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

by Stuart Wexler

  The best compendium of these accounts by witnesses comes from Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles in Oklahoma City,29 their excellent 2012 treatise on the bombing. They identified a number of witnesses whose encounters with McVeigh (or Nichols) and John Doe #2 coincided with unique or memorable events, which, knitted together, form a consistent narrative. This group includes Leonard Long, a black Oklahoma City commuter who nearly collided with a brown van on the morning of April 19; Long positively identified McVeigh (wearing a baseball cap) as the driver but was equally convinced that McVeigh traveled with a “stocky, dark-complexioned” passenger who “spewed racial insults” at Long. Not long after Long’s encounter, and not far from the location of his encounter, another witness described two men—a stocky, olive-complexioned man and a tall white man in a baseball cap—walking toward a yellow van. Just twenty minutes before the bombing, Mike Moroz, a mechanic, told investigators about an incident involving occupants of a yellow Ryder truck; the driver, whom Moroz later identified as Tim McVeigh, was wearing a baseball cap and asked for directions to the Murrah Federal Building. Moroz also stated that there was a passenger in the vehicle. Moroz recalled the incident well, because the Ryder truck nearly hit a display when it first peeled into Johnny’s Tire Company, where he was an employee, located only blocks from the explosion site.30

  Similar accounts place McVeigh in the company of an unknown accomplice fitting the John Doe #2 profile days and weeks before April 19, notably in Kansas when the bomb was allegedly being constructed. But perhaps the most intriguing account of a John Doe #2 comes from a group of go-go dancers at the Lady Godiva Nightclub in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The women recalled seeing McVeigh with two other men, one of whom matched the John Doe #2 description. McVeigh, perhaps drunk, broadcast his upcoming plans, quipping to the dancers, “On April 19, you’ll remember me for the rest of my life.” Security-camera footage from the nightclub, obtained by investigative journalist J.D. Cash, appears to corroborate the account, but the footage is too grainy for a positive identification of McVeigh or his associates, and the sound is of poor quality. At first blush, the date of the visit, April 8, appears to exclude McVeigh as the boastful customer, because McVeigh is supposed to have been registered then at a motel in Kingman, Arizona, where he had just prepaid for an extra five-day stay. But Hamm established that McVeigh did not receive or make any phone calls from Kingman from April 8 to April 11, and the manager of the motel did not recall seeing McVeigh’s car. In fact, the manager said that McVeigh’s room looked all but unoccupied during the relevant period.31

  As for the other two men the dancers saw in McVeigh’s company at the Tulsa club, the women managed to identify two individuals from photographs who definitely knew each other and who stayed together during the relevant time: Michael Brescia and Andreas Strassmeir. Brescia, an ARA member, bears a strong resemblance to police sketches of John Doe #2. In April 1995 Brescia roomed with Strassmeir at Elohim City, the Christian Identity compound in Oklahoma City. Strassmeir, a native of Germany, had come to the United States in the mid-1980s in search of government work. Failing to find employment, he found himself ensconced in the world of the American ultra-right. One person he definitely admits having met—only once, at a Texas gun show—is Timothy McVeigh. At the time, Strassmeir belonged to the Texas Light Infantry Brigade, a new militia group formed by Louis Beam. Strassmeir insists that he never met or talked with McVeigh again. But curiously, McVeigh admitted (to Michel and Herbeck) making at least one call to the Elohim City compound in the days leading up to the Oklahoma City attack. He wanted to talk with “Andy the German,” McVeigh said. When Joan Millar, Richard’s wife, told McVeigh that Strassmeir was not around, McVeigh responded, “Tell Andy I’ll be coming through.”32

  It is the curious circumstances surrounding Elohim City, including suspicions about Strassmeir, that present the fifth line of evidence suggesting a Christian Identity conspiracy in the Oklahoma City bombing. Hamm and Cash have developed a suggestive array of evidence connecting Elohim City to McVeigh and the ARA. It begins with Strassmeir, who admitted meeting McVeigh one time and whom McVeigh called (but never supposedly spoke with) shortly before April 19. Some witnesses contradict Strassmeir. A government informant, John Shults, told the FBI that he had attended a 1994 meeting at Elohim City that had included Christian Identity radical Chevy Kehoe and two Germans. One was named Andy, and Shults was “sure beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the other was Tim McVeigh. Shults remembered the discussion turning toward a bombing and a Ryder truck.33 Another government informant, Carol Howe, who lived for a time at Elohim City, insisted that McVeigh had visited Elohim City on repeated occasions, using the fake name Tim Tuttle. Howe, a onetime beauty pageant contestant, became close to Dennis Mahon, a major figure in white supremacist circles; she claimed that he had referred to the bombing of the Murrah Building prior to April 19. Mahon and Strassmeir were close associates, and Howe insists that McVeigh stayed in the company of Strassmeir at the compound. Others, including J.D. Cash and Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, claimed to have informants inside Elohim City who asserted that McVeigh had visited the compound. These informants were never named, and therefore their credibility cannot be adequately evaluated. What is clear is that a speeding ticket places McVeigh in the immediate vicinity of Elohim City in September 1994 and that McVeigh called the compound looking for Strassmeir two weeks before the bombing.34

  Some argue that Elohim City closes the circle between McVeigh’s chosen date of April 19, his ultimate motivation, and the attack on the Murrah Building. Prosecutors from the Fort Smith sedition trial developed evidence that Richard Wayne Snell, executed on April 19, had targeted the Murrah Building for a bombing attack in 1984. There is no evidence that McVeigh ever had anything to do with Snell, who responded with glee at the reports of the Oklahoma City Bombing on TV while awaiting execution. But Snell did have a very close connection to Elohim City. The Reverend Millar was Snell’s personal spiritual advisor, and Snell’s body was taken to Elohim City for burial following his execution. Carol Howe also reported that Millar and his Identity followers spoke frequently about an imminent holy race war and about the likelihood that Elohim City would be subject to a similar federal raid. Many former CSA members, including founder Jim Ellison (who was married to Millar’s daughter), had moved to Elohim City after the 1985 raid on Ellison’s CSA compound in Elijah, Missouri. Howe claimed that residents of Elohim City often spoke about “striking first.”

  The federal government dismissed the evidence of a conspiracy, and not without cause. The evidence that McVeigh executed the Oklahoma City attack with others as part of a Christian Identity cabal was intriguing but circumstantial. The Waco siege on April 19, 1993, remains the simplest explanation for McVeigh’s choice of date for the Murrah bombing. McVeigh definitely visited Waco on the eve of the 1993 raid and definitely became infuriated with the outcome. He never referred to Snell in any letter or correspondence. Howe’s account of seeing McVeigh at Elohim City changed more than once, including under oath. Shults’s sighting lacks independent corroboration and, coming two years after the Oklahoma City attack, could easily have been colored by revelations in the media. Most importantly, McVeigh himself never conceded to any conspiracy.

  That is where the controversy stood at the time of McVeigh’s execution, with some suggestions of a conspiracy but with no solid evidence to bring doubt to McVeigh’s confession. But soon the government began releasing evidence that raised serious questions about the competence of its investigation. Many see in the subsequent revelations signs that the government hid and possibly even provoked, unwittingly, a conspiracy in the April 19, 1995, bombing. The truth, as it always appears to be in the thorny world of domestic counterterrorism, may be far more nuanced.

  The new revelations included a provocative FBI report. “It is suspected that members of Elohim City are involved [in the bombing] either directly or indirectly through conspiracy.” So reported an FBI document released in 20
03 (that is still heavily redacted) that was written just days after the Oklahoma City bombing. The document came as part of many shocking new files released under the Freedom of Information Act three years after McVeigh’s execution. The new information had not been provided to McVeigh’s and Nichols’s defense attorneys or, for that matter, to the government’s own lead investigators in the Oklahoma bombing. The new data lent a measure of additional credibility to Cash and Hamm’s theories of a Christian Identity plot involving residents of Elohim City, members of the ARA, and Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Among other things, the newly released files report that the FBI found blasting caps in the possession of the ARA that closely resembled blasting caps that McVeigh and Nichols stole from a quarry and used for their ANFO bomb; investigators recovered only a portion of the caps that should have been in McVeigh’s or Nichol’s possession following the attack. Additionally, among materials found in possession of the ARA, federal investigators found a driver’s license with the name Robert Miller—an alias used by Roger Moore. Apparently, the FBI agents who had investigated the Midwest bank robberies took seriously allegations (popularized by Cash) that the ARA had helped McVeigh, but they did not provide that information to their counterparts in the Oklahoma bombing investigation. When he learned of this material in 2004, retired agent Dan Defenbaugh, who headed the FBI unit that handled the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, called for a new investigation. (His call was not heeded.) He expressed shock and exasperation when it became clear that the FBI had destroyed the blasting caps and the driver’s license without subjecting them to forensic analysis.35

  The overall performance of the FBI in its investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing brings to mind the type of behavior seen during its 1963 BAPBOMB and 1968 MURKIN inquiries. Investigators quashed leads too quickly, failed to draw logical connections in developing new leads, left gaps in the basic explanation for the crime, and withheld key pieces of information—even from their own people—at relevant stages of the inquiry. To some, the level of incompetence cannot easily be explained as merely due to chance; to them, the incompetence suggests that the government might be hiding some darker secret about the Oklahoma City Bombing. The more radical segments of American society suggest that this secret involves a “false-flag operation,” whereby the government actually encouraged the Oklahoma City Bombing to create a pretext for increased government intervention—ironically, the kind of government intervention fictionalized at the beginning of The Turner Diaries. Others postulate a more rational alternative explanation for the FBI’s incompetence—that the reticence to explore a wider conspiracy and the willingness to stonewall the McVeigh–Nichols defense team paralleled similar cover-ups in the past. Specifically, some say, the incompetence was the result of the FBI’s need to hide deep-cover operations from the public (and would-be terrorists) and to avoid revealing embarrassing connections between the government and the very subversives that law enforcement feared. Materials obtained by terrorism scholar J.M. Berger and an investigation by a subcommittee of the U.S. Congress imply that, once again, federal law enforcement agencies would have had to expose their sources and methods—and perhaps their own negligence—had they conducted a comprehensive investigation of the April 1995 attack. Berger in particular exposed a government operation that could have, and perhaps should have, brought McVeigh and any potential accomplices into the crosshairs of federal law enforcement months before the Oklahoma City Bombing.

  In 2012, using FOIA, J.M. Berger obtained records describing an undercover operation known as Patriot Conspiracy, or PATCON.36 As the name implies, the operation targeted the small-scale patriot or militia groups proliferating in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Given Americans’ First Amendment rights to assemble and Second Amendment rights to bear arms, the government could do little to temper the expansion of these openly antigovernment groups. Indeed, most militia groups, then and now, lack any aspiration to terrorism, even if many prepare for a day when they will have to take up arms against a tyrannical U.S. government. But federal law enforcement remained bothered by the prospect of any of these groups becoming radicalized and taking a proactive stance along the lines of the Order. Indeed, law enforcement recovered only a small fraction of the millions of dollars stolen by Mathews’s group, and rumors persisted that the Silent Brotherhood remained active and underground, even after law enforcement had imprisoned or killed its core members.

  The FBI specifically worried about Louis Beam, one of the men Mathews had provided with booty from the Order’s armored-car heists. Beam, an Odinist, assumed the role of Sun-tzu to white supremacists, elaborating on concepts like leaderless resistance, which in a landscape of the growing militia movement presented a nightmare scenario for law enforcement, one where any one of a hundred antigovernment groups could, in response to some signal event, radicalize and morph into a terrorist cell. Faced with this kind of unpredictable, needle-in-the-haystack scenario, the FBI resorted to a practice that would become rampant after 9/11—that is, engaging militia groups in hopes of flushing out would-be terrorists.

  To do this, the feds created their own bogus patriot group: the Veterans Aryan Movement (VAM). These undercover agents visited gun shows and antigovernment rallies, posturing as malcontented radicals, offering themselves as bait to individuals and groups that spoke about or hinted at future terrorist activity. According to Berger: “PATCON agents roved the country for more than two years collecting intelligence on … patriot organizations and on dozens of individuals, investigating leads on plots from the planned murder of federal agents to armed raids on nuclear power plants to a new American Revolution.” In one instance, members of VAM entangled themselves in a proposed plan, by the leader of a right-wing organization, to sell Stinger missiles (surface-to-air projectiles that can be fired with rocket launchers) to antigovernment groups. Such devices could be used to take down a passenger jet near any airport. In another instance, VAM members learned about the potential sale of night-vision goggles to ultra-right radicals and offered themselves as potential buyers.

  Those in VAM navigated a narrow space between serving as deep-cover spies and acting as agent provocateurs (those who provoke, rather than monitor, criminal activity). As Berger noted, the VAM only responded to rumors of potential plots; it appears never to have initiated such plots in hopes of luring out reticent terrorists. But Berger documents a number of instances where impatient PATCON agents pressed their targets for bolder or more aggressive action on such plots. At one point, a PATCON agent hassled a targeted radical for swifter action by accusing the genuine militant of luring the PATCON agent into a government sting. The secret government agent hoped that by falsely accusing a real radical of working for federal law enforcement, he would scare the real radical into accelerating and actualizing the missile sale.37

  This practice created the same problems as similar sting operations in the past: the specter of unconstitutional entrapment. If a defense attorney can show that the government instigated criminal activity—that agents did not simply respond to or prevent a dangerous plot but actually encouraged or initiated said plot—a judge can toss out the entire case. Law enforcement is not supposed to create criminal activity to provoke would-be felons, and prosecution cases built on such tactics are effectively poisonous once they reach a courtroom.

  This issue becomes even more problematic for an ongoing undercover operation, as a criminal prosecution invariably would require that an informant present himself or herself at a trial as a witness, ending his or her tenure as a potential source on future criminal activity and probably terminating the overall surveillance project. A prosecutor faces the possible embarrassment of an acquittal, one that literally and figuratively would endanger government operatives and operations. Such a calculus allowed J.B. Stoner to escape a trial for a conspiracy that ultimately led to the attempted bombing of civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth’s church in 1958. In initiating the 1958 bombing conspiracy by offering Stoner m
oney for attacks on civil rights targets, the undercover Alabama law enforcement operatives ruined their own hopes for a prosecution. Stoner may have elaborated on the proposal, but because he did not originate the bombing plan, Alabama prosecutors would not risk a trial. Similar thinking stopped the FBI from helping Alabama prosecutors subdue the Cahaba River Group for plotting the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Not surprisingly, despite two years of ongoing operations, PATCON yielded only one prosecution. Law enforcement was nonetheless happy with the results, as the operation created the type of dissension and paranoia amid the ranks of militia groups that COINTELPRO had helped encourage within KKK groups in the 1960s.