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

by Wendy S. Painting

Within each narrative, the material facts and chronology of events as well as the roles and identities of the villains differ, as do the acts attributed to them and their purported motives.

In McVeigh’s “Face of Terror” is also reflected “The Ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald” and like Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan and a number of other American “Lone Gunmen,” before and after McVeigh, all of whom inspired multiple competing, highly conflicting and continually evolving narratives and debates about just how alone these lone wolves really were.1 Many of the narratives that appeared after McVeigh’s arrest claim to tell the real and sometimes, suppressed story of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Although easily dismissed as fantastical paranoid tales, the mere existence of these narratives raises questions about and poses radical disruptions to historical and current medical, psychological, bioethical and terrorism discourses. These stories act as causes and solutions to physical and psychological terror; many products of a covert sphere, knowledge of which may help to distinguish between the signified and the signifier (symbols of representation and that which is represented), fact and fantasy, reality and illusion.

The acceptance of one version over another depends upon pre-existing beliefs about what is logical, plausible, implausible, palatable, or simply unimaginable.

use these sources to show how Timothy McVeigh authored all the competing stories about himself, not only those of the “Lone Wolf” variety.

From these as well as publicly available sources, I constructed a multi-sourced timeline of McVeigh’s life and critical moments leading up to the bombing. The use of this timeline helped me to identify when sources contradicted each other.

Compared against each other and to newer information introduced in this book, these stories illustrate the shifting nature of history itself and the ways that the Oklahoma City bombing acts as an example of how institutional secrecy can subjugate and silence information and knowledge and relegate it to the outskirts of officially sanctioned regimes of truth.

April 19, 1995:

9 pm: Richard Wayne Snell, an associate of residents at Elohim City who had previously plotted to bomb the Murrah building in OKC, is executed in the state of Arkansas.

April 30, 2015: Federal Judge Clark Waddoups files an order appointing Magistrate Judge Dustin B. Pead as Special Master to determine if the FBI tampered with a witness who was going to testify about participation in an undercover FBI operation called PATCON. In November 2015, Judge Waddoups issues an order barring participants in the Special Master’s investigation from discussing the process or the particulars of their participation.

The bombing, quickly characterized as “an attack on America’s Heartland” necessitated the creation of a nationally shared narrative to explain both the event itself and the threat it represented.

The coverage ultimately triggered, not a unified narrative, but several divergent ones.

The public more readily believes explanations of terrorist incidents when they conform to existing cultural myths; and so, on April 19, 1995, the prevailing American Terrorist Myth cast barbaric Middle Easterners as the mostly likely culprit.

The plausibility of the theatrics seen or the degree to which they accurately reflected real world events were of little concern to eager viewers of the new terrorist action movie genre. Rather, commanding their attention were the violent aesthetics of the films; the glorious explosion and the myriad ways of depicting death and destruction; all providing a window to observe and, by proxy, engage in what film studies scholar, Stephen Prince, termed “The Theater of Mass Destruction.”4

the existence of known bomb threats to the Murrah up to two weeks before April 19, one of which had resulted in the evacuation of the building on April 18. The

OKC Fire Department’s Chief claimed that his office had received a call from the FBI weeks prior to the bombing alerting them to a possible threat and,

number of people said that in the early hours of April 19, they observed members of the OKC Sherriff and ATF bomb squad trucks and a canine search unit near the Murrah. These reports led to the construction of a story about the government’s foreknowledge of the attack.

The FBI then introduced new plot elements and characters into the mix.

By the following afternoon, Thursday, April 20, the FBI traced it to Elliot’s Body Shop, a Ryder rental agency in Junction City, Kansas. There they learned that days before, on Saturday, April 15, a man using the name “Robert Kling” had made a phone reservation for the Ryder rental truck on Monday, April 17.

“Kling” picked up the Ryder, all said he came in with another man who silently stood in the back of the store and smoked cigarettes as Kling conducted the transaction.

“John Doe #1” (JD1) and “John Doe # 2.” (JD2).

One report observed that McVeigh seemed to provide “an obliging demon” towards whom the mounting public fear and anger could be directed. What the crowd in Perry and national news viewers found most disturbing about this demon was his “gaze” and the “look in his eyes.”8

The media made immediate and ongoing comparisons between McVeigh and Lee Harvey Oswald.

McVeigh’s lead defense attorney in early May 1995, Stephen Jones also publicly compared McVeigh’s “Perry Perp Walk” to that of Oswald’s. Jones

later pointed out that it would have been much easier (and safer) to whisk McVeigh quickly and quietly out of the back of the Perry courthouse and accused the FBI of tipping off reporters to the scheduled perp walk during which they paraded McVeigh in front of the cameras, thereby scripting and orchestrating a major media event.

forty-year-old Terry Nichols and twenty-six year old Michael Fortier

The three men, all white, U.S. citizens, had met while serving in the U.S. Army. Their collective profile starkly conflicted with the existing terrorist template. This was no gang of ragtag, swarthy, wild-eyed Muslim fanatics, but patriotic white Americans and military veterans, to boot.

The events at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993, as well as the passage of the Brady Bill, catalyzed both the mobilization and alliance of these disparate groups and individuals.

Notorious Neo-Nazi spokesperson, Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler told reporters that they suspected McVeigh was a “patsy,” perhaps even a CIA agent, thereby iterating an early version of Guilty Agent stories about the bombing suspect.

On Sunday, April 23, a friend of McVeigh’s in Michigan told reporters that McVeigh believed the government had implanted a tracking chip in his “rear end [so] the all-seeing eye of the government could keep an eye on him and know where he was.”10 The same day, April 23, the FBI received a call from Linda Thompson, an Indianapolis attorney, militia spokesperson and producer of an underground documentary, Waco: The Big Lie, which advanced a theory that the government had deliberately set the fire that killed the Branch Davidans.

“Dr. Jolly West,” a CIA operative who conducted mind control experiments had implanted microchips in Mc...

the first publicly told Experimental Wolf stories about McVeigh.

Prior to the bombing, Congress refused to pass a controversial anti-terrorism bill proposed by the Clinton administration, but two days after, on April 25, the first draft of it passed in the Senate and a year later, passed in its final form with overwhelming bipartisan support.

May 8,

unnamed federal investigators who said that McVeigh and the John Doe were in no way lone bombers but rather, more than likely cogs in a much larger network of extremists who had assisted in the bombing conspiracy through financing or tactical support.

Ma...

“investigators and authorities” who relayed a working theory that “John Doe 2 could be two people” who had accompanied McVeigh to OKC the morning of the bombing in order to act as “decoys” in the hope of confusing eyewitnesses and there...

McVeigh assumed the cloak of Disgruntled Soldier Avenger.13

April 21,

He was appointed two public defenders, John Coyle and Susan Otto, to whom, unknown to the public (but documented within the Jones Collection), McVeigh made a very strange confession.

He told Coyle and Otto that, while in the Army, he had been recruited to work undercover as part of a domestic security operation. McVeigh said his mission was to infiltrate and report on Neo-Nazi’s and other domestic terrorism threats. McVeigh then said that after having discovered the bombing plot, he reported it to his handlers but was instructed to continue in his role, remain embedded within the conspiracy and even go so far as to participate in the bombing; but ensure that only a couple of windows were blown out of the Murrah building. McVeigh expressed his shock that the Ryder could have caused as much damage as it did and wondered out loud if someone may have switched the truck at the last minute without his knowledge.

While, within the weeks and months to come, his story would undergo radical transformation, McVeigh’s initial confession to Otto and Coyle stands as the earliest (but in no way f...

According to Jones, when discussing the transfer of the case Otto cryptically warned Jones that “when you know everything I know, and you will soon enough, you will never think of the United States of America in the same way.”

During his first meeting with Jones, McVeigh “calmly,” “proudly” and “dispassionately” confessed that, although he had not meant to kill children, he had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and had gotten caught on purpose, hoping to use his trial to demonstrate that the government’s actions at Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, had been abusive and illegal.

Perhaps the most startling were revelations about Carol Howe, a paid informant for the ATF and the FBI, who from June 1994 until March 1995 had infiltrated EC, the ARA and other groups in an ATF investigation deemed investigation “SIGNIFICANT/SENSITIVE,” meaning it had potential national security implications. Howe, who became deeply embedded within the community of extremists, filed over 70 reports with her ATF handlers and, on numerous occasions, warned them about an impending attack on April 19, the anniversary of the fire at Waco, and named Andreas Strassmeir and some of the ARA bank robbers (among others) as conspirators.59

Corroborating her claims were a number of other undercover informants placed within EC by federal agencies and watchdog groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), who independently said they saw McVeigh there on over a dozen occasions. In fact, the Dissidents’ unholy alliance led to revelations about the prevalence of federal informants embedded within or very near to the bombing plot, of whom Howe was only one. Evans-Pritchard wrote, “The intrigue had become so twisted with undercover informants from different agencies tripping over each other – that it is almost impossible to disentangle.” Thus was the story of the Closely Watched Wolves born.

1996, based on information developed by the Committee and its allies, 475 survivors and victims’ family members began filing what would amount to several civil wrongful death lawsuits, as well as other legal actions initiated against government agencies including the ATF and FBI.

the government agencies involved were partially culpable for the deaths that occurred (a mainstay within all later Closely Watched Wolves stories). The courts dismissed the lawsuits.

the Dissidents’ unholy alliance led to revelations about the presence of federal informants embedded within the bombing plot in addition to Howe, including Robert Millar, the patriarch of Elohim City. According to Stephen Jones, “Robert Millar, at the same time he was the leader of Elohim City, was an FBI informant. This was during the same time that the government said the conspiracy started, September and October 1994.

Also at this time, Carol Howe had given information to the ATF that Strassmeir and Mahon were planning on blowing up government buildings and engaging in mass murder. The Bureau did not tell us any of this, but if you start with April 19th and you go backwards, what Howe said before the bombing is pretty incriminating evidence that the government knew something was going on. I think that they did” (Author interview with Stephen Jones, Consultation, Dec. 27, 2007).