Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf Andrew Gumbel Oklahoma City 20240713

Andrew thank you all for coming. This is a very somber subject. Normally when you do but towards you go to a different cities and talk about connections that the place has with whatever you have written about. This is a special place in this context, and i am certainly not here to tell you your own story of what happened in this city 70 years ago, because im sure you know it much better than i ever well. One of the things that always amused me when i come here is first of all how warmly i welcomed by everybody, but also how profoundly the bombing touched everybody here. It is a relatively small place. Ive never met anybody from obama city who was not touched in a personal way by the tragedy. The first time i came i spoke to a number of their relatives of the victims, especially the children who died in the day care center. I am a British Foreign correspondent. I have been to a lot of not terribly pleasant places. This is just another assignment. Then having spoken to them by went down to the memorial and saw that, the pictures of the dead children and teddy bears and everything else. It just got to me in a way that is still with me now. I went to the memorial this afternoon again, and it had the same effect. Years later in the course of researching this book, i talked to people who are hardened veterans of vietnam and other conflicts. They said themselves, major brown here who is with the sheriff department, he said he had never seen anything like this. I think there was something unique about the spectacular violence that took place and the colossally unexpected and undeserved aspect of the fact that it happened here in Oklahoma City. So that is you know, i want to state right said from the outset that i come to the subject with a certain humility. Im not here to tell you anything that you dont already know. But i do think that there is an aspect to what happened in the way it has been told and retold over the years that has gotten lost. That is fundamentally the reason why this book got written in the first place, and it is what i want to talk to you about tonight. I feel that the city was let down fundamentally in a number of ways, both before the bombing and afterwards as well. The starkest contrasts is with september 11 when you had an extremely active and well listens to Victims Community who managed to press for congressional hearings. Obviously there was a huge amount of political activity around the calamity that happened then. You had the 9 11 report. You had endless press given to the subject. The Oklahoma City bombing was rather different. I think people to a large extent grieved in silence. I dont think that congress necessarily was paying the kind of attention it should have. There were one or two attempts to start hearings that did not occur. And what you had essentially was the trial, and a trial is always of flawed exercise in finding out the truth. It is about the guilt or innocence of the defendant or defendants, not really about getting to the bottom of everything. I am very fortunate as a researcher that some of the trial material did not come out publicly at the time but is now available. Getting access to the full archive of all the material that the government handed over to the defense teams in all three trials. Mcveighs federal trial, Terry Nichols trial, and the trial in oklahoma a few years later. So what the possibility that arose was instead of having guesses and questions and the sense that something was not quite right, there was a unique really opportunity to look precisely what was the government knew based on its investigation, what did it do with that information, what itds it followed, what leads did not follow, and what questions one can ask from the results of that. The other aspect of the project which was a blessing for me as a researcher and writer was having got a hold of all this information, i thought this is an opportunity to go around, talk to everybody and i possibly can, people who were in mcveigh s circle, the radical Antigovernment Movement, the who work on the crime right from the very beginning, local, state, and federal. Agents, managers, their bosses in washington, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and surmise to my surprise and amazement almost everyone was willing to talk on the record in a lot of them were very frustrated and in some cases pretty angry about the things that left out, the roads that were not taken and the missed opportunities starting before the bombing and going all the way through the severals execution years later. What i mean when i say that city was let down . Starting before the bombing there were a number of things that occurred that in retrospect seem very troubling. Some of them were basic in concrete. The way the building was constructed, built in the 70s , there was a decision made to skimp on the way that the concrete pillars were reinforced. They were simple pieces of rebar. There are a number of things you can do to make buildings much stronger like having coils of rebar, other things you can do. There was a fema study done after the bombing that showed that if the people who had built the building had spent extra on the budget they could have raised the building to a level that would have meant california earthquake standards and probably when the bomb went off you would not have had the pancake effect of having all those cars collapse in on each other and about threequarters of the people who died might have their lives spared. That is one fact that did come to light at the time. Another failure is in the course of my research i found out that the man in charge of protecting the building and at least one of the federal judges were very concerned about a lack of security. They were specifically concerned after 1993, after waco when the Antigovernment Movement declared war essentially on the atf, the fbi. They made it very clear that that anyone who worked for the federal government was a target. In response to that, they set down and talked about how they needed to have 24 hour Security Guard coverage which did not exist. They needed to worry about the accessibility of the outset of outside the building to vehicles. They also were very concerned that the video cameras that were erected on the north side of the building were not functioning and had not been for years. And they wanted to rectify that. They went to the General Services administration. They ask for the money to make these changes and the answer was no. The gsa was trying to save money. Oklahoma city was not considered a place that was going to have anything happen, and that was that. Another let down i think. And then, the bigger one which i think affected the country as a whole and really gets to the core of what im writing about in the book is the after waco, after ruby ridge there was an Awareness Among federal agencies that follow these things for a living that there was a very serious threat of some kind of major attack. This is not a mystery to the people who track the order. , the groups in the 1980s that committed assassinations, bombings. Theyre robbing armored truck, a lot of very alarming things. There were very concerned about the radical Antigovernment Movement. They were very concerned in particular about the community, which we will talk more about in little bit, in part because some of the people who had been active in the 1980s were gravitating back to that place. Information was starting to come out that other dangerous criminals who were later prosecuted for other crimes or either living there or passing through. Much has happened in the runup 11. Eptember people who were shouting the loudest and issuing warnings say you have to do something about this or ignored. Not only were the ignored, but the different federal agencies in particular in this case the fbi and atf have pieces of information were not pooling that information, sharing a when that information when they got evidence of something alarming. Instead they went to each other in the u. S. Attorneys office said we really think something needs to be done here. They took the opposite. Why did they do that . The fbi had been afraid for many years of being too proactive in terms of going after things that were not necessarily directly related to crimes they knew about, but were more intelligence gathering operations to see if there was the possibility of future crimes. The fbi at the time was under attorney general guidelines not to do that. They get into trouble and number of times, especially in the 1980s, for going after groups and against and they did not have concrete evidence of criminal activity. Congress had raked them over the coals. Also in the wake of a lot of the activity from the radical far right in the 1980s, put together a trial, only the first time in the countrys history that anyone was put on trial. They rounded up 14 members of the neonazi white supremacist movement, put them on trial in fort smith, arkansas, and things went very wrong. The judge decided he would dispense with the usual jury selection procedures. He picked the jury himself. They were all white, all notably uneducated. He made sure none of them do anything and had heard and read nothing in the newspapers about the crimes and the people on trial. And the jury, two of the members of the jury fell in love with two of the defendants. One of them actually get married to one of the defendants. The star witness for the prosecution was a criminal from the 1980s by the name of jim ellison who had no credibility whatsoever. It was suspected that he was in it to save his own hide and reduce his jail sentence. Everybody was acquitted. The fbi promised itself after that that if anything ever happened again from the radical farright there were going to prosecute the crime at hand and there were not going to look for any links to the broader radical movement, and that is exactly what happened when the bomb went off in Oklahoma City. The atf, meanwhile, did not operate under the same strictures. It did not have any attorney general guidelines. It had problems of its own. There was a sense that the atf was primarily responsible for the disaster at ruby ridge in idaho in 1992 when there was one were people died needlessly, and primarily responsible for an siege in waco which ended in terrible tragedy in the deaths of dozens of people. So they were running scared over another screw up. There was a new republican majority in congress led by Newt Gingrich that was unabashedly of s hide. The atf sli they were basically waiting for something to happen to give them an excuse to say we are abolishing the agency. They were very scared of doing something wrong. As this happened there were looking at the man from tulsa by was name of dennis who had gone to germany, participated in cross burning, nazi connections and there were very concerned about them. They suspected that he had been involved in criminal activity. They put an undercover informant on an, an attractive young woman who had gone off the rails spectacularly, had a swastika tattooed on her left shoulder. Took him to the city. She she spent a long time there in the fall of 1994 and started hearing people talking openly about plotting to blow up Federal Buildings, and was the was the atf response . What they should have done arguably is to get to the fbi and say we dont have the operational capacity to deal with this, but you should know of this. You have been concerned as long as we have. Up in the proper investigation and see what we can find out. Probably if that had occurred, and this i was told by the man who was the head at the time on the record, if we had kept an informal operation of there we probably would have found that about the bombing and been able to prevent it. A really startling thing to be told. Instead what did they do . They started hearing alarming things from the informant his. They decided if we keep hearing these things we will have to take action because this is more than we can possibly ignore. So what were going to do is close down the informal operation and effectively block our ears and close our eyes and hope for the best, and that is she was taken out of action in what they did. She was taken out of action in march of 1995, a few weeks before the bombing, then after the bomb went off there was a collective sense of whoops. The first thing they did was reactivate carol, who they had. Arred as being unstable go find out what you can, but by then it was too late. A lot of the people who were most suspicious that left a few days before the bombing. She herself was widely suspected of having been an informant at that stage because she disappeared so suddenly. She is told her life would be in danger. What is really shocking though is from the point of view of the fbi and the atf talking to the agents who were deeply concerned about this problem, they fully expected the fbi would send somebody else and come send agents and come start in, interviewingle, an people, and they never did. In the meantime all kinds of other things were going on here in Oklahoma City which again i think did the city a great disservice. One thing bill was going on was that there was a huge bureaucratic war going on within the fbi. The director at the time was attempting to remove every Single Division chief of the country and replacing them with his people. One of the people who he had most keenly was the special agent in charge right here in Oklahoma City. Was an abiding insecurity about him. Instead of putting him in charge of the bombing investigation you put somebody in over his head. The immediate effect of this was that it split the investigation right away. All the agents here in obamas some of whom were remely accomplished, felt meanwhile, kennedy was the liaison back to headquarters. Was all overers the place, scrambled to assemble and Operations Center that will be open 24 hours a day to keep an eye on what was going on. Tremendous confusion. There was and i think that led to a lot of misguided decisions. , i tell this great about, there was around successful attempt to track mcveigh. They found him within 48 hours. He was in custody as im sure you know in the county jail. He had been pulled over by a highway patrolman who saw that he was missing a license plate. They got to him just in time before he was about to be released on bond for his traffic offenses and carrying a concealed weapon. And they also, through mcveigh, rapidly realized that they were interested in a pair of brothers, terry and james nichols. What was unfortunate and of the of those the scramble first few hours is that everything that the task force here in Oklahoma City was being transmitted around the country. You suddenly had hundreds of potential people in the media. And sure enough, the news got on to the radio the same day there taken into a federal custody. Both nichols brothers heard this on the radio and immediately took evasive action to make sure they were not going to be seized and killed by the feds because they were paranoid and anxious about that, but also from an investigation point of view, it meant that any possibility of putting them under surveillance, tapping her found, see who they were talking to and what else might be out there came to an immediate and crashing halt. Really that was the beginning of an unraveling of the potential of really getting to the bottom of what had happened in the bombing. Over the next month or so there was a tremendous attempt to look for other coconspirators. In particular, they were two people seen renting the truck two days before the bombing. A sketch was put out. John doe one and john doe two. Rather hastily as soon to be mcveigh. John doe two was a total mystery. For a month the feds looked everywhere. They even suspected Terry Nichols 12 yearold son josh, a kid. It was rather preposterous to think he could have been there without his father. His father was very protective toward him, but a for a few days that was their conviction. But ultimately they could not figure out who this character was. About a month, they decided he did not exist. The shop with the truck had been rented, had modeled up what happened on monday with what happened on tuesday. And it was a very convenient way of putting that issue to rest. Meanwhile, there were a number of other people who had come to light as potential suspects. One by one the fbi and the Justice Department, because senior lawyers came out and cut these deals themselves, decided you tell us everything you know about mcveigh, and we we will will overlook everything else. That happened with five or six different people. The potential for pursuing them as suspects closed down. The interest in looking further afield group narrower and narrower as time went on. The prosecution in particular was very worried that any kind of extra investigation might not lead to useful leads but would only give ammunition to the defense team the trial, who could then use it to argue, you know what, you are saying that mcveigh is the mastermind. Maybe he wasnt. Maybe he was just a bit player. Maybe he was just the driver. Maybe the real people are still out there. There was a conscious closing down of the investigation, and it was not something that was decided monolithically. You know, just to give one example, a major dispute about this, if you ask most rankandfile investigators from the fbi for atf, they will tell you they would have worked 24 hours a day as long as it took to get to the bottom of this. But just to tell you how that was impossible, a roadblock was set up by the fbi outside kansas to ask people passing by if you , did you see something in the days before the bombing . The feds had a pretty good idea that was where the bomb went next. In what they found out was that a lot of people had seen a ryder truck not only in the 18th, the day that it was there and win when Terry Nichols and tim mcveigh least those two were building the bomb, but they had seen a ryder truck for several days in the week before. It could not have been the same because that was only rented on monday the 17th. At the same time there were also reports of the second truck at a motel in Junction City where mcveigh stayed for a few days before the bombing. In one person, amongst others, felt this was a terrific lead. We need to find out what the second truck is about. The prosecutors and one are two other people in the fbi felt that this is a crazy thing to do fishing expedition. , ait was only giving ammunition to the defense. Sure enough all mention of the second truck fell away to the where it wasnt even mentioned the time it got to trial. There is a whole book of instances like this where i not only try and denounce the things that were missed but also try and account for it because it is a very complicated mechanism. You have got, you know, investigators, their bosses, competing interests of the different agencies. You got the fbi director breathing down peoples necks. You have got people in handcuffs. Want to be able to say this is a victory for the fbi. The atf is struggling. You have got prosecutors who disagreed vehemently among themselves. This is not something that was known at the time, but when i spoke to then they told me quite frankly this is not unmarried we are under instructions to give mcveigh, make sure hes convicted timid given the Death Penalty, and it did not matter what it took to get there. What often happens is that when you have a major public traumatic event like this what you end up getting his and out outcomedriven investigation. There is a sense that we want to get to the end. That we have done our part. Mcveigh, Terry Nichols was the one they had secondarily. And so they focused everything and then. I think another opportunity in another way in which Oklahoma City was let down was that mcveighs trial if you compare and contrast the two trials, whatever you think of the outcome, i am not here to say mcveigh should not have had the Death Penalty or conversely to say i applaud the fact that nichols did not, thats of something that i feel is my place to tell you how to feel. But what i do feel is a feeling that somebody is interested in getting to the bottom of things. The defense in both chiles had an opportunity to let the government evidence in the way that i had an opportunity to my coauthor, to really ask hard questions. Did they really know what they say no . With these witness statements reported accurately . The fbi. Witnesses picked selectively . Other people that should have been spoken to emendations to. And indications elsewhere that a number of people in the radical farright had knowledge of the bombing . White and the fbi go talk to those people . The nichols team to take it in reverse did an unbelievably thorough job of looking at the evidence against the defendants and asking those are questions. And two individuals managed to embarrass the government , to illustrate the things were not quite as the government had shown, and that was a big part of the reason why nichols was not convicted on the main murder charge which is to trial. He was eventually convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter and conspiracy and got life instead of the Death Penalty. More significantly from the perspective of 2012, their investigative work and everything that it generated has given a tremendous amount of material to researchers and historians. The mcveigh defense team fell down on the job. Stephen jones in particular did not drill down on the evidence. Places where were he couldve shown the government up. Looking through the trial transcript, there were two examples of the things that the government never really proved, how mcveigh and nichols planned have to build a bomb. There are vast gaps of how that happened. In 1994, they were messing around with pipe bombs, nothing to do with Ammonium Nitrate or nitromethane. In the fall of 1994, they experimented with small versions of what turned into the Oklahoma City bomb. According to mcveigh, this experiment was a success. According to nichols who corresponded extensively without it was essentially a failure. We just dont know how they went from al tries from devastating success, the government is to know. I think the defense team could have really put them on the spot. Another thing they never proved was that mcveigh was the one who rented the truck on i dont april 17. Personally know if he did or didnt, but i can tell you his fingerprints were not found the body shop. They could not match the signature on the rental form. There was the problem of john doe two and also the problem of john doe one because there were fairly detailed and converging descriptions given by the body somebody aees about good three or four inches shorter with pockmarks. Mcveighs skin was smooth. One or two other physical dissimilarities which raised the question it could have been someone else. There were problems of the government had in showing how he got from mcdonalds in Junction City where he was caught on the surveillance camera just before 4 00 to the body shop and had and have the rental agreement printed out at 4 19. It was quite a distance away, raining that day. The person who showed up to rent the truck was dry, according to all the witnesses, and on and on. There were a number of things that raised questions about the strength of the governments case. There was also most spectacularly the fact that on the morning of the bombing about two dozen people had seen mcveigh. Every single one of them had seen them with somebody else, some had seen him with other vehicles. Not a Single Person said what said, that he was on his own. He passed the truck and walked away by himself, but in your plugs and heard the explosion from a few blocks away. Not a single one of them corroborated his version. Yet it was the one that prevailed at trial. For all these reasons i think many tricks were missed by the defense team, and i think there were opportunities to do that kind of really intense investigative work that the team do that was didnt do that lost. I think this city could have been looked at much more thoroughly. Some of these other reasons the radical farright cabinet that much more thoroughly. Looking for into the future, it obviously matters to Oklahoma City, because it is your story. Today . Does it matter the preoccupation with keeping the country safe, and insecurity, the threat from abroad, it matters for us because as i mentioned, a lot of the mistakes that were made around the time of the bombing were repeated around the time of 9 11 in terms of Law Enforcement not appreciating the threat adequately, not sharing information and also looking now i think there are legitimate reasons to be concerned that the threat from that antigovernment radical right has not gone away. We have a situation now where many young men have had combat experience in iran and afghanistan, have got military training. Many of them were traumatized by what they went through. They come back in the hundreds of thousands to a depressed economy and inevitably i think the vast majority of veterans are very honorable people but inevitably there will be a small minority who will be attracted by extreme ideologies, who will be interested in using what they learned in the military in order to turn it against the certainly there has been a huge uptick in the number of radical groups, white supremacist groups, neonazi groups, groups affiliated with extremists, religions, much as was the case in the early to mid1990s. And having an africanamerican president has been a tremendous recruiting tool for many of these groups. So you have a preoccupying situation, but you also have a situation where despite the common security, despite the fact that terrorism was now front and center in the countrys preoccupation, you still have this bureaucratic imperative to look at the last threat that came along, not necessarily anticipate the next one. So most of the money, the manpower, the resources are engaged in the fight to prevent al qaeda from doing a repeat of 9 11, and no doubt rightly so. I was in washington last week and had the privilege of talking to members of the highest, and Security Committee and there very concerned about this. They feel that other islamist threats are being disregarded or at least not given enough attention. And they feel that the domestic threat was also not being pursued adequately. And you have a situation now, a lot of the Institutional Knowledge of how to handle potential corruptions of crises have gone away. The people who understood that waco was a disaster and a few years later when another group was seized by federal lawenforcement, the fact that they understood how to bring that to an end peacefully, all the people involved in that are no longer in a federal Law Enforcement. A lot of people who in the late 1990s continued to follow the radical farright, went undercover, understood the culture, the people. Many of those people transfer transferred to international work, many of them have gone into retirement. Im not here to sell you the fbi doesnt know what theyre doing because i dont know what the fbi is doing. It is not an agency that is forthcoming with operational decision making. But i do think there are very legitimate questions. Have the lessons of what went what had happened had been articulated, had they been learned, had 9 11 been fully appreciated. And are we now ready to face future threats . I can certainly tell you that restriction on intelligence gathering has been lifted. There are obviously potential abuses involved in lifting it which is why there were imposed in the first place, but the fbi can no longer say we are not going to investigate someone because we are not allowed to. That is gone. There are other things that are still negative. The fbi and atf still hate each other. Theyre both in the Justice Department. The atf used to be of the treasury. It hasnt helped anything. And when the atf was involved in the scandal of walking guns over the border into mexico, fast and furious operation, all the fbi guys i talked to were feeling caught literally smoke coming out of their ears sang these saying these people are irresponsible, borderline criminal. Nothing has changed in that respect. I would also argue, that independently of the amendment, second and i dont want to get into that particularly, it has to be a problem that anyone who has a criminal intention has tremendous access, far more than exist in other countries, to deadly firepower. A tremendous amount that you can access legally. But there is also a tremendous amount that you can access with relative ease that is illegal in terms of explosive material. You cannot buy Ammonium Nitrate in any great quantity anymore without sounding alarm bells, but plenty of other materials can be used to devastating effect which should be of concern for everybody. Gone on for quite a long time. I would love to know your experiences, the things that may have concerned you, whether the very fact somebody comes from outside of oklahoma and starts talking about this upsets you, something you welcome. I dont know, i would just love having a conversation with you. I am an authority. Some of you may be authorities in your own right, and i would love to hear what you have to say. So i will do the moderating because i am the only one appear , and i will try to calm everybody once before i come back for a second time. Over here. Of all the places you have been, what really caught your attention in Oklahoma City . You have been all over the world. You have seen some pretty bad things. What made you focus on this incident and not others . Andrew it really stemmed from the first time i came here which was in 2001. I was working for a british newspaper call the independent. They wanted me to read a piece about the bombing in anticipation of mcveighs execution, and i really knew very little about it. I had this vague idea as else that two guys from the did this together. They had been caught. That was really the end of the story until i read american terrorist which is the book length interview with mcveigh that he gave to journalists from his hometown. I thought to myself, i dont know much about this case. This did their parts of the story that is missing. It seem like mcveigh is aggrandizing his role. There has to be more to it. Then i realize the governments version of events was really not all that different. In fact, many of the fbi managers who want everybody to believe that they did get to the bottom of the story will say over and over, we know that we were right because mcveigh confirmed it, but to me, that set of all kinds of alarm bells. I came to Oklahoma City. I started asking questions. I heard a million theories about all the things that had been missed, why they were missed, what it might add up to. I did a lot of digging at the time, but really a lot of questions remained unanswered. And it was only when there was the possibility of getting the full government case file and talking to everyone involved on the inside in the investigation that there was a fabulous opportunity to look at a major historical event from the inside in a way that had never been done before. And that, to me, was the gift of the project. You know, it was the experience i had is less important than the outcome. I did my very best to hear everybody, to try and account for everything. There are many things i still dont know. One of the rules that i teach when i teach journalism, and it is important to tell the difference between what you know and what you dont know, to make that very clear to the reader. That is what i try to do with this project. There are puzzles that menaces of anothers that did not. That it was possible to ask the questions i hope more sharply. Yes. I would like to thank you for coming. I read your book. Thank you. Thank you. , a womane audience lost her two children, so i would like to recognize there. And colonel george wallace, the key is actually on the investigation committee. My question is that like as said, i really love the work. Close to a literary orgasm. I have looking into it for been looking into it for years. Just released a documentary. Hi actually i would like to present you with a copy. My question is, the subtitle is what the investigation is and why is still matters. I would like a viewpoint on why i fail to see an indictment of current officeholders who may have been involved with the coverup, including eric holder who is our now attorneygeneral of the United States who was directly responsible of the coverup of the murder of kenneth michael, who was murdered in federal custody, because the fbi thought, sticking identity, thought he was john doe number two. And Janet Napolitano who is our federal prosecutor in arizona at the time where mcveigh was going around trying to recruit people for this plot. And so why is still matters, i was wondering why we chose not to go after them, the people who iw hold office of power, who think, in my opinion, were directly responsible end task with a role in that coverup and now jen and the public, is director of homeland security. Eric holder is attorneygeneral. Response for executing the laws of the United States. Andrew sure. First of all, it is a pleasure to see you. I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation that when i went to the memorial for the first time in 2001 how it really hit home, and it hit home because i talked to people who had directly lost loved ones. She told me with tears in their eyes what happened to her, losing her two grandchildren. And when i saw their picture on the fence just outside the memorial, that was the moment when something in my stomach just flipped. And i thought, this is just the most ghastly thing that could have possibly happened. And, you know, so she, that emotional reaction to the bombing is what in many ways sustain me and kept me interested in this story for a long time. And she has been somebody i have spoken to on and off for years. I admire the courage of who lost people in the bombing and their ability to speak out and to have, you know, thoughtful ideas about what happened. So absolutely, i sure what youre saying. In terms of the other issues you brought up with let me talk about napolitano. Napolitano was the u. S. Attorney in phoenix. There was a tremendous amount of Law Enforcement interest in kingman, arizona because mcveigh had lived there. His army buddy who ended up cutting a plea deal with the government lived there with his wife. There was a whole community of antigovernment activists mixed together with people who were involved in the crystal meth trade. It was quite an assembly of people. There was a man who ran a group called the arizona Patriots Fund who mcveigh almost certainly knew. I started out this project very interested in the arizona ankle. You know, all the way through. The short version of what i found is this. There were one or two people who should, i believe, have been scrutinized much more closely. One man in particular by the name of Steve Colburn who was a chemist. He had worked at cedar sinai hospital in Beverly Hills in california. Very bright guy, but also very unstable. He knew how to build explosives. And the government was after him for a number of things, including a suspicion that he possessed an m60 machine gun , which he was caught with on video in california and there was an arrest warrant put out for him in the summer of 94. He ended up disappearing into 1994. The desert in arizona. It appears he knew mcveigh. The fbi in the course of their investigation established that they had exchanged letters. A decision was made in may of 1995 that there were going to overlook everything about him except what he could tell them about mcveigh to corroborate the fact that they had been in touch had tried toh recruit him, because it helped establish mcveighs motivation for the bombing. They overlooked a number of things about him, his bomb making ability. The fact that his own uncle had said how he had always been afraid that steve would turn into a mad bomber. That he felt the steve was fully capable of carrying out the bombing. They ignored testimony from the people who were sharing a shack in the desert with him, who said on the day of the bombing he looked at the tv and seemed to claim some kind of ownership. He claimed he talked about nitromethane and bombing a Federal Building in the days before the bombing. The fbi and Justice Department overlooked this completely. Her, iback to the not sure that was a decision. Am the number two in charge of all the u. S. Attorneys came out to arizona and sat in on that meeting on the 20th of may may 1995. She was the one who signed off on that decision. I dont know what the mechanics were. No one spoke to me about it. Most likely the decision came from very high happen washington. They made a very deliberate decision to get the stuff on mcveigh. I also know that people within the fbi had the sense excuse me, this was just too crazy to be effective in any kind of serious plot. I dont know if that assessment was correct. My suspicion is that he should have been looked at a lot more closely. Im not aware of Janet Napolitano directly closing down any lines of investigation herself, which is not to apologize for it unnecessarily. It is just what you know versus what you dont know. Eric holder, he was im not sure exactly what he was doing in 1995. In 1997, he became deputy attorneygeneral. Was someone general else who sparred furiously with the director of the fbi, and i not going to go into the murky am details of what that was all about. Its in the book. But essentially there was a tremendous bureaucratic battle between the Justice Departments that wanted both the Justice Department and the fbi who had to find someone to blame for waco and ruby ridge. Congress is getting very hot and heavy. Essentially the Justice Department had a certain amount of information against people. In turn, had information on janet reno and , andhe behaved in waco this became a giant game of chicken. The Deputy Director of the fbi at the time was first in charge of the investigation, then he became the subject of the ruby ridge related scandal connected. It was tremendously destructive. There was a man who was brought into federal custody in oklahoma in the summer of 1995. He died very violently, it appears he was bludgeoned to death. The initial ruling was that it was a suicide. That was then subjects a review based on the lawsuit brought by his brother who is a lawyer. I looked into this fairly closely. Again, it comes under the rubric and of i dont know. He was convinced his brother was mistaken for john doe two. I never found any evidence in terms of paperwork, people talking about it, that confirm that, which doesnt mean is of the case. It just means i dont know. Seekingd been information and was told it was a case of mistaken identity, and thought his brother was john doe two. [inaudible] andrew im sure you go into great detail. That hen tell you is was somebody on death row with mcveigh. It was not somebody was a federal agent. Im not sure he was the first one. Andrew he wasnt the first one . Anyway. I feel because he is so convinced that his brother was somehow mixed up in the bombing investigation, as a consequence he filed many different suits for freedom of information act for release of documents. Weight, let me talk. Thank you. I want to get everybody else a chance to talk. Very briefly. He has performed a valuable Public Service by bringing documents to light. He was a very helpful part of this project. As far as the other person concerned, it was a big i dont know. The focus of this book was really how the investigation unfolded and the things that were directly related to the investigation that we know of for sure that we can document and talk about. And for that reason we made a decision that we were not going to talk about this particular issue. Talk about this particular issue. Not yet. Somebody else gets a chance. Yes. Just a curiosity. The access that you all had to Terry Nichols, since he is in a super max prison. Curious how you are able to get that access. Andrew a great question. At the time we started he was still prevented from having access to the media and the patriot act and it was a real problem. I cant tell you how we did it, but roger charles, my coauthor, was responsible for finding a way to get access to Terry Nichols, and it was invaluable. You know, i will tell you also that Terry Nichols he was completely silent from the time he was arrested and brought into federal custody until about 2004 , when he was finally learned he was not going to be put to death. He was resentenced to life in state court here in oklahoma. He started writing a tremendous amount about what the new. Those writings increased over time, and once we get access to him, we ask him hundreds of questions to which he gave extremely detailed answers. It is not that we believe everything you tell this, but it gave tremendous texture and depth to the story and put a lot of new light on a lot of issues. So i am extremely grateful to Terry Nichols for his contribution as a researcher. I also think he has been very forthright in admitting is his responsibility for a number of criminal activities directly related to the bombing. Whether he admitted everything, whether everything he told us was exactly the truth, that is something that we parse very carefully. But we could not have had the book in the form that it is without Terry Nichols. Yes. The gentle men behind you. With regards to the series of lawsuits that were filed, he had one in which you wish trying to get the cameras on the north side of the building, which wouldve shown the truck, and the cia got involved with it to object to it. They would not release it on grounds of national security. I saw that and thought to myself , that isnt right. Thats not quite right. Another question. About the explosive, a lot of people who were inside the and others said they were taking a Computer Class up there at the time this happened, and that the first thing that happened was the building shook. And the instructor said it is an earthquake. Everybody jump under your desk. So everybody got under the desk. A couple of people from california said it is an earthquake, and about five seconds later, another explosion ,it, and a lot of people experts, suggested that there were explosive devices inside the building. That would explain the blast pattern, why debris was thrown across the street. Could you address that . Andrew sure. These are things much talked about at the time and since. The video cameras, i can tell you unequivocally they were not working. How do i know this . Survey of drew up a all the security arrangements in the building in february 1995, two months before the bombing. And there in blackandwhite it says that the video cameras are not working. As i told you earlier he and a judge were very concerned about this and wanted to do something about this. And the answer came back no. I dont want to dwell too much on him, but he sued the government, believing these cameras might exist, there might have been footage from those cameras. And in one of these comedy of errors, the people and the Records Department of the fbi clearly dont know, have not seen the document i have seen. I dont think anyone at the fbi ever saw it because i was given by tom hunt directly. And they are operating on the basis, we are not sure if this footage exists are not. Fight this on legal grounds, so cover our bases either way. We will and this has been going now for years. I can tell you definitively that the cameras were not working. The cia thing is actually a different part of what theyre suing over. Ill leave that to one side. As far as the explosion, the fact a lot of people, not just in the office, but many felt a double thump, and initial shaking, and then a much bigger blast that came somewhere between seven and 11 seconds later. This was something that the geologists and norman who thought there mightve been two explosions. His boss and the u. S. Geological survey then explained why they felt that that was mistaken. I have spoken to a tremendous number of explosive experts, and the explanation that was given to me is that what happens when you have a big explosion like that is that it creates a vacuum. A few seconds after the initial blast to get something called a negative blast where the air sucked i can and that impacts the building the hardest much harder than the initial explosion, and thats what she the columns and because the caking affect and because so many people to die. The explosive device. Nitrate. After 24 minutes. Thats all you have to set it off. Andrew all i can tell you on that subject, very briefly both Terry Nichols and Timothy Mcveigh gave detailed descriptions of the composition of the bomb. I showed it to endless experts in government and out of government. They all said both devices would essentially work. What is interesting is that theyre very different from each other. Different from each other in terms of how they describe the bomb being built on the 18th. Which then raises the question, you know, mcveigh claims to be has wayermind, but he less detail in his design is much less logical than nichols. The question asked in the book, was nichols the mastermind was that the bomb or was it someone else showing them what to do . Which, again, is another one of the big open questions. I heard from no credible explosive experts that it was not possible to transport bombs the way that mcveigh described it being transported. That is not something that anybody i came across with real credentials said was a problem. Lets somebody else of ago. Have a go. Yes. I worked for bank of oklahoma about a block south of the building. So it was quite a different experience in as much as all the facts that have come out since then. It was more of an emotional thing. Everybody downtown experienced , not only the people personally involved at the building, but the whole downtown area experienced quite an emotional shock. There was a lockdown for two miles around the downtown area. I dont know how quickly that happened, but i know you could get out, but then you could not get back in. Do you know anything about that . Andrew well, actually, it was a big problem in terms of investigating the bombing in the way in which the perimeter was set up around the crime scene. It actually wasnt done properly. This is a big part of the reason why the fbi failed to gather the forensic evidence to be able to make any meaningful conclusions about the device that exploded, and they were absolutely taken to the cleaners at court over that. A couple of reasons. The defense had a terrific for forensic lawyer from texas who tore them apart piece by piece. And secondly, because the Justice Department Inspector General came out with a report about the Fbi Crime Lab in the jury selection in 1997, blasting the Fbi Crime Lab over Oklahoma City in a number of other highprofile crimes showing how they had done their work backwards. They had taken evidence from elsewhere to make conclusions about the composition of the bomb, and they effectively blew the chance to put together a compelling forensic case for what had happened. There were a number of failures, and some of them were understandable because the first impulse right after the explosion was save as many lives as possible. So people were tramping in and out, and it was a crime scene and rescue scene. There was an initial followup bomb alert at about 10 30 a. M. So about an hourandahalf after the initial blast which gave the federal authorities a chance to set up a provisional perimeter. But it was a very small one, not big enough according to the experts. What you need is the entire debris field plus 25 . That did not happen for quite some time. And even once that perimeter was set up there were all kinds of security problems, red cross people coming in and handing out water and food to the rescue workers, which again, from a human point of view is entirely understandable, but it wasnt done in a way that respected the integrity of the crime scene and it could have been done better. No one thought to cover the cratered the night of the bombing. There was a tremendous rain storm. Ammonium nitrate was destroyed on contact with moisture. So again, huge missed opportunity to gather evidence that could have been used effectively to work out how the bomb was built, who might have built it, how sophisticated it was, all these kinds of things. [inaudible] andrew certainly from the point of view of the search and rescue operation there was no experience of this. Fema came in on the evening of the bombing and in particular had never had a disaster. Fema did not endear itself as an extended to anyone in the way that they behaved. They tried to boss everybody around. They claimed credit for everything the Oklahoma City Fire Department had done in terms of rescuing people, getting them out. They really behaved appallingly. That is also in the book. Ways that they behaved appallingly because they the fbi in terms of getting onto the crime scene once became clear that there were no more people left alive. The fbi should have had control of the place. They did not get control for 11 days. It did not do any favors to the crime investigators. Yeah . The day of the bombing i was working at the county assessors office, which is about two and a half blocks from where the Federal Building was. I heard two explosions. Andrew right. I mean i heard two explosions. Andrew yeah. Everybody did. No, they didnt. People have argued with me for 17 years that i didnt hear two explosions. I know what i heard. Andrew right. And number two, there has been a rumor since day one almost that that bomb was not made at the lake. That it was made in southwest Oklahoma City. I finally got to go to the warehouse where the bomb was supposed to have been made. It was not made by Timothy Mcveigh. Timothy mcveigh was in the army , sure. He and my second son rescission together at fort riley kansas, and they did not make bombs. They also went to the persian gulf together. Terry nichols wrote me and told he told me didat not blow up the Federal Building because they did not know how to make bombs. It was real lumpy. There are a lot of things that seem like nobody wants to talk about. Andrew ok. Well, let me address one or two of those things. You know, i think a lot of rumors have been circulated. I think a lot of troubling and of information are out there, and that think it is very important to try to distinguish fact from fiction. It is absolutely true that Terry Nichols has written. He wrote this to us as well. He wants to believe the bomb he built the bomb, he described it in great detail, he drew a picture of it. It is absolutely compatible with what exploded. The issue dealing with that the nations, i addressed already. The negative blast wave makes a tremendous amount of noise, and the sharing of the columns in the pan caking makes a tremendous amount of noise. Peoplei have talked to who are expert in the feed that field. 17 years and [inaudible] by all means, read the book, challenge the credibility if you want to. I offered to you to take it for what it is. What was the other point . About them not building bombs in the army . There is genuinely a question of how mcveigh and nichols learned how to build a bomb. If you talk to people, it is not that hard to build. The record shows, to the extent we know about mcveigh and or Nichols Building devices, we have evidence of pipe bombs in arizona, fooling around with bottle bombs on the nichols farm in michigan, but nothing on the scale of the bomb detonated on the day. It is a real question of how they built it with confidence to know it was going to blow as devastatingly as it did. It is one of the genuine unanswered questions. Does anyone have a question who hasnt asked one yet . Go ahead. Could you talk about star fire and your interview . Meyer strockmeyer and your interview with him . A German National named andreas stress meyer it is aeyer, and mystery to figure out who he is. There are suggestions he was some kind of intelligent agent, either working for the germans to spy on the neonazi movement in the United States, or he might have been working directly for a u. S. Intelligence or Law Enforcement agency. There are also suggestions he was a believing nazi, his grandfather was an early member of the nazi party, and made he went to Oklahoma City to wage war against the federal government, and was a true believer. I talked to him for about four days straight, it was fascinating. The reason he became involved in the investigation was because he met mcveigh at a gun show in 1993, gave him a business card, and two weeks before the bombing, mcveigh made a phone call to Ellicott City and it was for mandy and it said he was coming through shortly. Did mcveigh go to Ellicott City in the days before the bombing . In the book, i found no conclusive evidence, but evidence he might very well have in search of coconspirators. Another leading the investigation that was completely ignored. It raises the question of what knew . Meyer new was he involved in the plot . Some of it is guesswork, the impression i got to him from talking him at great length is that i didnt think he would ever have spoken to me if he had been involved in the bombing directly. Having said that, i think he knows a lot. He didnt tell me what he knows. I think he and mcveigh were extremely good friends. He talked very fondly about vague. About mcveigh. Memorythis incredible about their every interaction, which suggested wasnt just an encounter at a gun show, it was a relationship went on much longer. The impression i got was that here he was, his father a prominent politician in germany. He had a fascinating background which had not been previously known. He spent a lot of of time in israel. He was put on patrolling duties near the Golan Heights the a generalmy, he met who was the architect of the 1982 invasion of lebanon. He had access to highlevel people. , still back to germany in the german army, still doing intelligence work, he confirmed this to me, and it seems he had some kind of intelligencerelated connection going. He comes to the United States, one of the first people he contacts is a cia operative who, westding to strassmeyer going to hire him for Drug Trafficking on the u. S. Border. The operative was hoping to get a job in the Bush Senior Administration when he was president , he didnt get the job, it fell through, and everything i found out about thatsmeyer fell apart at point. He didnt know what to do, no interest in getting a job, no interest in leaving the u. S. , he fell in with a lawyer whose job was to represent members of the radical right. He prayed on his hospitality for a while, and his sidekick for a while, and they got fed up him and sent him to Ellicott City, thinking it could marry and get a green card and get a job and get a life and get out of their hair, primarily. His response when he got there was to start bombing to go round to gum shows to gun shows, by up weaponry and talk about the show down all expected after waco. He became associated with a withf the criminals a lodge of the criminals and i think he ended mcveigh a lot of the criminals and i think he and mcveigh had a connection. After the bombing when his name started circulating, and the head of the fbi investigation wanted to go after him, he left the country in a great hurry. They wanted to grill him in berlin and find out everything, but were overruled. And fbi agent in the end got on the phone with him and lobbed him a bunch of softball questions and then they moved on and then they moved on in the whole history of strassmeyer was left hanging. He reminds me a little bit about osama bin ladens family after 9 11, the fbi talked to them and said because they had connections and george bush was put george bush was friendly with other members of the bin laden situation, they were put on a plane and sent out of the country. Similar thing with strassmeyer, and that was the end of that, huge opportunity in the investigation that was missed, in my opinion. One more, keep it brief, thank you. Patriot conspiracy, your contention that the fbi investigating rightwing extremists prior to the bombing was partly because of waco and those issuesnd were partly responsible for the bombing. But i was expecting an investigation into Operation Patriot conspiracy, run by the fbi, they were in filtering they were infiltrating rightwing groups in the United States. Was when of the few domestic terror operations the fbi managed to get through. It started in 1991, because an informant told the fbi that he had heard among a group of texas militia people that they were plotting to assassinate fbi agent. The informant had health problems, he wanted money, everything he turned out to say turned out to everything he said turned up to be unreliable. The story about assassinating fbi agent turned out to not be true. Just as they were about to close he kept kept up coming up with new stories. He knew how to play the fbi. He came up with a story about somebody selling missiles on the black market, the fbi looked into that end it turned out not to be true. My investigation of what happened, including talking to people who started the investigation, is that it was a total wash. The informant was not reliable and it had no substance. There are people who believe patcom was this allencompassing investigation by the fbi into the farright, and point to some kind of secret knowledge of the bombing before they occurred. I found no evidence whatsoever. If there are no more questions, i thank you very much. I am going to be signing looks. I appreciate you listening. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] theory bookshelf features countrys best known history writers of the past decade talking about their books watch our weekly sound weekly series every saturday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan re. On cspan3. [birds chirping] this is American History tv, featuring events, interviews, archival films and is two college classrooms, museums and. Istoric places exploring our nations past every weekend on cspan3. To thean has coverage coronavirus pandemic and it is all available on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors, track the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps. Time,on demand any unfiltered at cspan. Org coronavirus. Narrator