government crackdown on guns on personal possession of guns and in response the first thing they do is they blow up FBI headquarters in Washington with a truck bomb which is driven into the underground garage if you can hear a few echoes already it's probably not a coincidence and they don't stop there and by the end of the book they've dropped a nuke on Washington DC which might seem slight overkill in response to a gun control law but it's it's an astonishing book it's you know for ordinary readers I think it's impossible to get through without wanting to take several cold showers along the way but it was a bestseller on the gun show circuit and really popular with a lot of people who were drawn to this extremist ideology and I think it's a heavily racist book as well but I think the appeal of it was actually less the racism than it was the radical anti-government revolutionary spirit this idea that we need to band together take arms against the corrupt government and you know if need be destroy the world in order to prove that we are pure and correct and other real heirs of the founding fathers of the American constitution McVerry read it when he was in the army he always had it with him when he went around on the gun show circuit selling his rather poultry wares at gun shows he pressed it on anybody who he could possibly find to press it on and you know you can see in the conception of the plot a number of echoes William Pearce also wrote a second book called Hunter and that is about somebody who goes around shooting into racial couples who then gets recruited by a shady government recruiter who then gets him to do a number of things including blowing up a Mossad office in Virginia with an ammonium nitrate bomb and there's a very detailed description of how that bomb is put together and again you can see a lot of ways in which what McVerry ended up doing with however many people he ended up doing it with was inspired by these books and I think you know if you look at his letters if you look at the way that he talked to his friends it becomes clear that he lived in a bit of a fantasy world of the Turner diaries and in September 1994 when the government passed the assault weapons ban he saw that as the Turner diaries coming to life Terry Nichols told us that he said that was an absolutely key moment for McVerry and that was not coincidentally the moment when they started assembling bomb components and started thinking about their revolution one interesting question is why would they assemble bomb components in September and October of 94 if the bomb is only going to go off in April 1995 to which according to Terry Nichols and I actually believe him on this I think the plan was to blow up something like the federal building local home city much sooner and to aim for something really big for April 19th probably the FBI headquarters is what they would have loved to have done why didn't they blow up anything or attempt to blow up anything sooner than April mainly because Terry Nichols got spooked and left the country McVerry then tried to recruit Michael Fortier he was another army buddy of his who lived in Arizona he also got spooked said no he came with him on that trip to Oklahoma City where they where they checked out the federal building McVay was to the daycare center but then he said oh I'm not having anything more to do with that so McVay was left high and dry with no one to carry out the plot with when Terry Nichols came back from the Philippines which is where he went then McVay got back in touch with him and things moved towards April the 19th but I believe the plan was to start earlier and build up to a crescendo to some grand finale on April 19th which in McVay's head even if it wasn't practically anything they could have ever pulled off the idea was to blow up the FBI just like in the Ternodares great let's open it to the audience if you have a question just identify yourself and wait for the mic I'm Matt Bennett third way this is all fascinating the secret service agent notes that you read did you were there things in there that were exculpatory is that why the FBI agent was so worried that this would come to the attention of the judge or what what was it about those notes that made them so interesting this is it's a very good question and I grappled with it and the the lawyer for for William Morrow grappled with it too because we had to try and figure out you know how much was an argument of convenience by the FBI because they wanted to take credit for this how much of it was a turf war between between the secret service and the FBI and how much of it was you know real grounds for concern that the agent whose name was Mary Riley had made some kind of mistake I can tell you that she was actually investigated internally by the secret service for having violated various things in terms of seeking subpoenas getting information through the proper channels observing the correct protocol she was actually cleared in that investigation but as soon as it was over she left the secret service she got a very high profile job with the Bank of America which which she still has so whether she was scapegoated you know who knows I tried to find out you know what the internal politics of that were I didn't get very far a couple of things that we do know one is that she was in very close touch with a very senior official in the Justice Department by the name of Donna Buseller who's still very much part of the Homeland Security apparatus who was getting her to fax things directly to her and when I told members of the FBI task force that that is what had occurred they went bananas and said you can't do that it has to go through the task force in Oklahoma City that Donna Buseller should have known that this agent if she didn't know that then her bosses should have known that this was a violation of protocol it seems a little bit you know inside baseball from the outside there was also an issue with the financial records of everyone who was a subscriber to the same phone card that Terry Nichols had subscribed to which McVeigh used that card as well the spotlight company which publishes a far right-wing magazine also offered these phone cards there were about 5000 subscribers subscribers and Mary Riley asked for the financial records of all 5000 people and from my FBI sources apparently this was a huge problem because it was a potential violation of a lot of people's privacy had nothing to do with the bombing whatsoever but having said that you know what was not clear to me is whether Mary Riley made these mistakes herself if she indeed made them or if she was following directions she was doing everything right she was faxing everything she you know we know from her fax headers that she was sending everything to the task force in Oklahoma City as well as Donna Buseller in Washington or ever Donna Buseller was because she went to Oklahoma City for a while too so it's unclear if she did anything wrong but the FBI used that as an excuse to shut the Secret Service out completely they didn't trust the Secret Service they didn't think they were a good investigative agency and I have to say from having seen their documents with the exception of Mary Riley's work I would tend to agree with that assessment and when they went to court the only people who appeared in court were the FBI phone records analysts and there was one witness who who um work who was the head of the company that um ran the phone service that the spotlight cards were used through he attempted to talk about the Secret Service agent in his testimony and prosecution attorney jumped up as fast as he could raise an objection and change the subject as fast as possible and when you read the trial transcript knowing this backstory you know exactly why but you know when the jury was listening to it in court they didn't know why this attorney was jumping up and objecting it just looked like a piece of courtroom procedure so it's there was this fascinating piece of you know background politics going on and there's this is just one instance of that through the trial you know once you've read all the documents and then you reread the trial transcript you realize there's this whole intrigue going on and and it was reflected in who was called to the stand how they were questioned which questions they were not allowed to answer and on and on why was the Secret Service involved anyway they have general investigative interests in a number of things they were tracking the radical far right for a number of reasons um this is why I don't think they're very good because I saw their documents where they're talking about you know the radical far right in Oklahoma and that document is riddled with mistakes that were pulling second third fourth hand information from from all over the place one other way in which the Secret Service got involved is that um I mentioned a little bit ago the neo-nazi bank robbery gang who were called the Aryan Republican army who robbed 22 banks um before they became the bank robbery gang one of their members by the name of Richard Guthrie had publicly threatened to kill president George W. Bush H. W. Bush excuse me and his best friend from childhood who ended up being the ringleader of the bank robbers was was somebody by the name of Pete Lang and who was in prison in Florida for holding up a pizza joint the Secret Service went to him offered to use him as an informant if he would go find Richard Guthrie for them so he was sprung from prison he was given a bus ticket to Cincinnati where he was from he and Guthrie met up and they went underground and that's when they started robbing banks together so the Secret Service gave Pete Lang and the gift of his life um not not not not the world's most stellar law enforcement operation the bank robberies were also influenced by the Turner Diaries absolutely um and one of the biggest omissions um in the whole investigation was when the bank robbers started to be arrested which occurred in early 96 to mid 96 most of them were picked up um there was no crossover between that investigation and the bombing investigation and that absolutely should have been when they raided a safe house in Columbus Ohio where they'd holed up they found a gallon jugs of nitromethane which was the uh material that was used mixed with ammonium nitrate to make the bomb and for the Oklahoma City bombing they found um they found blasting caps they found various other explosive elements they found um they even found Christmas wrapping paper that was very similar to the Christmas wrapping paper that McVay had used to wrap up a bunch of blasting caps when he transported them at some point across the country um now not only were the investigators in Oklahoma City not told about this but a lot of this evidence was actually destroyed the blasting caps and the Christmas paper for example were destroyed so there was no possibility after the fact to even look at them and see is there a link here or isn't there um when I spoke to one of the prosecutors who prosecuted the bank robbers and you know I there's a lot of detail here of different individuals which I'll spare you but there were a couple of people in particular in the rob bank robbery gang who were fingered by some of the others as potential bombers in Oklahoma City and when I asked the the prosecutor why wasn't more effort made to see if indeed they were linked you know to investigate that he made it clear you know that the reason they weren't was because they were being used as witnesses for prosecution in the bank robbery prosecution and that was the main focus of interest and they didn't want to know whether they were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing because if they did it would just greatly complicate the prosecution and it it became just as it became easier to prosecute McVey and Nichols and say that's it because that way you're more sure of convicting them it became easier to prosecute the bank robbers stick to them and say that's it because otherwise that case might fall apart um so there's a lot of politics of how to prosecute these cases and you know I feel very strongly that and and not only I but a lot of the FBI agents involved in the Oklahoma City bombing who know this stuff now are furious that this wasn't properly processed and cross-checked so they could have seen if they could have found more conspirators in the bombing is there any possibility that any element of the case could be reopened it's difficult to see how um there've been various moments where that could have happened one was in 1998 towards the end of Terry Nichols' trial when the trial judge Richard Meech said from the bench there are a number of questions that remain unanswered and it would be very disappointing to me if the federal government stopped looking for those answers um the investigation did formally stay open for a while longer another point where things could have been picked up was in 2005 when Terry Nichols gave information via one of his um prison mates who was Gregory Scarper Jr a mafia figure from New York that there was more explosives buried under the house where he'd lived in Harrington Kansas and there was a whole soap opera about how the FBI got to find out about that but when they did they went digging they found the explosives Terry Nichols said if you go looking you will find fingerprints on those boxes that may lead you to other co-conspirators which is the reason why he talked about it because there was one of these people he wanted desperately to see prosecuted the FBI took three years to analyze the fingerprints and then when the results came back they said no usable fingerprints on here um and that was the end of that and as far as I know that was the last time any investigative action was taken in the Oklahoma City Bomb how did you get involved in writing this book I was first asked in 2001 just before McVay was executed to write a feature for The Independent my newspaper in London and my first reaction sight unseen was don't we know everything about that um and I read a book which McVay had essentially dictated to two journalists from his hometown Buffalo New York which is sort of his version of events and I read that and knowing very little about the case I thought you know I don't know much about the case but I do know that whatever happened it can't have been this because it makes no sense what was that what was a particular thing that didn't make sense mostly that he took credit for having done everything right um and it was as though you know he was this all-knowing all-seeing person who drifted through this landscape of middle America for two or three years he had no viable form of income he had no particular bomb making skill but somehow he managed to put together this plot all by himself and well it just it just made no sense and then when I found out that the government's version of the case was essentially the same that's when I started getting really intrigued and you know like everybody else I did a lot of guessing um and then as I say when these documents came out I thought okay here is the opportunity first of all to find out what the government knew and then another opportunity to go around and interview everybody see if they'll talk and find out what the inside story was and the great pleasure of this project was that almost everybody did talk they were very frank and a lot of people were really furious about what would happen and were thrilled to have the opportunity to make it public and you know in in what they said was you know this is a fabulous project we wish you all the best which translated into English meant we want you to get to the bottom of absolutely everything except the part that embarrasses me I think that's life in general right in the back here yeah John Miller from Ohio State and from Cato Institute you mentioned in somewhat in passing that the bombing killed the movement would you expand a little bit more on that and uh there if there were a bunch of other people we've not lived 17 years since that essentially nothing's happened they haven't done anything as far at least as far as I know so maybe it'd been best just to let it go rather than spend octillion dollars trying to trace these people down maybe never convict them um that's certainly an argument that I've heard from the people who involved in the investigation you know the argument is essentially you never catch everyone we caught the main people you know so be it life goes on and nothing bad has happened I would contest that nothing bad has happened I mean certainly no federal buildings have been blown up um but a number of people who I believe should have been questioned because they either demonstrated that they had foreknowledge of the bombing or because they had espoused the same cause of violent revolution absolutely went on and did more very unpleasant things uh the bank robbers continued robbing banks for example um there was a character called Chevy Kehoe who on the morning of the bombing was bugging a motel owner in Spokane Washington to turn on CNN um and as soon as he turned on CNN 10 minutes later the first news the bombing dropped and he looked like he knew all about it and the motel keeper was absolutely spooked and when he told the FBI this the FBI showed no interest in it whatsoever Chevy Kehoe went on to kill a family uh a gun dealer and his his wife and an eight-year-old daughter in Arkansas about a year later you know there were a number of very unpleasant things that happened and I'm not saying that the investigation had it being conducted differently would have prevented those but at the very least we would have had more answers and if any of these people were involved they would have been taken off the street so I definitely take issue with the idea that nothing bad happened as a result of not taking the investigation wider um what was the other part of your question excuse me right right okay hi I'm Gordon Whitken with the Center for Public Integrity the book discusses uh kind of a rogues gallery of the radical right there's a lot of folks that you provide some illumination about of that whole group of folks who are the ones that you think were most likely involved directly in the conspiracy I'll tell you right off this is the question that the lawyer Harper Collins never wants me to answer but I'll answer it anyway um but I have to catch it in very careful terms you know first of all um I say this in the book too you know that book authors are not are not crime investigators we don't have subpoena power we don't have the power of arrest you know we can't bug people's phones so there are limits to how much a book author can know we can have suspicions we can look at documents we can see what the investigators knew uh and base it on that um you know here's a list of people I would have absolutely questioned or found a way to question um I think Lewis Beam would be very high on the list again he was the propagandist for the movement he'd been very active since the 1980s in the clearing war on the government he made an absolutely incendiary speech in 1992 in the wake of the Ruby Ridge incident in which he basically said you know the federal government's going to come and take your children in your homes and you have to take up arms and fight back against them if you don't want that to happen um very bright very dangerous man um the FBI received information on him in early 96 that he knew that something was up uh before the bombing he talked about some kid they had who was going to do something and he mentioned a number of cities in the Midwest that were going to be attacked and forgive me for not remembering but I think Oklahoma City was on the list of of places that was mentioned um again I have no information Lewis Beam was involved directly whatsoever um but the fact that the federal government never even spoke to him about it is absolutely astonishing there's a very seasoned ATF agent who wonderful man named Jim Kavana now retired who described Lewis Beam as the as the hydrish of the radical far right you know he was he was that kind of charismatic extremely dangerous person um so he would be high on my list of people to talk to the bank robbers um there's a lot of a lot of information to suggest that McVay knew them um it's possible also that he was involved in some way in some of the bank robberies it appears that McVay got a hold of bank notes from somewhere very possibly through these bank robberies he gave some of them to his sister to recycle um he bought his sister a brand new um SUV at a certain point we don't know where the money for that came from because she was a student whose only viable form of income as far as we know was doing new Jella wrestling in a in a bar in in upstate New York on the weekends um which is something that the FBI found very amusing as well um you know lots of unanswered questions about what sources of income McVay was living off in that time between leaving the army and and the bombing um so you know they were absolutely you know and then the people at Elohim City um the FBI did go to Elohim City they did ask some questions but by the time they got there which was mid-96 so a year after the bombing most of the radical criminals who had been there were flushed out the leader of the community Robert Millar very clever man he made sure that he was in touch with federal law enforcement constantly he made himself available he said if you want anything i'll give you whatever you want the FBI in particular and the ATF never really asked him for much and interestingly after the bombing it was Millar who came to Elohim City to the task force to talk to them not the other way around because he was trying to make sure that the rumors he was hearing of the FBI or the ATF raiding his community were not true or if they were true that he could ward it off um but they showed relatively little interest there were a lot of people there um including some of the leftovers from the 1983 plot to blow up the Mara building who were at Elohim City they were never questioned. So McVay was living at Elohim City for some period of time? He was no this is this is a great unanswered question um according to the official version as presented you know by the Justice Department what the prosecutors said when they were asked you know on the record at the time they said McVay was never at Elohim City we have no evidence that he was ever there so the idea that you were trying to link Elohim City into the plot is a conspiracy theory. What I found out 15 16 17 years later is in fact the FBI had written in a document to the Justice Department that they had solid information that he'd been there every investigator senior investigator I talked to including Bob Ricks who was the head of the FBI in Oklahoma at the time talked to Robert Millar on a regular basis he said he had information that McVay had either been there or had passed through on a regular basis um when I spoke to one of the federal prosecutors and said you know why wasn't more done to look at Elohim City his response 15 years later maybe having forgotten how vehemently this was denied in the past he said so McVay was there so what which I found a very revealing little slip um you know there's a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence that he was there that he had friends there there was a shady German who lived at Elohim City by the name of Andreas Strasmeyer who ended up interviewing for four days straight in Germany a couple of years ago he knew McVay for sure because they'd met at a gun show he gave McVay his business card McVay called Elohim City two weeks before the bombing and according to an FBI document it may have been that he was calling to try and recruit somebody else because he wasn't sure if he could count on Terry Nichols Strasmeyer I don't believe was involved in the bombing having spoken to him at length and I don't think he would have spoken to me at all if he was but I do think he knows an awful lot and he told me some of it um but I think there are other things he knows that especially the extent of his friendship with McVay that he wasn't willing to let on just to give you a little hint of how close Strasmeyer may have been to McVay um fast forward six or seven months Strasmeyer was getting very nervous about federal law enforcement interest in him because they did become interested in him and he ended up leaving the country in very melodramatic fashion which is described in the book um one of the things that tipped off his friends in the far right that there may be a problem was um he bragged one day about having McVay's field jacket from the Gulf War and his friend Dave Holloway said oh come on Andy that's just nonsense you know you're just bragging as usual and he said no no no I really have it and he goes to a duffel bag and pulls out this jacket and Dave Holloway looks and sees that there's big red big red one insignia for the first infantry division and then he sees the the the the tag on it saying McVay and he goes holy crap you know this is not good um but again Strasmeyer was interviewed once very perfuncturally over the phone once he was back in Germany by two of the federal prosecutors and one FBI agent they just lobbed softball questions at him and it was clear the whole point of the interview was just to be able to say we've talked to you it's that particular um you know unfinished piece of business is now finished we can move on and um Danny Deffenbaugh who was the head of the FBI investigation into the bombing who was personally very interested in Strasmeyer was endlessly frustrated that that's the way things went. Thanks Ken Dante um one of the things about McVay was that he was part of this Christian identity movement and of course it's very much of an apocalyptic movement in some ways just generally to cause kind of a non-ending apocalypse it's kind of a warrior image would you like to comment if you know anything about the WMD idea like in a way he kind of created an asymmetric poor man's WMD which he drove to that uh the complex in Oklahoma City and I'm wondering and I think I I believe I read something that he had written about Sodom Hussein and the WMD is there kind of justifying that even justifying his own actions okay let me there are a few different pieces here to unpick so let me let me talk about a couple of them um the Christian identity movement is fascinating it's a it's a it's it's essentially you know a deeply racist form of religious belief that says that in a white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are essentially the true Christian the true children of Israel the Jews are the spawn of Satan and they have a whole theology going back to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden that justifies that and that African Americans are essentially you know subhuman um and it's a very dangerous it there are different theological strands of course it's not possible to have a fringe um belief like this without it breaking up into all kinds of rival factions um that it's a very dangerous ideology for a number of reasons and one of the offshoots of it is something that's known as the Phineas priesthood which again goes back to a story in the bible of a priest who used his javelin to kill um an Israelite who was having an affair with a Midianite woman I believe anyway the the theory is that Phineas was a hero for killing an interracial couple and that the Phineas priesthood is an elite vanguard of radical right-wing anti-government warriors whose job it is to go around killing people and waging revolution in the name of religious as well as political righteousness um Mugwe having said that was not part of that um he knew those people and I think he sympathized with them but there's no evidence that Mugwe had any kind of religious bent that pushed him in the directions that he went um what I think is a more interesting area of looking at the wellsprings of his revolutionary ideas is his service in the Gulf War and his experience of fighting the Iraqis and he was he went into the Gulf War as the perfect soldier he his superiors couldn't believe how extraordinary he was he was always perfectly turned out he knew his weaponry he excelled at every task that was given to him when the soldiers went kind of crazy on the weekends and got drunk he would make sure that he stayed sober and he would use his car to drive him around get him home safely charge money for it um everybody loved him he goes to the Gulf he's a gunner he his job is to man a Bradley fighting vehicle he wins medals um it performed extraordinary feats one on one on a particular occasion when he managed to kill in iraqi at a distance of about a mile uh one shot took him out um but as the fighting went on and in particular towards the in the four days of the ground war when literally the americans were moving forward and just grinding up iraqi soldiers into the sand with huge machines burying them alive um something happened to mcveigh and i'm not a psychologist and i wouldn't pretend to be able to describe in exact terms what that was but i can say that beforehand he was gung-ho he was killing with great alacrity some of his fellow soldiers reported that he actually killed soldiers who'd already surrendered therefore you know was potentially a war criminal he did all that with great gusto and then suddenly something hit him and he decided these people are poor conscripts they shouldn't be our enemy the united states has no business doing anything other than defending its own borders this is some great corruption we've been hoodwinked into performing a united nation's operation when it's the last thing we should be doing and mcveigh ended up identifying with iraqis he became disillusioned he left the army um and he's cracked in a certain way and one fascinating piece of information is that at a certain point about a year after he left the army he called a veterans administration hospital in florida uh he'd been feeling suicidal and was looking for psychological help um and they were willing to give it to him and then he said can i come in without giving my name and you know identifying myself and they said no no we need to know who you are and then he dropped the idea and never went in and it's tantalizing to think that if he'd sought help then things might have turned out rather differently but um you know that was certain i don't know anything to do with saddam hussein and weapons of mass destruction i'm not aware of any link that he made to that okay question here the book talks about how at a fairly key point in the investigation as a result of the fallout from ruby ridge that two of the fbi senior folks danie colson and larry potts were essentially sidelined can you talk a little bit about what you think the impact of that was on the direction of the investigation and also give us your assessment of the conduct of the fbi director louis free in this investigation it's a great question um one of the things that is absolutely hair raising when you get into the detail of this investigation is that there was a political battle royal going on within the fbi at the time and it had a terribly damaging effect on the investigation essentially in the wake of ruby ridge and waco there was tremendous amount of pressure from congress to find culprits for the screw ups and for the fbi to make itself accountable the atf also um louis free at the same time he took over after waco in 1993 he had this idea he had only been in the fbi for six years and i think you know partly for reasons that one can justify that he thought that the fbi was top-heavy two managerial which for which there's a very good argument to be made and partly i think for for personal reasons he didn't like the top brass of the fbi he felt like he wasn't outside he felt like they didn't like him he was going to go after them and by the time he was done as director he had replaced every single special agent in charge so the heads of the field divisions of the fbi he'd replaced every single one and he started that process right at the beginning and he had it in for those people um larry potz who he mentioned he wanted him to be his deputy director he was somebody who had gone through the ranks very fast he never was a special agent in charge um he was an exception but danny colson who was the special agent in charge in dallas when the bomb went off he was on the director's shit list uh joe martin olich who was up in detroit who played an instrumental role in going after james nickles fought furiously with the director because he didn't believe there's enough evidence to arrest james nickles for anything related to the bombing uh free said i don't care arrest him anyway we'll find the evidence afterwards martin olich ended up leaving the bureau early he was sidelined essentially but to come back to what you're talking about um there was a tremendous amount of pressure to find people who were accountable for the mistakes at ruby ridge in particular and what happened at ruby ridge from the fbi point of view just to say it very briefly is that there was a rewrite of the rules of engagement that effectively opened the door for an fbi sniper to kill vicki weaver who was the wife of the person who the federal government was trying to arrest while she was holding her 14-year-old baby in her arms and this was an appalling act by any by any standard and randy weaver who was the one they were after when they ended up trying to prosecute him in court after this debacle he ended up walking free his lawyer jerry spence managed to humiliate the government in court because they had really behaved in an appalling way and nothing nothing represented that more than this sniper shooting of vicki weaver in fact on radical right-wing circles the name of the sniper was circulated at gun shows and you know people were encouraged to go find him and kill him which never happened um but anyway it was very important for certain members of congress for members of the public for people who care deeply about this to find who had been responsible for changing the rules of engagement and the fbi launched its own internal investigation the justice department launched an investigation it's incredibly murky to sort of figure out exactly what happened but larry pot certainly was involved in the discussions of changing the rules of engagement danie colson was peripherally involved in those discussions as well and in the summer of 1995 when the oakland city bombing investigation was in a very hot um they ended up being put on administrative leave along with three others they were never told why they were being put on administrative leave they stayed there for two years they weren't even given the means to defend themselves because they didn't know what they were being accused of and pots and colson in the end were just allowed to retire there was no disciplinary action taken against them but they were effectively taken out of the picture um they had actually been taken off the oakland city investigation even sooner than that colson was involved in the first few days he's a very um he's a very interesting character he had tremendous amount of experience in in going up against the radical far right he had been responsible for a siege in 1985 against a group called the covenant the sword in the arm of the lord which ended peacefully unlike weco um so he was a logical person to turn to in this in this investigation he certainly felt like he should have been asked to run it instead of which he was told his services were no longer required after the first week or so he was very shocked by that larry potts meanwhile was promoted to deputy director um just a couple of weeks after the bombing louis free thought that the bombing would give him enough cover to make the appointment stick uh jamie garellic the deputy attorney general was furiously opposed but she eventually relented um but after the appointment was made there was a public outcry everybody said how can you point this guy as deputy as deputy of the fvi when he's got you know taint when his name is tainted from ruby ridge larry potts basically fought for his name for six weeks instead of overseeing the oklahoma city investigation and then when he was put on administrative leave that was the end of his career um who did their point to to run the investigation the logical person would have been bob ricks who was the special agent in charge in oklahoma ricks had a couple of strikes against him one was that he had been very charming with uh robert millard ahead of elaheem city um and there were questions as to whether he'd handled that right i don't know if that's the reason why free overlooked him i think the reason free overlooked him was because um they'd both been rivals for the job of director of the fbi in 1993 um and free didn't want to give any ammunition to to ricks to challenge him in any way which is the way he seemed to behave with a lot of the special agents in charge the ricks is shunted aside for the first month they have less than a month they have welden kennedy who's somebody on the way out of the bureau regarded as a safe pair of hands he comes in from arizona he he minds the shop then he's out of there because he doesn't want to be involved anymore he ends up becoming deputy director in in in potts's place and they appoint a man called danie deafenbaugh who had never been in charge of anything much he was a bomb specialist he'd been the number two in mobile alabama um but he was not regarded as somebody who had any managerial skill and i spoke to danie deafenbaugh a tremendous amount of this book he was a terrific source i'm extremely grateful to him but he's the first person who will tell you you shouldn't put me in charge of anything i don't have the right temperament you know he's he's got a short fuse he's irascible he doesn't get along with people and he didn't have the sufficient political clout to do the things that the head of the investigation should have been able to do so for example when he wanted to interview andra strassmeyer and he was overruled that's a typical example of the limits of danie deafenbaugh's power he wanted to go off to somebody by the name of roger more who was um a retired boatbuilder very rich uh lived part of the year in iranche in arkansas with his girlfriend part of the year in florida with his wife he had an open relationship with both of them he went on the gun show circuit his his girlfriend ran an ammunition business there are there are a lot of reasons to think that mcvay's relationship with roger more was very fishy uh danie deafenbaugh was one of them but the prosecutors decided they wanted roger more as a prosecution witness because they believe that mcvay had been responsible for a robbery at roger more's ranch and their theory was that this is what had financed the bombing mcdeafenbaugh was overruled on that yet again in the run up to the trial the prosecutors went to a field agent not to deafenbaugh but to a field agent to go through the witness testimony they went around deafenbaugh deafenbaugh was furious there was nothing he could do he was basically burned from all sides um he was thought of as somebody who wasn't the right person for the job and it's really extraordinary that louis free appointed him and one has to speculate that the reason was that free wanted somebody relatively weak in oklahoma city so that the real leadership of the investigation could be conducted elsewhere along the lines that i've been describing all along i hope that answers your question gentlemen in front here what's your name sir gary forber with the epoch times um i might understand then that that um mcvay um when he checked out the oklahoma city he he knew that the bomb was then going to it was really targeting the the daycare center now i thought it was something that he didn't want to happen but it was just a collateral damage but you're saying it was a deliberate intention to make that the he certainly said after the bombing you know whoops sorry didn't mean to kill the kids um i don't believe him from an instant no i think it was absolutely deliberate he wanted to take revenge for the children who died at weco um there's another little wrinkle to that story which is something that no one's ever got to the bottom of and various people have tried the local law enforcement tried the federal for prosecutors tried to look at it as well in 1993 terry nickles his two-year-old son jason asphyxiated to death on a plastic bag at the nickles farm um and it was deemed to be an accident but no one completely believed that it was first of all marifay nickles the boy's mother didn't believe it she first um wondered if her husband had had something to do with it she was terrified that he had she suspected mcvey she suspected all kinds of people the local coroner didn't believe entirely that it was an accident but he couldn't prove otherwise the local police had their suspicions as i say federal law enforcement had their suspicions one possibility and we don't know any more than that is that mcvey killed jason nickles first of all as some kind of really twisted way to terrify the life out of terry and force him to drag you know scare him into doing what he wanted from there on out that that's one possible motivation and the other is there's a kind of trial run to see if he could kill children and and and be okay with it i don't know if that's true or not but the part i'm absolutely convinced of is that he knew about the daycare center and that he blew it up deliberately we know that because he visited in december of 1994 and we know that also because you know i never did this because i never went to a climb the city before the bombing but when you were on fifth street where he left the truck and looked up you could see the artwork of the children on the plate glass windows of the day of the mara building directly above you um and you know anybody who had even you know if you were driving up and you looked at the building you would have seen that there was children's activity going on on the second floor directly above the place where they left the truck any other questions what lessons if any can we take from this story hit to put it to put it in another way why should we revisit this now okay that's a great question i mean i think you know the two stages of answering that question the first is i think if the lessons of Oklahoma City had been articulated at the time there would have been an opportunity to learn from the maybe things would have gone differently in the run up to 9 11 that's point number one point number two where are we now i think it's instructive to look at the two incidents together actually you know how the federal government responded to the threat um in 94 95 how they responded to the different threat from al-qaeda in the run up to 9 11 and whether the federal authorities are any better now down anticipating threats from places they aren't looking than they were then you know i think that's a very pressing question i think another pressing question is to ask how do the federal law enforcement agencies work together you know how can we avoid the secret service the FBI the atf from all being at each other's throats with holding information um and being compartmentalized in that way in the first place and i think that question is very far from being answered you know when on joint terrorism task forces sort of a fairly big answer to that in theory but you look at what happened recently with the fast and furious scandal with the atf you know when they were walking guns across the border into mexico in an attempt to track across border crime and and it all blew up in their faces every fbi agent i've spoken to said you know this is unconscionable how can they do this they're a bunch of yahoo's they don't know what they're doing why did the atf even exist you know here we are in 2000 this was 2011 when i had those conversations but 2012 now you know those kind of you know the atf is now part of the justice department as is the fbi previously it was part of treasury that hasn't helped joint terrorism task forces i'm sure they work in some circumstances my experience of talking to atf and fbi agents is that every now and again you come across stories of how they work together beautifully so they certainly can um but um you know one of the most memorable lines that i was given was um an fbi agent who was based in oklahoma who was describing you know the way in which the atf made the first screw up at ruby ridge which they did they were the ones who are after randy weaver and it escalated from there they were the ones who made the first screw up at weiko which is also true um they were going to go in to try and investigate illegal weapons there they found out that they knew the people in the in the compound knew that they were coming but they went ahead anyway there was a shootout a whole bunch of people died at the beginning of the siege and in both cases the fbi then came in afterwards and you know in my view made their own mistakes but the line that i love is um tim arney this this agent in in muskogee said you know here we were looking at alaheim city the fact that the atf were talking about possibly raiding the place which they were and he went oh my god we don't want to take another bite out of that shit sandwich and that's the way the two agencies institutionally regard each other and i think to this day you know um another thing about alaheim city was that they did have meetings joint terrorism task force meetings effectively informal ones where the fbi and the atf would get together every now and again to talk about what they knew about what was going on at alaheim city because it had been a target for law enforcement for years before the bombing they would meet in a hotel room they'd sit there look at each other and they wouldn't say a word you know they would chitchat they would say things that meant nothing they weren't ever going to spit what they knew to the other neither of them knew very much to start with for the most part and they wouldn't communicate to the other what they knew even though that was the purpose of the meeting and i heard that from atf people who attended the meetings and from fbi people attended the meetings it's like yeah we it was kind of a joke we'd get together we'd theoretically be pooling our knowledge but actually that's the last thing we'd be doing and you know i think that problem hasn't gone away you know we at the new america foundation look at all the terrorism cases since 9 11 we've i think they're 190 plus center for roland here maintains the database of jihadi terrorism cases and it's interesting to me that in none of the jihadi terrorism cases of anybody try to do a biological radiological nuclear or chemical attack but if you can prepare with the right wing since 9 11 there've been four cases of fairly serious attempts to build a radiological weapon by people coming out of the right wing movement so in terms of you know we're always sort of looking at this the majino line problem it's sort of always looking at the wrong thing in a sense if there is a radiological bomb attack in this country it is far more likely to come out of the right wing which you've already said is sort of slightly re-energized when i say the right wing militia movement than it is to come out of sort of an al-qaeda related organization based on the just the evidence we have so i mean that i think they're i mean one i guess one sort of way to kind of close this andrew is to obviously oklahoma city was the you know it was as it helped clinton in a sense destroy new gingrich and it certainly destroyed the the militia movement what do you think the future of our right wing terrorism is in this country and given the fact in particular since 9 11 there has been a massive you know whether it's dhs or tsa or a hundred joint terrorism task forces and there's a huge amount of effort and and by the way a lot of this effort is directed at the right wing going going back to our database it it's just as likely for the government to put an informant into a right wing case as it is in a jihadi case is just as likely for there to be serious law enforcement effort based on the data that exists so what is the future of this are they sort of do they have any future i guess is a question wow um i don't know if i'm qualified to answer the question um i think you know one thing you can do is just you know one thing i i i cannot the one way i can answer it is to look back historically at in where the wellsprings of this kind of violence have come from and it has been a constant presence in it's been a feature of this country going back quite a long way um in the 1980s just to go back that far there were tremendously effective groups there was a group called the order that that killed allenberg the radio host in denver they knocked over an armored truck in northern california and got away with more than three million dollars there was the covenant that soared the arm of the lord they plotted a lot of things they did in practice rather fewer but they they had very serious plots to kill federal judges kill FBI agents they were thinking about putting cyanide in city water supplies this kind of thing in the nineties you had the okloma city bombing something that happened very recently which you know tying the politics into it which i think is very interesting um you know one of the features of the nineties until the okloma city bombing is that it became rather trendy especially within the context of the new gringrich revolution to attack the atf to attack the fbi to talk about jack booted thugs in in in bucket helmets um i think g gordon lydde on his radio show encouraged his listeners to shoot atf agents and make sure there's only headshots you know this kind of really irresponsible talk um there's been a whiff of that kind of thing recently i don't know if anybody remembers in 2010 uh someone flew a light plane into the irs building in austin texas um and there was a republican congressman from iowa um it's steve king i think i always get him a lot with p king but steve king who said you know i sympathize with why he did it i think there is a wellspring of sympathy at the you know within the political mainstream maybe on the edge of the political mainstream but nevertheless with it within it for the idea of someone who's so mad at the federal government that they're going to take up a weapon or use a plane as a weapon and and and and take retaliate reaction that's going to result in loss of life damaged property and so on and so forth and that to me is an alarming thing and if you look at the radicalization of the republican party and again i wouldn't tar the whole party with this but i think there has been as there was in the early to mid 90s a sort of a sense that somehow this is a legitimate part of american discourse the idea that you can take arms and start shooting people in the name of patriotism um and it's been part of the country from the beginning you know i think that one of the ways that american heroism is defined has always been in one of two ways there's a terrific book um by billy gibson called it's in here at the very beginning i'll look at our warrior dreams it's called you know we talked about the two sort of archetypical american heroes are you know the good soldier and the outlaw and mcveigh in many ways typified both of those things and i think the outlaw still has a romance in this society which is potentially very dangerous especially when you have weapons of mass destruction that are potentially within the reach of ordinary people well thank you andrew that was a really very interesting presentation thank you everybody for coming and let's give andrew a round of applause