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