Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

to the dismay of the Dissidents, Oklahoma District Attorney Robert Macy, lead prosecutor in both McVeigh’s and Nichols’ trials and the most aggressive opponent of the Grand Jury’s formation, was appointed to oversee the Grand Jury hearings and determine what information could be presented. Nevertheless, Key established the OKC Bombing Investigation Committee (OKCBIC), made up of volunteers and a professional research staff who would conduct their own investigation and gather evidence.

situation that, although often raising more questions than it answered, proved irrefutably damning to the government’s story.

including Andreas Strassmeir (“Andy The German”) – a German national living in the U.S. on a retired visa and head of paramilitary training at Elohim City.

the FBI improperly destroyed some of it,

It was clear that there was prior knowledge.

Roger Charles later wrote that the prosecution was worried by the large number of witnesses who recalled seeing McVeigh with others and so, with the help of “a handful of trusted FBI agents, [they] set about making the problems go away. They interviewed and

re-interviewed witnesses, looking for weaknesses in their stories or ways to get them to change their minds.” Included were lead FBI agents Scott Mendeloff and Jon Hersley’s “extensive efforts” to “neutralize” Elliot’s employees, “convince [them] that John Doe 2 was a phantom” and thereby, prevent the spectral conspirator from appearing at the trials. In fact, “Hersley was the prosecution’s go-to person to resolve many of the holes in the case.” Lead prosecutor Larry Mackey later acknowledged that Hersley regularly “hammered” witnesses who might aid the defense team’s cases. Further, another lead FBI agent in the case, Danny Deffenbaugh, disclosed that in his opinion, Hersley commonly distorted evidence, lied about his investigation (or lack thereof) and often acted outside of his authority. “We had to watch over Jon. He’d go around trying to stop viable investigations, especially if they involved other people in the conspiracy. Every time we caught him, I had to bring him in the woodshed to paddle him. Then he’d go right back at it.”

What’s more, it appeared that the FBI was making other evidence disappear. For instance, in November 1995, the Jones Team requested transcripts of all OKCPD and OCKFD dispatch tapes of transmissions in the two weeks prior to the bombing and the day of April 19. Rather than honoring this request, later discovery material would show that the FBI had “accidently destroyed” these dispatch tapes. This was not the only instance of such shenanigans.

Public confidence in the criminal justice system and law enforcement agencies, generally, and the FBI, especially, had sharply declined in the wake of Ruby Ridge, Waco, the first World Trade Center bombing, OKC and Atlanta Olympic bombings and a recent FBI Crime Lab scandal.71

the Key Grand Jury and theories about John Doe 2, confidently told reporters, “We believe the system should and will work, and those responsible for this horrific act will never walk the face of this Earth again.” For him, the willingness of Americans to believe that “our free institutions can commonly be corrupted to dark and evil purposes,” was a result of “watching too many Oliver Stone movies. What we see on the movie screens these days demonizes government agencies and public officials. Free institutions cannot survive this kind of cynicism.” In fact, Keating continued, the bombing itself was a result of just such paranoia.

Judge Matsch, however, ruled that much of the eyewitness testimony and physical evidence (or lack thereof) that Jones wanted to use, was inadmissible, thereby severely hampering his ability to raise questions in the mind of jurors about the Others Unknown.

Although there were up to twenty-five surveillance cameras positioned in and around the Murrah Building on April 19, the FBI never produced them during discovery nor did they enter them as evidence at the criminal trials. The whereabouts of footage from all of the twenty-five known surveillance cameras remained unknown and Matsch did not compel the FBI to produce them. Amazingly, as none of the witnesses who saw McVeigh in the days leading up to the bombing and on the morning of April 19 testified (assumedly because they all saw him with other people) and since the surveillance tapes from the Murrah never surfaced, and while nobody argued otherwise, prosecutors never even established McVeigh’s presence in OKC on the morning of the 19th.76

Who would ever have guessed that a case, already highly circumstantial, in which the federal government was asking for the death penalty, would leave the jury without a single witness to Tim McVeigh’s whereabouts [from April 17 to April 19]?”

A DOJ Inspector General’s (IG) inspection and Audit Report issued months earlier had strongly criticized the FBI’s Crime Laboratory for mishandling evidence in several high profile cases, including (but not limited to) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, an assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush that same year, the 1995 investigation of ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, and the Oklahoma City bombing. The IG initiated its investigation after the Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI Crime Lab, Frederick Whitehurst, PhD (considered the FBI’s most highly qualified bomb residue and explosives expert) went public with allegations about corrupt crime lab practices. The IG final report concluded, among other things, that the OKC bombing investigation was one of the most serious cases of evidence tampering that the IG had ever encountered and that the FBI crime lab had “repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without scientific basis.”78

Michael Fortier told jurors that, after the events at Waco in 1993, McVeigh had become very disturbed, angry, defensive and paranoid. Then, in 1994, McVeigh wrote Fortier, informing him that he (with Nichols’ assistance) was planning on taking “some kind of positive offensive action” intended to avenge Waco. After this point, he had begun to confide various details about his preparations to Fortier who then agreed to help. He admitted that he had accompanied McVeigh to a rented storage space where McVeigh had stashed stolen bomb-making materials and, on one occasion, to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah building.82

“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

his execution in June 2001.

“not all of the questions have been answered”

After his release from prison in January 2006, he and his family were placed in the Witness Protection Program and given new identities.

May 1, 2001, after the FBI disclosed that it had withheld thousands of discovery documents from McVeigh’s defense team during the 1997 trial, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered a thirty-day postponement of the execution to allow attorneys to review the documents.

worked in the HUD office inside the Murrah and who survived the bombing, later testified that the day before the bombing he met four employees of the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency in charge of security for the Murrah and other federal buildings. The GSA employees told Lawton that the GSA headquarters sent them from Fort Worth to check security in the Murrah’s security. (Associated

14. Jones 1998: 31,359; Jones had worked as Richard Nixon’s personal researcher and, interestingly, had served as general counsel for the Oklahoma ACLU at the same time, a position he stepped down from when the ACLU publicly called for Nixon’s resignation. Jones had a history of representing unpopular clients such as Keith Green, arrested during an anti-war protest at the University of Oklahoma in which he had carried a Vietcong Flag and represented Abbie Hoffman when the Oklahoma State University banned him from speaking on campus.

their stories. In addition, a number of individuals on the route from Junction City to OKC saw McVeigh with other

individuals in the early morning hours of April 19.

While the FBI and federal prosecutors had for years continued to deny the existence of any such footage, the memo, which was permitted entry as evidence during Terry Nichols’ 2004 state trial, was described by Nichols’ defense team as “direct evidence of the involvement of others in the bombing conspiracy” (Wright 193).

In addition to the Murrah surveillance tapes the Jones team also sought copies of photographs taken by Sheri Moore who, arriving at the Murrah building for an appointment in the Social Security office on April 19, at 9 AM observed a brown pickup truck parked illegally in a handicapped spot very close to a Ryder truck. Annoyed, and carrying a camera, Moore took pictures of the truck. The explosion occurred after she took them as she approached the entrance. She dropped the film off to be developed, and when she went to pick it up two weeks later, FBI agents were waiting for her, intervened and took both the pictures, which never surfaced again.

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories. Regnery Publishing, 1997: 20 also published in Human Events “What Really Happened in the Oklahoma City Bombing? May Victims’ Families Believe FBI Knew Bombing Was Being Planned” Oct 21, 1997.

Investigators also found a driver’s license for ‘Bob Miller,’ the alias of McVeigh’s friend and suspected government informant Roger Moore.

Evans-Pritchard is among those who felt that Strassmeir was involved in a joint U.S.-German intelligence operation whose mission was to locate the source of Neo-Nazi propaganda passed between the U.S. and Germany. Others believed he was an operative involved in covert intelligence gathering and sting operations conducted by various agencies, including the FBI, that targeted extreme right Patriot and WPM movements. The issue of McVeigh’s proximity to ongoing domestic intelligence operations is explored further in later chapters throughout this book.

43,000 ‘lead sheets’ and 3,100 additional reports generated by interviews with witnesses.

when contacted, refused to cooperate, claiming the FBI had specifically instructed them not to speak to either defense team or cooperate with them in any manner. Eventually, Ron Woods, lead attorney for Nichols, brokered a deal with prosecutors wherein the government would provide investigative reports in exchange for the defense team’s investigative memos and while the government did not keep their end of the bargain, this is partially why the Jones Team began keeping two sets of memoranda and obscured information within the ‘regular’ set.

79. For eight years, Whitehurst, considered the FBI’s most highly qualified bomb residue and explosives expert, had continued to tell his superiors about ongoing corruption within and mismanagement of the lab, which, he said, adversely affected the conclusions and testimony given by FBI Lab experts in over fifty-five cases, including the aforementioned. However, rather than correcting the problems, the FBI dismissed Whitehurst (described by his superiors in one performance evaluation as “the most outstanding forensic chemist in the lab’s explosive trace unit”) from his position, subjected him to various forms of harassment and ordered him not to speak to his former co-workers or attorneys about the allegations. When his superiors failed to take action, Whitehurst publicly exposed the crime lab and in doing so, instigated the IG to conduct an investigation. The Chief of the crime lab gave false testimony to Congress and FBI Director Louis Freeh concerning Whitehurst’s allegations and the events leading to his suspension. However, in 1988, after Whitehurst sued the FBI for wrongful termination, the FBI agreed to a $1.6 million-dollar settlement as well as $258,580 for Whitehurst’s legal fees.

would inspire and catalyze other revolutionary acts.2 FBI Special Agents Jon Hersley and Larry Tongate, two lead investigators in the case, felt compelled, in their 2004 book Simple Truths: The Real Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation, to correct “various inaccurate and irresponsible theories that this notorious event spawned” and “tell the real story” of the Oklahoma bombing. Restating their intentions throughout the book, the authors offer “a much-needed factual history of the case” and Simple Truths purports to offer a “contribution to accuracy in history.” Tongate and Hersley summarize and advance the FBI’s conclusion and the case prosecutors presented at the criminal trials of McVeigh and Nichols and assert that, having turned over every stone and followed every lead, “all other theories proved implausible [and] no credible evidence existed that anyone other than McVeigh and Nichols were involved.”

After all, they emphasize, McVeigh himself admitted such. In his introduction to the book, retired FBI agent and Governor of Oklahoma at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, described the bombing as an act of “monstrous evil” but assured readers that Simple Truths “is the closed book on the case. Two evil men did this and two evil men paid.” Simple Truths is illustrative of the way in which the government’s Lone Wolf story is oddly similar to McVeigh’s own.

I discuss new information which has surfaced since 2001 and introduce new evidence to show how Guilty Agent theories are originally rooted in stories told by McVeigh himself, both prior to and after the bombing and how stories such as these may be more plausible than previously imagined.

startling contextual and biographical details about McVeigh. In constructing this Experimental history, I employ both fictional and nonfictional texts including those about McVeigh and update readers on recent controversial and provocative bioethical issues surrounding, among other practices, the use of non-lethal interrogation, surveillance and “soldier enhancement” methods.

This hidden narrative sheds light on, or helps clarify, unknown or unresolved biographical elements of McVeigh’s life, controversies surrounding the Gulf War and contributes to a number of larger ongoing discussions and debates surrounding current U.S. government, military and medical policies and practices. We will also explore a nearly hidden history of McVeigh’s participation and experiences in the Gulf War.

bombing, an accusation also made by others pejoratively labeled (and thus dismissed) as “conspiracy theories.”

undisclosed in Apocalypse, was his role as a paid expert consultant for McVeigh’s defense team. Noteworthy,

evidence, lied about his investigation (or lack thereof) and often acted outside

Similarly, in his encyclopedic 1998 book, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, conspiracy-genre writer David Hoffman posited two theories: Either the bombing was a sting gone wrong, or a deliberate black operation. Hoffman, like many others writers, acknowledges that the ‘truth’ of the bombing is unreachable given the vast amount of missing data. Still, he concludes that the event was likely a deep-cover black operation orchestrated by powerful but faceless elites and executed in the typical style of a tactical “strategy of tension.”

John Trochman, a well-known voice within the Patriot Movement, leader of the Montana Militia and now known government informant, told reporters McVeigh was a victim of the “Oswald Syndrome; […], “a patsy” whose sole function was to “provide deep cover for the CIA…after all,” Trochman asked, “Who trained him? The military.” For conspiracy theorists like Trochman, the real story was easy to suppress because “the American people have been so brainwashed they can’t see the truth anymore” (Omaha World Herald “An Inconsequential Verdict in the Eyes of McVeigh Sympathizers, He’ll Always Be Innocent, Jury Selection” March 30, 1997.)

One such trauma, called ‘Information Stress,’ resulted from “obsessive absorption” with computers, television or other modern-day hobbies, noting that recent generations “have been molded, not by rich real-life experiences [but] information imparted electronically via television, film, computers and other advances in communication technologies” that convey “narrow, shallow and violent” images and messages, lead to crises of identity (at best) and actual violence (at worst) and render people mere “holograms of the society they inhabit.” While the most common IDs led to “ongoing altered states of awareness,” when in a “more advanced” and extreme stage, ‘the delusional stage,’ an individual’s ability to distinguish reality, fantasy and illusion is impaired, causing them to suffer “vivid delusions” and confusion about whether they are actually awake or dreaming.

While there, he, along with several other undergraduate students, became a subject for psychological tests conducted by a former interrogator for the WWII intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – Henry Murray. The tests, which lasted several months, sought to measure reactions to extreme stress and distress. Students wrote essays about themselves, were taken into a room and placed in a seat facing bright lights and a two-way mirror, hooked up to electrodes and then berated, belittled and subjected to brutal verbal attacks directed at their egos and beliefs. The experience and their reactions to it were filmed, and then played back to them repeatedly throughout the course of the study. Kaczynski’s brother said that, prior to his participation in the test, his brother had been emotionally stable. In 1962, at the age of twenty, Kaczynski graduated from Harvard and enrolled in a

Hinckley grew up in a wealthy family with elite political connections, including the Bush family.

Hinckley had a significant effect on the role of mental health in criminal prosecutions.

Hinckley, perhaps more than any other lone nut before him, sparked gun-control debates that eventually led to the passage of the Brady Bill,

“the rise in reported incidents of people snapping suddenly and violently [and] sensational crimes, mass slayings and quieter instances of people snapping in everyday life situations.” Average, everyday people were being “pushed to the breaking point and beyond” and becoming “anxious … confused … overwhelmed … overloaded … vulnerable to manipulation and ultimately less capable of thinking and acting as fully human beings.” They attributed this situation to “traumatic social, political and technological transitions in cultures besieged by fanatical mindsets and apocalyptic messages,”

snapping. To them, both Waco and the OKC bombing indicated a much larger group of “vulnerable minds [that] have increasing difficulty distinguishing literal messages from metaphors.” They noted an increased suggestibility found in children who ‘space out’ while consuming television or film media and pointed out that, by the time they reach adolescence, the average American has spent tens of thousands of hours in front of television sets, has watched as many murders and “engineered acts of violence” and has been exposed to hundreds of thousands of commercials filled with “arbitrary symbols of coded commands and meaning.”

“made information stress a fact of life” and ominously (but accurately) warned readers that “the phenomenon [of increased snapping] seems to be accelerating as a tumultuous millennium approaches.”