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May 26 - June 25, 2021
In many ways, this book is a story about stories, the people who tell stories, the stories they tell and the reasons they tell them.
five commonly told narrative variations: The Lone Wolf, The Pack of Wolves, The Closely-Watched Wolves, The Guilty Agent and The Experimental Wolf.
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.
Mind Control, or ‘Experimental’ stories help us to understand possible motives left unexplored about McVeigh’s motivation to participate in the bombing plot, whether as a Lone Wolf, a part of a Pack or a Guilty Agent.
As a child, Kaczynski was often sick and frequently hospitalized for various ailments including recurring hives. He feared other children and refused to interact with them, leading his mother to seek help for what she believed to be autism. He was, however, highly intelligent, and completed high school by the age of fifteen. At sixteen, he began attending undergraduate classes at Harvard University. 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
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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.
The advent of the postmodern era has radically disrupted the notion of identity.
In 2012, a Boston Globe opinion piece expounded on the Batman Shooting, by observing how “it is possible for any of us, of any age or gender, to avoid reality all day in America by keeping our eyes fixed on our screens.”
World Vision has been described by some as a ‘CIA Front’ and within more conspiratorial narratives, has been implicated in U.S. mind control experiments, the 1978 mass suicides at Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, and as an unseen but important influence in the actions of Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley, Jr. , whose father was President of the organization.
In 1978, the CIA reported 3,336 acts of terrorism, after which definitions of terrorism expanded, and in 1980, the number rose to 6,714. When CIA director William Casey expanded definitions to include actions taken by the Soviets, statistics of international terrorism incidents doubled. Although between 1980 and 1985, only seventeen deaths had been attributed to terrorist violence worldwide, New York Times’ coverage of terrorism increased 60% and by 1986, the paper published an average of four stories per day on the topic.
CBS dedicated as much coverage to the hostage crisis in Tehran as it did to the Vietnam War. The 1985 TWA hostage crisis would make up 65% percent of televised news content and 30% of major newspapers content.
at the Buffalo Army recruitment center, McVeigh scored among the top ten percentile on the General Technical test.
A recruitment error however, landed him in the experimental Cohesion Operational Readiness Training (COHORT) unit. The COHORT program kept soldiers together from Basic Training throughout their entire three-year enlistment cycle, with the goal of unit cohesion, esprit de corps, advanced group training and commitment to the unit’s mission. While military theorists proposed the idea that COHORT Units would lessen “soldier turbulence” as well “high levels of psychological breakdown in battle,” previous attempts to form such units had led to higher rates of AWOL’s and suicides.
To his great dismay and despite assurances to him by his recruiter, the COHORT structure prevented recruits from volunteering for Special Forces, Ranger School, or even Airborne School, for at least three years. “If the recruiter had told Tim the truth about the program he was headed for,” Brandon Stickney wrote, “McVeigh probably wouldn’t have enlisted.” This was only one of such errors and misrepresentations the Buffalo Army recruiter made in McVeigh’s case.1
Mark Hamm, criminologist at Indiana State University and former consultant for the Jones Team, wrote that the Army’s COHORT experiment provided the “mechanism” and “most important source of indirect support for the terrorism that would later occur in Oklahoma.” In fact, he said, the conspiracy to bomb the Murrah building could not have gotten off to a better start had it been orchestrated by the “best and brightest at the Pentagon.”
In Hamm’s opinion, “there would have been no conspiracy” without the COHORT program, for it was in Basic Training that Timothy McVeigh met Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who would become Ti...
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In just a few weeks, military doctors examined Timothy McVeigh on more occasions than civilian doctors had throughout his entire high school career and, upon his leaving the Army two years later, more times than in his entire life prior to joining the Army. McVeigh’s medical records and letters reveal an unknown soldier, who, in two years active duty in the United States military received medical attention on more than seventy-five occasions, as reflected in his available records. Was it
possible that Timothy McVeigh’s avalanche of decay alluded to something more than his adolescent apocalyptic survival fantasies?
In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, when asked to describe brainwashed war hero Raymond Shaw, the soldiers he served with always, automatically and unanimously, responded by reciting the words, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Reminiscent of this are the descriptions of McVeigh by his fellow COHORTS, over 33 of whom responded in a remarkably unanimous manner.
“Sometimes the effect of an error can be larger than the error itself.… We shouldn’t unearth the past except when new events remind us that old mistakes were not just a matter of coincidence.” – Saddam Hussein to April Glaspie (U.S.
Ambassador to Baghdad), speaking about Irangate, 7/25/90.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told television viewers, “we have no interest in occupying Iraq, but … there won’t be any sanctuary inside Iraq for those forces who’ve been involved in occupying Kuwait.”
I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” –Timothy James McVeigh at his sentencing hearing, August 4, 1997.
The grim and grisly impact McVeigh’s travels on the long road to Safwan had on his frame of mind should not be underestimated.95
Lee Harvey Oswald, Texas Bell Tower sniper Charles Whitman, D.C. Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik, Naval Yard shooter Alex Alexis, serial killers Jeffery Dahmer and “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, and of course Timothy McVeigh, all had one thing in common: U.S. military training awakened their lust to kill and refined their ability to do it.
the worst part is that when you institute and execute a policy of atrocity, you and your society must live with what you have done.138
In the updated 1995 edition of their book, Snapping, Conway and Siegelman described various ways in which political indoctrination acts as an “information disease” and argued that when a person who, for whatever reason, including trauma, has become physically and mentally wrecked, they consume information less critically and are more open to manipulation by others.
Interestingly, Hinckley had provoked the Brady gun control legislation that, ironically, helped provoke the Oklahoma City bombing, which then prompted further debates about people like McVeigh.
The Turner Diaries, he insisted, was not so much the blueprint for the bombing, but rather provided an inspirational model of resistance to gun control legislation.
Absent in the many letters McVeigh wrote Steve, as well as in the transcripts of FBI and defense team interviews with other soldiers, is any mention of his continued medical visits. From the time he returned from the Gulf in April until leaving the Army in December, he continued his secret life as a professional patient.
McVeigh’s lead attorney Stephen Jones
often compared McVeigh to Hinckley who in turn lends himself to comparisons with recent ‘apolitical’ mass shooters such as Lanza and Holmes.
1991, German domestic intelligence agencies released that there were nearly 40,000 “right wing” extremists in West Germany, many of whom held “white supremacist” ideologies. Both Strassmeir and McVeigh had connections to Oklahoma KKK spokesperson, Dennis Mahon. As early as 1991, Mahon was under investigation by U.S. and German intelligence agencies for trips he made to Germany in previous years recruiting radical right wing Germans for the White Power Movement (WPM). Outlawed in Germany, a growing amount of hate literature flowed from U.S. sources and participation in extreme right wing
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December 1988, Iraq purchased $1.5 million worth of pesticides from Dow Chemical, despite warnings that they were highly toxic, could result in untold accidental deaths, or their weaponization.
In an April 1990 meeting with Senator Bob Dole, Saddam complained of continued U.S. efforts to demonize him in the press and asked Dole, “has the Zionist mentality taken control of you to the point that it has deprived you of your humanity?” (Simpson
The grand conspiracy Saddam perceived against him and his nation, however, had not prevented the U.S. from continuing to share intelligence, their conventional and chemical weapons sales to Iraq or the exporting of these by privately owned U.S. companies.
Jounalist John Simpson wrote about later revelations that the CIA had known in advance about Iraq’s impending invasion and had deliberately done nothing to prevent it.
Just prior to his execution McVeigh discussed his perception of Gulf War propaganda on 60 Minutes. He elaborated to his biographers, comparing the type of media hype seen during ‘The Big Lead-Up’ to the Gulf War to that seen during the Waco siege.
He outlined a number of first hand experiences with “wartime propaganda” during the Gulf War about which he said, “All of these experiences gave me a very unique and personal experience with, and perspective on, WARTIME propaganda. So, imagine my shock and disillusionment when, returning home from such as war, I recognized the same propaganda being utilized against American citizens – first Ruby Ridge, but real bad at Waco. Wartime propaganda being used against Americans!” This, McVeigh said, showed him the value of propaganda as a “war tool.” He then offered another equation, to explain-
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The February 16 incident raised the number of U.S. ‘friendly fire’ casualties to ten out of every fourteen deaths.
Interestingly, Dr. John R. Smith, widely cited for finding McVeigh ‘sane’ was an expert in POW conditions and his teacher, Dr. Jolly West the leading U.S. expert on the topic, came to appear within several ‘experimental wolf’ narratives about the bombing and McVeigh. The record shows that the Jones Team called West because McVeigh’s conditions of confinement had led to his mental and physical deterioration and for this reason, among others, Dr. Smith ‘treated’ McVeigh regularly while he awaited trial.
After the war’s end, it would later surface that, on February 27, the deaths of the Marines and nine British soldiers, the wounding of forty more and the destruction of five Abrams and five Bradleys during ‘the Battle of Norfolk’, had all been the result of friendly fire.
When the body of Sgt. Tony Applegate (killed during Norfolk) returned home, despite the letter signed by Maj. Gen. Thomas Rhane (commander of the First Mech. Inf. Div.) explaining he “was killed as a result of enemy action” his widow became suspicious. Mrs. Applegate said, “The coffin didn’t weigh anything. I wondered if Tony was really in there.” The only portion of his body in the casket turned out to be a charred hipbone. Her husband was the gunner on a M1A1 Abrams tank that another Abrams hit with a sabot round, or ‘Silver Bullet’ that travels about a mile per second, its tip coated with
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Estimated numbers of retreating Iraqi soldiers and civilians range from 10,000 to 80,000 and the number of Iraqi vehicles on Basra Highway, was estimated at approximately 2,000.
Kuwaitis living in the area said many Iraqis attempted to flee but those who escaped the aerial assault became the targets of coalition ground forces. Speaking of a quarter mile traffic jam that trapped several hundred retreating vehicles, A U.S. officer told Press Association (UK) reporter Gordon Airs, “we have taken out about 80 bodies from this tangled mess so far- but God knows how many are still in there.” Airs described his impressions of the scene, writing, “The few who managed to get north of the bottle neck trap did not last long either. All along the highway lay wrecked and burned
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Beyond oil well fires, the spoils of war seeped into the sea as well. In January 1991, Saddam commanded his generals to begin opening pipeline valves leading to the Kuwait Sea, dumping millions of barrels of oil into it and resulting in the largest oil spill in history. The amount of oil spilled into the Kuwait Sea, estimated at 400 million barrels, twice the size of any other oil spill in history, 25 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill and destroyed marine life and eviscerated sea birds, coral reefs and turtles
To explain the term ‘Sheep Dipped,’ Hoffman quotes former CIA-DOD liaison L. Fletcher Prouty’s book, The Secret Team. Prouty wrote that Sheep Dipping “is an intricate Army-devised process by which a man who is in the service as a full career soldier or officer agrees to go through all the legal and official motions of resigning from the service.
Then, rather than actually being released, his records are pulled from the Army personnel files and transferred to a special Army intelligence file. Substitute but nonetheless real appearing records are then processed, and the man ‘leaves’ the service”
At the start of the 12-day standoff that ensued, the Marshals were joined by hundreds of local police, agents from the ATF, FBI, US Marshals, US Border Patrol and troops from the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and the National Guard until, eventually, 400 armed federal agents surrounded the Weaver cabin, occupied now by three surviving children (10 months to 14 years old), Weaver and Harris, and Randy’s wife Vicki. In what already seemed like overkill, JTF-6 was called in to provide agents with supplies and conduct reconnaissance flights over the property using military helicopters.
