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

by Stuart Wexler

  McVeigh’s frustration and anger with the government only grew after the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Texas, in the spring of 1993. David Koresh had created the Branch Davidians as an offshoot of Seventh Day Adventism. Adventists distinguish themselves from other fundamentalist Christian sects by embracing many Jewish traditions, including following Jewish dietary guidelines (that is, keeping kosher) and, most importantly, observing the Sabbath based on a Jewish time from—sundown Friday to sunup Saturday (hence the reference to the “seventh day” in their name). They share the millennial dispensationalist approach of many evangelical Christians described in Chapter 3. Namely, they believe in a rapture that will spare true believers (the elect) from a Great Tribulation that will ultimately see God vanquish the forces of evil, bringing forth the second coming of Jesus. But in his rendition of the book of Revelations, Koresh argued for a mid-tribulation Rapture—that is, one in which the elect must first suffer through part of the Great Tribulation.12

  For many months, Koresh had been predicting to his followers at the Waco complex that this part of the Revelations prophecy—their tribulation—was imminent and that it could take the form of armed conflict with the government. Koresh believed that he was the Christ who would rise again after he and his followers were martyred. Hence he had been stockpiling the very weapons that caught the attention of the BATF and brought its agents to Waco. As one might expect, the decision to arrest Koresh resulted in a standoff. What the government did not realize was that by its very opposition to Koresh, and by escalating its siege-like preparation for a raid, it was playing right into Koresh’s own biblical prophecies: that he was the Messiah and that the end-times were approaching. Koresh hunkered down, and though there would be controversy over who actually started the shooting, the raid resulted in a fire that engulfed the compound, killing Koresh and seventy-five of his followers, including pregnant women and twenty-one children. The date of the siege: April 19, 1993—precisely two years before the Oklahoma City Bombing.13

  In March 1993, drawn by coverage of the standoff between the government and the Branch Davidians, McVeigh had detoured to Waco from his normal jaunts through the gun-show circuit. He even gave an interview with a reporter at the scene. The ultimate outcomes at Ruby Ridge and at Waco convinced McVeigh of the evil of the federal government. According to McVeigh’s own account to reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck in interviews for their book American Terrorist,14 after Waco, he and his former platoon commander, Terry Nichols, resolved to engage in a major act of revolution. In justifying his eventual attack on the government he wrote:

  I chose to bomb a federal building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike; a counter attack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years… .

  Knowledge of these multiple and ever-more aggressive raids across the country constituted an identifiable pattern of conduct within and by the federal government and amongst its various agencies… . For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become “soldiers” … and they were escalating their behavior. Therefore, this bombing was also meant as a preemptive (or proactive) strike against these forces and their command and control centers within the federal building. When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operation, it is sound military strategy to take the fight to the enemy.15

  Though he challenged the government’s case in court, McVeigh proudly admitted his guilt after his conviction, and juries sentenced two others—Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier—for their role in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Before becoming the first federal prisoner to be executed in fifty years in 2001, McVeigh insisted that he and Nichols had acted without assistance (beyond some early, minimal help from Fortier in Arizona). To Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh more or less conceded the official version of the case: That he had begun planning an antigovernment attack in 1993; that he and Nichols had selected the Murrah Building as the target by December 1994; that they had sold weapons stolen from an associate (Roger Moore, whom McVeigh had met at a gun show in Florida) to finance their operations; that they had obtained the bomb’s components and stored them in a warehouse in Kansas, where they ultimately constructed the bomb, obtained the Ryder truck under a false identity, and detonated the bomb on April 19 in Oklahoma City.

  McVeigh did not become another Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. He never claimed to be anything other than the sole driving force behind the bombing of the Murrah Building. But McVeigh also remained a fan of The Turner Diaries. Earl Turner’s only regret—one redeemed only through his kamikaze mission at the end of the novel—was in revealing Organization secrets, including names of other members, to the agents of the Jewish-controlled American government while captured and under interrogation. Many experts who took a deeper look at McVeigh’s activities leading to the Oklahoma City Bombing believe that McVeigh avoided the fictional Turner’s mistake—that he became a martyr for others who had assisted with and possibly planned the Oklahoma City Bombing. One popular theory, favored by several investigative reporters and criminologists, sees McVeigh as a witting member of a Christian Identity conspiracy.

  The case is circumstantial and involves five different lines of evidence. The first involves challenging the official account of McVeigh’s motivation: the idea, offered by federal prosecutors, that the convicted terrorist was exclusively driven by antigovernment paranoia, untainted by either racism or religion.

  Kerry Noble, the former member of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, is one of many who doubts this limited explanation, affirmed by McVeigh himself. The CSA, recall, was started by Jim Ellison, who fell under the sway of Christian Identity preaching while mentored by the Reverend Robert Millar. By the early 1980s, the CSA had stockpiled weapons and attracted terrorists like Richard Wayne Snell. Many see the obvious connection between the chosen date of the Murrah attack and the anniversary of the Waco siege. But Noble sees much more significance in the chosen date of April 19.

  The date of the Oklahoma City Bombing also marked the tenth anniversary of an FBI raid on Jim Ellison’s Arkansas compound in 1985. Noble, who was inside the compound, remembered the day as nearly ending in a major gun battle. (But instead it resulted in a “talk-down” by FBI hostage-rescue expert Danny Coulsen.) In fact, Noble, who abandoned the CSA not long after the assault, specifically warned government agencies not to inflame ultra-right groups in mid-April because of its proximity to Easter. According to some, any Identity martyr who died during this time could be resurrected.16 As others point out, McVeigh obtained a new driver’s license under a fake name not long after Snell’s execution date had been finally announced; he gave a birth date of April 19 even though his real birthday was April 23.

  McVeigh publicly distanced himself from any religious motivation for his crime. He was raised Catholic, but no one described McVeigh as devout in any way. In some public statements, McVeigh asserted something bordering on agnosticism and specifically denounced certain core religious concepts, such as the existence of hell. But in private letters written before the Murrah bombings to childhood friend Steven Hodge, McVeigh asserted, “I know in my heart that I am right in my struggle, Steve. I have come to peace with myself, my God, and my cause. Blood will flow in the Streets, Steve. Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Slave Wannabe Slaves. Pray that it is not your blood, my friend.”17 As religious scholar Eugene V. Gallagher noted, “Despite his professed antipathy toward organized religion, with his references to God and prayer and the stark antitheses of good versus evil and freedom versus slavery, McVeigh implied that the events about to take place had ultimate importance and perhaps even divine sanction.”18

  If some sort of religious impulse compelled the otherwise secular McVeigh, it would be one more thing he had in common with the fictional Earl Turner. Once the leadership of the Organization had accepted Turner into
the Order, it allowed him to see a sacred manuscript referred to as the Book. In his diary, Turner recorded,

  For the first time I understand the deepest meaning of what we are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depends on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His Grand Design. These may seem like strange words to be coming from me, who has never been religious, but they are utterly sincere words.19

  Of course, that “Grand Design” involved genocidal ethnic cleansing, and McVeigh’s other claim, that he lacked any racial prejudice, is simply not believable. As researcher J.M Berger noted, “It is extraordinarily unlikely that The Turner Diaries could appeal to anyone who is not a hardened racist. Dripping with racial animus, The Turner Diaries does not aim to convince readers of the virtues of white supremacy. Rather, it assumes bigotry on the part of readers and explicitly tries to move them from passive agreement to violent extremism.”20 McVeigh also played down his decision to join a Ku Klux Klan organization in the early 1990s, incredulously claiming that he had entered in ignorance of the group’s racist agenda, assuming that the group simply supported gun-owners’ rights. Thomas Robb, the leader of the group in question, the Arkansas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had been a major figure in Christian Identity circles since the mid-1980s. In letters to his sister in the months before the Murrah bombing, McVeigh also cast aspersions on Jews and their role in controlling the world financial system. It appears as if McVeigh at least shared many of the sensibilities of Identity followers, a fact that he clearly tried to hide from public scrutiny.

  But questions about a Christian Identity conspiracy extend beyond McVeigh’s motivations. Many doubt whether McVeigh and Nichols could have executed the plot by themselves, whether the logistics of the actual bombing fit a two-person scenario. Uncertainty extends specifically to the design of the bomb and to the financing of the entire operation, which some see as the second line of evidence pointing to a conspiracy.

  There is the curious fact that in a matter of weeks, McVeigh and Nichols graduated from barely being able to compose low-level “backyard” explosive devices to being able to mix together and construct a sophisticated bomb that combined racing fuel and ammonium nitrate fertilizer. At McVeigh’s trial, Michael Fortier described how, in the fall of 1994, while planning their attack on the Murrah Building, McVeigh and Nichols had reported the results of an early test of a “milk-jug bomb.” “He told me that the blasting cap just sprayed the ammonium nitrate everywhere, it didn’t work.”21 Yet just a few months later, McVeigh and Nichols designed a much more sophisticated bomb that nearly demolished a nine-story building.

  There is little doubt that McVeigh and Nichols had the know-how to create the weapon by April 19, 1995. In 1999 McVeigh gave very specific details on its construction to Michel and Herbeck from memory, and experts agree that the narrated design could account for the explosion. What is not clear is how McVeigh and Nichols acquired the know-how. Nothing in their backgrounds suggests the required training and level of sophistication in fabricating explosives. Having consulted with demolitions experts, McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, doubted McVeigh’s confessions about the bomb and pressed him to divulge the source for the design. McVeigh told Jones that he had studied the bomb-making process from a book at a public library in Arizona, but McVeigh could not remember the title. Jones’s investigators could never find any book or resource in that library to account for the ANFO bomb. “There simply is no evidence,” Jones insisted to investigative reporter Peter Lance, “that Terry Nichols or Tim McVeigh or anybody known to have been associated with them had the expertise, knowledge, skill [and] patience to construct an improvised device that would bring down a modern nine-story office building.”22

  The implication is that “others unknown,” as Jones called them, assisted McVeigh and Nichols in constructing the bomb and that the two men had protected their compatriots. Some researchers believe those same unknown others must have also helped the pair by providing financing. Both men were struggling economically as of 1993, when their plan first took shape. Yes, the pair admitted to robbing Roger Moore, a fellow antigovernment gun-rights enthusiast whom McVeigh had met on the gun-show circuit, and then selling weapons from Moore’s rare firearms collection to help finance their operation. But many doubt whether they could have raised the necessary money from that robbery alone. Mark Hamm, an Indiana State University criminologist whose 2002 book In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground outlines a Christian Identity–backed conspiracy in the Murrah bombing,23 believes that McVeigh and Nichols had help in robbing not only Moore but also a series of banks from 1994 to 1995. Building on research by Oklahoma reporter J.D. Cash, Hamm even fingers the likely accomplices: a relatively new band of Christian Identity zealots, the Aryan Republican Army (ARA).

  Formed in 1993, in response to the same types of government raids that dismayed McVeigh, the ARA modeled itself on Robert Mathews’s Silent Brotherhood. An eclectic group of seven core members based out of Ohio, its numbers included Christian Identity preacher and East Coast Aryan Nations leader Mark Thomas; transgendered hillbilly Peter Langan, who preferred to be called Commander Pedro; skinhead musician Scott Stedeford; a would-be Navy Seal with demolitions training, Richard “Wild Bill” Guthrie; tenth-grade dropout Kevin McCarthy; and former Eagle Scout Michael Brescia. Committed, like Mathews, to raising money for a revolution, the ARA robbed no fewer than twenty-two banks in the Midwest and the Great Plains in 1994 and 1995. The robberies were as idiosyncratic as the group itself, with members disguising themselves as U.S. presidents, Santa Claus, FBI agents, and construction workers. The robberies followed the same general pattern, as described by terrorism expert Friedrich Seiltgen:

  A robbery would begin with Langan running in first, with the others following behind. Langan would take a running leap and jump over the counter, brandishing his rifle, and yell, “No alarms, no hostages” twice. The robbers used two-way radios to communicate with one another and with gang members outside. All sometimes dressed in camouflage and combat boots. When not wearing ski masks, they often wore Halloween masks of American presidents.

  While Langan cleaned out the teller drawers, a teammate would guard the lobby, yelling foreign-sounding gibberish. They never went to the vault because they believed that would take too much time. When they were finished, they would often toss a smoke grenade behind them, leaving the bank in a cloud. After racing away in a cheap “drop car,” they would transfer to another, more reliable car to complete their getaway, monitoring police radio frequencies as they went.24

  The robberies were always a means to an end: to obtain enough money to help white supremacists finance a holy race war. The ARA eluded federal law enforcement until FBI agents turned Shawn Kenny, an ARA associate, into an informant. Members of the group went to prison in 1997.25

  Hamm established that McVeigh and Nichols were in the vicinity of several of the ARA robberies at the time of the offenses. “It is highly improbable—if not statistically impossible,” Hamm insisted, “for nine men with such violent predispositions and such deep connections within the white power movement, all of whom needed money desperately … to randomly come together at the same time in the same geographic location.”26 Based on letters from and interactions with her brother, McVeigh’s sister Jennifer provided vague but corroborating evidence in a December 1994 affidavit:

  He (Timothy McVeigh) had been involved in a bank robbery but did not provide any further details concerning the robbery. He advised me that he had not actually participated in the robbery itself, but was somehow involved in the planning or setting up of this robbery. Although he did not identify the participants by name, he stated that “they” had committed the robbery. His purpose for relating this information to me was to request that I exchange some of my own money for what I recall to be approximately three $100.00 bills…
.

  It is my belief that this bank robbery had occurred within the recent past. I was not made aware of the details or if there were any additional robberies involving my brother or any of his associates. I do recall that my brother remarked that the money he had in his possession represented his share of the bank robbery proceeds.27

  Hamm developed additional circumstantial evidence supporting a far-right conspiracy involving the ARA in the bombing of the Murrah Building. Hamm established that Guthrie and McVeigh both belonged to the same KKK group, the Arkansas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, run by Christian Identity eminence Thomas Robb. Hamm also found evidence suggesting that McVeigh and Robb may have met as early as 1992. In examining early reports about the Roger Moore robbery, Hamm noticed that descriptions of the assailants, per Moore, matched members of the ARA, and not McVeigh and Nichols. (Although Hamm speculates that the two men provided targeting information to the ARA.) This is odd, since Moore was well acquainted with McVeigh from the gun-show circuit. Hamm even managed to get Langan on record confirming that Guthrie knew McVeigh. He also found records showing that Langan had told an undercover police officer in 1993 that the ARA intended to bomb a federal building. This potential connection between McVeigh, Nichols, and the ARA represents the third line of evidence pointing to an Identity conspiracy in the Oklahoma City Bombing.

  More than anything, Cash and Hamm developed leads indicating that one ARA member, Michael Brescia, directly interacted with McVeigh and aided him in the bombing.28 This information relates to the fourth line of evidence suggesting a Christian Identity–backed conspiracy in the April 19 attack in Oklahoma City: the twenty-four witness sightings of McVeigh and/or Nichols in the presence of a stocky, olive-complexioned man commonly referred in official reports as John Doe #2. Witnesses described a man fitting that description in the presence of McVeigh days before, during, and immediately after the terrorist bombing. The Justice Department concluded that these witnesses had confused a completely innocent army soldier, Todd Bunting, for an accomplice to Tim McVeigh. A witness positively identified Bunting as accompanying McVeigh when he rented the Ryder truck in Kansas, but hard evidence clearly established that Bunting, who looked like the sketch of John Doe #2, had visited the rental agency the day before McVeigh and that he had no connection to McVeigh. In other words, at least one of the witnesses confabulated two different events when implying that McVeigh had an accomplice; skeptics of a conspiracy argue that such mistakes are not uncommon. Other sightings of John Doe #2 may simply be the result of similar confabulations and the cognitive distortions generally associated with eyewitness descriptions and memories of crimes. But this explanation goes only so far. Stress can play games with perceptions, and the brain can force sudden and unexpected events into a false or distorted narrative. But many of the eyewitness accounts occurred days and even weeks before the actual bombing, and others include hallmarks of the ring of truth.