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R. Smith, an Oklahoma City psychiatrist and retired Air Force Captain, who specialized in aggression, violence, hypnosis and the mental and physical effects of combat for Vietnam Veterans. Smith also acted as, among other things, consultant for the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Services, the Veteran’s Affairs Administration Hospital in OKC, the security services in Pakistan and, later, a contractor treating active duty members of the US military at various installations, including (later) Guantanamo prison camp.
Smith first met with McVeigh at El Reno Prison on June 6, 1995. Two days later, on June 8, the court sealed the psychological records of both McVeigh and Nichols.
“long term significant depressive illnesses” and PTSD but also “paranoia … character/personality disorders; borderline personality disorder with obsessive features [and] grandiose features and perfectionist.” McVeigh never mentioned this to his biographers.
Although Smith is the most often mentioned mental expert to have been involved with McVeigh, and despite McVeigh’s claims that only two or three “shrinks” saw him, Jones briefly noted in his book that “Dr. Smith was only one of several” psychiatrists to see McVeigh. Among those who saw him on a regular basis were clinical and forensic psychiatrist, Lee Norton, Ph.D, forensic psychologist Dr. Seymour Halleck and clinical psychologist, neuropsychologist, psychotherapist and hypnotist, H. Anthony Semone, Ph.D.
McVeigh told Norton that during the Special Forces tryout “he was told what they ‘really did,’ which included bringing illegal substances into the country and hunting and killing potentially innocent people.” According to Norton, his inability “to reconcile his ‘perfect’ image of the ‘good’ that the Army performed for the sake of the country to what he was told their actual mission may at times involve,” caused him to experience a remarkable, even earth shattering, sense of “dissonance.”
McVeigh sometimes expressed confusion about individuals who swore they met him and who seemed to have accurate details about where he was and when, but McVeigh said he could not remember.
In clinical terms, a delusion is a firmly held, false belief and incorrect inference about external reality that is considered pathological when, despite what most other people within ones culture or subculture believe and when presented with proof to the contrary, the person defends and vigorously maintains it.
For instance, McVeigh initially told Otto and Coyle that the day of the bombing he had been operating “within the confines of the United States government,” and that the truck might have been switched because the bomb was not supposed to have caused the horrific damage it did.
Farrington implicated a number of people whom he said ordered, sanctioned and provided material support for the bombing. Most were connected to Aryan Nations, the National Alliance and Militia Of Montana.96 Sergent Mac, he said, turned out to be “a real idiot” who disobeyed orders and “blew up the wrong place.” He was actually supposed to blow up the courthouse. He was also supposed to detonate the bomb at night but took it upon himself to change the timing. While later media reports detailing his claims are very different from the accounts he initially gave the FBI and Jones Team, Farrington
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“the Ryder trucks were switched” and McVeigh had not built the actual truck bomb, as he now insisted.
A decade later Terry Nichols would describe McVeigh’s angry outburst upon learning that both the target and the time of the bombing had been changed.
lingering mysteries surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing: an unidentified shaved leg clad in a combat boot found in the rubble at the blast site.
although the FBI did not question the managers there until December 1995.
Unknown to both McVeigh’s and Nichols’ defense teams, DNA tests on the leg were conducted in a private lab in 1997 but, while the Oklahoma Medical Examiner was given a copy of the results, they remain confidential. In December 2015, the FBI disclosed that they were unaware that DNA tests were conducted or the existence of a report detailing the findings, but said they would look into the matter. However, according to an FBI crime lab spokesperson, the FBI would only perform new DNA tests, using more advanced
techniques, if the original FBI agents in charge of the case requested it.
Roger Charles said that the FBI could not risk exposing known conspirators because it would, in turn, expose a complex network of government informants and undercover investigations.
Spying is attractive to loonies.… Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field. – CIA contract researcher, Harvard Psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Murray, Explorations Of Personality, 1938
McVeigh strongly resented suggestions that another person (or people) may have influenced, manipulated, directed or even controlled him. Nevertheless, the overall opinion of the mental health experts was that it was unlikely McVeigh came up with the idea to bomb the Murrah building and may not have even played a “primary role,” but was part of “a larger conspiracy” that went “much deeper” than McVeigh was willing to let on.
McVeigh had re-enacted the deeds of the fictional Earl Turner, protagonist of The Turner Diaries.
Dissociative Identity Disorders (DID) are defined as extreme and long lasting manifestation of traumatic stress resulting in “a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior.”
(e.g. daydreaming),
What makes dissociative states pathological or maladaptive is the inability to control their occurrence and the episodic amnesia often accompanying them.
Those displaying symptoms of DID tend to be highly suggestible and easily hypnotizable.
depict him as a narcissistic, fragmented, paranoid, delusional, psychotic, suggestible, amnesiac man suffering from PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Even with the failure of several government agencies to turn over critical discovery material about their investigations, and the manipulation and destruction of
information, the Jones Team was able to chronicle many of McVeigh’s movements throughout the country. The many motel records, speeding tickets, phone records, receipts, photographs, and letters support the idea that several characters with distinct claims of self-identity within McVeigh had contributed to the trail in a conspiracy of multiple selves.
“Tim Tuttle” frequented gun shows, his name apparently borrowed from the main character in the film Brazil, Harry Tuttle: a vigilante terrorist out to fix a corrupt system. In Arizona, Montana and Idaho, a mercenary known as “Sergeant Mac” emerged. “Daryl Bridges” made numerous and incriminating phone calls to several well-known (and not so well-known) neo-Nazis. “Shawn Rivers” maintained a series of storage spaces throughout the country and filled them with stolen guns, disguises, and bomb-making materials, and “Tim Johnson” checked into a few motels. Although McVeigh said the existence and
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The McVeigh as Dissociated Bomber scenario presents further linkages and intersections between Experimental and Guilty Agent stories, and recurrent narrative elements found in both. Dr. Jolly West, ace practitioner of all things creepy, was among the experts quoted in a 1985 Washington Post article about “the quirks of the modern spy” and other deep-cover operators who inhabit the “shadowy world of counterintelligence.”
loyalty to one’s country or an ideal; revenge; or to damage those whose secrets they sell and betray; and what West called a “bag of mixed psychological motivations.” His colleagues expounded on this bag, saying operatives are overly romantic thrill-seeking escapists with a need for control, a desire for power, narcissistic and conceited. They are empowered by the very secrets they harbor and their ability to conceal information, including about their own selves. A State Department consultant said that the operator “lives a life of half-secrets and half-truths. He can live life without having
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It is these very character weaknesses that spy recruiters and handlers count on and exploit. West said recruiters and handlers are “espionage professionals” and described them as “very smart … they know how to get their subject involved just a little bit, doing something that seems harmless” and end up seducing them into taking actions they normally would never consider. In the old “carrot and stick approach,” the carrot could be any number of things the recruited spy desires (mentally or materially) while the stick, wielded on noncompliant agents, is blackmail. The handlers threaten to expose
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Remember Michael Gelles, the navy counter-intelligence professional called in by the FBI to hypnotize the woman who saw Tim McVeigh with two other guys at Maloney’s real estate office in Missouri? Gelles, not just a one-trick hypno-pony, also had some insight into the workings of McVeigh’s real or imagined career as a government-sponsored covert warrior on a secret mission. In 2000, Gelles, Chief Psychologist for Naval Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) (among his other titles) made headlines for his NCIS internship program, which trained college students and agents of regional, state,
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Acting largely autonomously and separated from friends and family, they live a particularly lonely existence and are particularly prone to developing deep attachments to their targets. They may come to identify with targeted individuals and groups and question the utility of certain laws, the purpose and rightness of their assignment, and their own involvement in it. It then becomes justifiable to engage in criminal activity beyond what is necessary to maintain their cover or achieve their objective. Insufficient guidance, instruction and encouragement from handlers and low pay versus the
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idiosyncrasies” of their fake personalities.108 Or worse.
An article in the American Criminal Law Review succinctly observed, “Undercover officers are at serious risk of developing ‘split personality’ or experiencing the ‘self as unreal…traits characteristic of dissociative identity disorder, in which multiple personalities recurrently take over a person’s behavior.’”
A series of deceptions might be orchestrated, including being told they have failed and did not make the cut, for the purposes of observing their reactions. Such methods engender lingering “suspicion and distrust” about the very institution on whose behalf they work. In fact, observed one study, “agents readily admit that the most troublesome symptoms of anxiety and paranoia do not typically arise with uncertainty over the enemy [or target], but more when it is the employer’s motives that are perceived to be the source of the threat.”
One study pointed out that, agents in the midst of an operation, more so than before or after, exhibited “elevated psychiatric symptoms [similar to] those of psychiatric outpatients.”
Agents embedded in terrorism investigations are said to have it the worst.
they should obtain a copy of the July 1995 issue of Soldier Of Fortune Magazine.
Others have noted that, like Oswald, McVeigh left the military “under a cloud” of unknowns, became politically alienated, engaged in restless nomadic wanderings, had a deep desire to be recognized by a strong father figure and a desperate need to “assert himself,”
McVeigh’s documented dissociative disorder and other revelations only compound matters and add to an already complex array of information that must be considered when evaluating his Guilty Agent claims and, in fact, open doors for the creation of Experimental Wolf stories.
and, wouldn’t you know it, he was one of the primary architects of the military’s SERE program (more on that shortly).
The results of the polygraph indicated McVeigh was dishonest when he stated no other conspirators beyond
Nichols and Fortier had participated in the bombing plot.
The aim of the Alice in Wonderland or confusion technique is to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee…The confusion technique is designed not only to obliterate the familiar, but to replace it with the weird … as the process continues, day after day as necessary, [the situation] becomes mentally intolerable [and] he is likely to make significant admissions, or even pour out his story.
– KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, CIA,
We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files. We’d like to help you learn to help yourself. Look around you all you see are sympathetic eyes. Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home. […] Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes. Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes. It’s a little secret just the Robinson’s affair. Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids. […] Laugh about it, shout about ...
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Mickey’s attorney confirmed that her condition was growing worse but said he felt it best that she not seek
treatment through the Coast Guard as the quality of care they provided was questionable and they could very well leak information.
Like Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, had done, Mickey McVeigh spoke publicly about her son’s innocence, claimed he worked in some sort of undercover capacity for the government and accused mysterious forces of spying on her family prior to and after they framed her son. Unlike Marguerite Oswald, Mickey McVeigh’s claims and assumedly her distress, led to her involuntary confinement in a psychiatric facility in early 1997.
Earlier that summer, several news outlets reported that hypodermic syringes were among the contents of food trays delivered to McVeigh and Nichols. This led to the suspension of Chuck Mildner, the Chief of Security at the prison in charge of the guards who delivered the trays.
