America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States

by Stuart Wexler

  Berger’s revelations regarding the PATCON operation present students of the Oklahoma City Bombing with an alarming possibility: the chance that the government could have (or should have) known about McVeigh prior to the bombing. As Berger notes, from 1991 to 1993, “Timothy McVeigh literally drove through the middle of PATCON’s investigative landscape… . McVeigh interacted with members and associates of the targeted groups.”38 Berger specifically documents McVeigh’s interactions with members or close associates of two patriot groups: the Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) and the Texas Light Infantry Brigade (TLIB). The former group, run by Tom Posey, “started out as an anticommunist group supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, but … turned into a racist right-wing white supremacist group,” according to government reports.39 Posey’s group lay behind the missile plot described above. The TLIB was formed and run by Louis Beam, one of PATCON’s chief targets.

  As McVeigh submerged himself more and more into the mind-set and lifestyle of the antigovernment racist right, he traveled the nation’s gun-show circuit and met the likes of Roger Moore and Andreas Streissmeir. Moore enjoyed a close relationship with Tom Posey; Streissmeir consulted with Beam’s TLIB. McVeigh made no effort to hide his radicalism, selling The Turner Diaries at gun shows and openly speaking about his antigovernment philosophy. It stands to reason that such activity could have attracted the interest of PATCON agents, but no evidence suggests that PATCON identified McVeigh or, for that matter, individuals like Moore and Streissmeir.

  The FBI ended its PATCON operations by 1993 at approximately the same time McVeigh shifted from a revolutionary mind-set to a revolutionary plan of action. What remains unknown is how federal law enforcement evolved at this time, what operations and countermeasures followed PATCON. Clearly, militia groups and leaders such as Beam remained targets of interest to law enforcement. The use of Carol Howe as an informant suggests that federal agencies continued to monitor groups and individuals who came into contact with McVeigh.

  Related and more disturbing revelations come from a little-known government investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing by a congressional subcommittee led by Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California. Following the 2004 document dump by the FBI, Rohrabacher, already suspicious of a potential conspiracy in the attack, pursued various leads in the case, among them the possible involvement of the ARA in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Every one of the living ARA members denied a connection to either McVeigh or the bombing, although the report characterized their stories as “murky, if not contradictory.” But more alarmingly, the committee could not even find one of the bombers, despite its best efforts. The committee’s final report noted that Kevin McCarthy, one of the ARA members who had stayed with Strassmeir (and Michael Brescia) at Elohim City, for reasons unknown had entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. The report noted,

  Continuing the attempt to locate McCarthy, the subcommittee chairman contacted the head of the Department of Justice’s federal witness protection program. The official confirmed that in the past McCarthy had been in the program but had no information on his current status. Similarly, the subcommittee also discovered, through a private source, that McCarthy is no longer attached to the Social Security Number he had at the time of entry into the federal prison system. These facts raise questions about whether McCarthy is, in fact, still under some sort of federal protection as well as why the Department of Justice was unable or unwilling to help find him. It is astonishing that officials from the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies were unwilling to permit congressional investigators to question a former bank robber with a possible connection to a large-scale terrorist attack.40

  A better question would be: What would prompt the Justice Department to offer federal protection to someone immediately after he served his prison sentence for bank robbery? The other ARA members were already serving their prison sentences, and none of the others was subject to additional prosecution. Perhaps McCarthy provided information on other white supremacists, but that possibility is tempered by the fact that McCarthy had been “out of the game” and in prison for several years before becoming a source. A more disturbing possibility is that the government never wanted others to interview McCarthy, especially after the 2004 revelations further tying the ARA to McVeigh and Nichols. There is no obvious reason to cover for the ARA if it did in fact have nothing to do with the Oklahoma City Bombing—that is, unless the ARA–McVeigh–Elohim City angle could expose an even darker secret about the April 19, 1995, bombing.

  Here one gets into highly speculative territory, in part because the government continues to withhold information about the case. But more than one student of the Oklahoma City Bombing has questioned whether the government had advanced warning of the bombing from informants in places like Elohim City. Oklahoma state representative Charles Key, who launched his own pseudo-investigation of the crime in 1997, reported in a March 12, 1997, letter to concerned citizens that “the Oklahoma City Fire Department received a call from the FBI the Friday before the bombing and was told to be on alert for a terrorist attack on a government building.”41 Gumbel and Charles tell of several witnesses reporting men who appeared to be bomb-squad experts, replete with bomb-sniffing dogs, searching the area of the Murrah Building on the morning of April 19, before the explosion. Gumbel and Charles add,

  On the morning of April 19, the head of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s tactical team, John Haynie, was in Oklahoma City with a bomb truck, even though he was stationed in Ardmore, near the Texas border. Ostensibly, he was in town to run another training session—quite a coincidence. In 1998, Haynie told a grand jury that his session was called to hone his team’s surveillance skills. OHP time records, however, show that at least three of the team members who might have been expected to attend were off work or on vacation.42

  When confronted with this anomaly, Haynie said, “There’s no benefit that I can see to talking about anything to do with anything I’ve ever done.” On a related front, Gumbel and Charles note,

  A question hangs over the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which brought three out-of-town agents into Oklahoma City on the evening before the bombing, for reasons it has never adequately explained. Rick Stephens, who came in from the Tulsa area, would not say if he or other OSBI agents had been forewarned of a bomb attack. “That’s been rumored for years,” he said. Invited to issue a categorical denial that the OSBI was responding to a threat, he said “I won’t confirm or deny anything.”

  If federal and local authorities were warned about a potential attack, the record offers some possibilities as to the motive. Carol Howe insists that she told her BATF case officer, prior to April 19, “of the activities of Mr. Mahon and Mr. Strassmeir and Elohim City residents in (1) believing a Holy War was imminent, (2) that Elohim City should strike first, (3) that Elohim City was the next Waco, (4) that Strassmeir and Mahon wanted to bomb and blow up buildings, including federal buildings and installations, and (5) among these buildings was the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.”43 Howe changed her story on more than one occasion. No documents directly support her account, and the BATF denied the essence of her story. But the BATF also refuses to release the raw tapes and transcripts of thirty-eight conversations that Howe recorded for her handlers during the time she spied inside Elohim City.

  Others speculate that Andreas Strassmeir tipped the government off to a pending attack, indicating that he served as an informant for U.S. law enforcement, German intelligence, or both. The son of a top aide to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, Strassmeir served for seven years in the German military. He told reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that he “received military intelligence training. Part of his work was to detect infiltration by Warsaw Pact agents, he explained, and then feed them disinformation.”44 He came to the United States, by his own admission, “hoping to work for the operations section of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency].” He claimed to Evans-Pritchard that this “never worked out” and that h
e soon became drawn into the right-wing subculture, first joining Beam’s TLIB. But when Evans-Pritchard dug more deeply, he found reason to doubt Strassmeir. Among other things, the reporter discovered that when Strassmeier’s car had been impounded in 1992 for a simple traffic violation, a host of federal and international public officials had brought considerable pressure on the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to release the vehicle. Evans-Pritchard also found that Strassmeir’s behavior raised alarms with members of the ultra-right. Members of the TLIB became so suspicious that they “placed a ‘tail’ on Strassmeir and followed him one night. Strassmeir went into a federal building in which was housed a local ATF office. On the doors of this particular federal building, there were combination locks and in order to gain entrance, the person had to punch in the correct combination… . The members of the Texas Light Infantry reported that they watched while Strassmeir punched in the proper code, unlocked the door and went into the building.”45

  The government’s actions—or lack thereof—toward Strassmeir only reinforce the perception that he may have been an informant. There is no doubt that Howe informed the FBI about Strassmeir no later than April 21, 1995. Yet, as Representative Rohrabacher’s investigation observed, “For nearly a year after the bombing, the FBI did not interview Strassmeir. Only when he had fled the country was he queried briefly on the phone by the FBI.” The Justice Department also misled McVeigh’s defense attorneys, as well as the federal judge presiding over the terrorist’s trial, by telling them that law enforcement had never seriously considered Strassmeir for any possible role in the crime. Judge Richard Matsch forbade the defense from pursuing the Elohim City angle, largely based on federal prosecutor Beth Wilkinson’s assurances that Strassmeir was a “mere wisp of the wind.” But in a 1997 special report on ABC News’s 20/20, reporters revealed that in private conversations, a law enforcement official had admitted that Strassmeir was a significant person of interest. The family of one of the Oklahoma City Bombing victims even attempted to include Strassmeir in a wrongful-death lawsuit, naming the German as a “US federal informant with material knowledge of the bombing.”

  Strassmeir, for his part, denies that he was an informant, just as he denies that he had any involvement in the Oklahoma City Bombing. But in a revealing exchange with Evans-Pritchard for the London Sunday Telegraph in 1996, Strassmeir claimed to have a “very reliable source” on the Oklahoma City Bombing operation. The reporter recounted:

  “The different agencies weren’t cooperating,” [Strassmeir] said. “In fact, they were working against each other. You even had a situation where one branch of the FBI was investigating and not sharing anything with another branch of the FBI.” …

  “It’s obvious that it was a government ‘op’ that went wrong, isn’t it? The ATF had something going with McVeigh. They were watching him—of course they were,” he asserted, without qualification. “What they should have done is make an arrest while the bomb was still being made instead of waiting till the last moment for a publicity stunt. They had everything they needed to make a bust, and they screwed it up.”

  He said that the sting operation acquired a momentum of its own as the ATF tried to “ice the cake” for more dramatic effect. “Whoever thought this thing up is an idiot, in my opinion. I am told they thought it would be better to put a bigger bomb in there. The bigger the better. It would make them more guilty… . McVeigh knew he was delivering a bomb, but he had no idea what was in that truck. He just wanted to shake things up a little; you know, make a gesture.”

  “According to your source?”

  “That’s correct. The bomb was never meant to explode. They were going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time… . Maybe he changed the time, you never know with people who are so unreliable.”46

  Evans-Pritchard became increasingly suspicious that Strassmeir was himself the source, despite the German’s repeated denials. Eventually he confronted his subject with his doubts:

  “Either you are a mass murderer, or you are an undercover agent,” I said. “Either you killed all those people, or you risked your life to penetrate a group of vile, dangerous people. Take your pick, Andreas, but don’t think you can stick your head in the sand and hope that it will all go away. It won’t go away.”

  “You don’t understand,” [Strassmeir] said.

  “You know what I think already,” I persisted. “I think you’re a very courageous man. I think you did everything you could to stop that bombing. You did your part; you got inside the most deadly terrorist conspiracy in the history of the United States; you got these maniacs to believe in you; your cover was brilliant; and somebody let you down, didn’t they, Andreas?”

  “You don’t understand,” he repeated almost plaintively.

  “I do understand, Andreas. I understand that it wasn’t your fault. Are you listening to me? It wasn’t your fault. So why not just come out and tell the whole rotten truth, and get it over and done with? You don’t have to cover for the ATF.”

  “You think it’s as simple as that?” he stammered.

  “I don’t know, Andreas. You tell me. Who were you working for anyway? Did the Germans send you over?”

  “No! No, they would never do that.”

  “So who was it then? The ATF? The Bureau? Who were you working for?”

  “Look, I can’t talk any longer.”

  “Just listen to me, Andreas. They’re going to hang you out to dry. When this thing comes down they’re going to leave you holding that bomb, or—and you know this as well as I do—you’ll fall under a train one day on the U Bahn, when nobody’s looking.”

  “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “There comes a time in every botched operation when the informant has to speak out to save his own skin, and that’s now, Andreas.”

  “How can he?” he shouted into the telephone. “What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur?”

  “A provocateur?”

  “What if he talked and manipulated the others into it? What then? The country couldn’t handle it. The relatives of the victims are going to go crazy. He’s going to be held responsible for the murder of 168 people.”

  “That is true.”

  “Of course the informant can’t come forward. He’s scared shitless right now.”47

  In some ways, Strassmeir spoke to a problem we’ve seen repeated over and over throughout this book. Investigations of domestic terrorism often place law enforcement in a quandary. Faced with a potential terrorist plot, the government must debate whether or not to expose the crime and consequently risk the safety of important and ongoing sources and methods, specifically human informants, who could potentially uncover even more nefarious plots in the future or develop evidence against more senior members of a domestic terrorist group. The government must often look the other way as said informants continue to commit crimes. The infiltrators often find themselves in the ambiguous space between monitoring a plot and provoking it. If the decision is made to expose the informant in some sort of a sting operation, timing becomes key, as the government seeks to maximize its chances of developing the best possible case against the greatest number of the most senior terrorists. If Strassmeir is right, the Oklahoma City Bombing may represent a tragic example of what happens when such a sting is poorly timed, and possibly provoked.

  It might also be the case that the government was legitimately trying to stop an attack, but one for which it had only vague outlines. Even if one believes that Howe warned the BATF of a plot, she gave three different potential targets and no date. Predicting and preventing such an attack would be even more problematic for the government if it was largely a bottom-up plan driven by one or two lower-level men rather than a top-down plot hatched by radicals like Dennis Mahon at Elohim City. A top-down plot is less adaptable because all the players in the conspiracy must be coordinated and kept informed, and the conspiracy is e
ven more open to infiltration by government sources. Grassroots terrorism, on the other hand, allows individuals to adjust their plans as needed and to more easily elude serious penetration by law enforcement agencies. This was Louis Beam’s insight in applying the concept of leaderless resistance to domestic terrorism.

  McVeigh and Nichol’s actions still point to the two men as the driving force behind the attack, but as the phantom cell in Beam’s schema. McVeigh’s private writings and letters, and the testimony of people like Michael Fortier, clearly reveal a man who became radicalized in reaction to government raids and who was more than willing to engage in domestic terrorism, even before he met anyone in the ARA or at Elohim City. Both men, regardless of how they did it, acquired extensive knowledge of demolitions design and clearly stole the materials necessary to make the weapon. A top-down conspiracy that included those with extensive knowledge of demolitions, like ARA members Langan and Guthrie, would not have needed to outsource something as vital as building the bomb to two men like McVeigh and Nichols. A more likely bet is that McVeigh and Nichols reached out to others (including possibly John Doe #2) to help them with their plan as needed. Perhaps they received financial support from people in the ARA, but even Hamm’s research suggests that the two men crossed paths with an ARA bank robbery in only one place—Fayetteville, Arkansas—for a limited time. If McVeigh and Nichols had ongoing connections to the ARA, they clearly didn’t need to risk robbing someone they knew, such as Roger Moore. McVeigh’s strange pattern of phone calls also indicates someone who is looking for coconspirators rather than someone who is a participant in an ongoing conspiracy. In other words, McVeigh appears to have been in the driver’s seat rather than as someone who was being manipulated as a pawn or as a bit player in a larger plan. The calls, for one, all seem to come at the last minute, in April 1995. In addition to the call to Elohim City, McVeigh made repeated phone calls to William Luther Pierce’s National Alliance, but the records show that he never got anything other than an answering machine. The calls suggest a hint of desperation on the part of McVeigh, like someone looking for last-minute help on a job that may be over his head.