There are, as a result of the investigation and the presentation of the evidence in this case, a number of questions unanswered…. It would be disappointing to me if the law enforcement agencies of the United States government have quit looking for answers in this Oklahoma bombing tragedy.
—RICHARD P. MATSCH, PRESIDING JUDGE IN THE MCVEIGH AND NICHOLS TRIALS
I’m thoroughly convinced we’re going to have another domestic terrorist act in this country that is going to be beyond our imagination, beyond Oklahoma City.
—KERRY NOBLE, REFORMED MILITANT FROM THE RADICAL FAR RIGHT
Why read about the Oklahoma City bombing, after so long? Many Americans think of the events of April 19, 1995, as a jarring interruption to an otherwise peaceful decade, a disturbing story whose shockwaves, mercifully, did not resonate for long. They remember it as the work of two disaffected army veterans from the heartland, who pulled together their deadly payload from ordinary farm fertilizer and delivered it in a Ryder truck to a city unprepared for such destruction.
But that is only part of what happened. While the guilt of the two principal defendants, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, was established beyond doubt at trial, many other things were sidestepped: the dysfunction within the country’s law enforcement agencies, which missed opportunities to penetrate the radical right and prevent the bombing; the question of who inspired the bombing and who else might have been involved; and evidence contradicting the government’s repeated insistence that investigators had everything under control and that, ultimately, the system worked.
This litany may sound familiar from the controversies following the September 11 attacks, and it should. Many of the same institutional problems and misplaced political priorities that blinded the country to the threat from al-Qaeda in 2001 were responsible, six years earlier, for a refusal to take the threat of paramilitary violence from the radical right with the requisite seriousness. Attorney General John Ashcroft was more interested in public decency and outlawing medical marijuana than in reports of suspicious foreigners enrolling in flight schools; likewise, his predecessor, Janet Reno, pushed her Justice Department to crack down on deadbeat dads while playing down reports of radicals advocating bombings, assassinations, and shootings.
One problem, as in 2001, was a failure by law enforcement agencies to see past their own rivalries. Another was an assumption that the threats were just empty rhetoric from the mouths of social outcasts incapable of holding down a regular job, much less doing real damage.
The lessons of Oklahoma City have never been properly articulated. Yet they are important, because the conditions that led to the deaths of 168 people at the Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City, and the shattering of thousands of other lives through grief or injury, could easily be replicated. McVeigh was a traumatized veteran of the first Gulf War, who felt validated by his experience of warfare but returned home to disillusion, recession, and a bleak future of dead-end jobs. He found solace in his fascination with fire-arms and survivalism, bounced around the country on the gun-show circuit, and shared the company of angry young men like himself. Sometimes they blamed blacks and Jews; other times they directed their anger at the federal authorities. When a government siege at the Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, went horribly awry in early 1993, McVeigh and his cohorts decided it was time to stop complaining and take action, because a government capable of deploying tanks against civilians and watching children burn to death could not be counted on to leave anyone in peace.
No two moments in history are exactly alike, of course, but it is not difficult to see how new McVeighs could emerge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lingering devastation of the 2008 economic meltdown, and the anti-establishment rage embodied by everyone from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to the violent racists threatening to put a bullet in the brain of America’s first black president. The government is no better at tracking political extremism or mental instability in the armed forces than it was in the early 1990s. Too many dangerous people have a measure of military training, as a much-discussed Department of Homeland Security report found in 2009; too many have access to a fearsome array of firearms and explosives.
The choices made by McVeigh and his fellow conspirators were abhorrent, but their story is still quintessentially American, a story of hopes raised and dashed against a backdrop of violence, political agitation, and individual restlessness. “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom,” Jonathan Franzen wrote in his novel Freedom, “is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.” McVeigh and his friends were just such personalities, with an added layer of idealistic fervor to spur them beyond their resentments to deadly action. They saw themselves in the same mold as the eighteenth-century revolutionaries who fought off British rule. They called themselves patriots, seeing little or no contradiction between the violence they advocated and the many wars waged by their government in the name of honor, freedom, and country.
“America has always had a war culture,” the social historian Billy Gibson wrote in Warrior Dreams, a remarkable study of America’s paramilitary frenzy in the wake of Vietnam. “This culture has two fundamental stories, one celebrating the individual gunman who acts on his own (or in loose concert with other men); the other portraying the good soldier who belongs to an official military or police unit and serves as a representative defender of national honor.” Intriguingly, McVeigh fit both categories—first as the exemplary infantryman who won medals in the Gulf, then as the underground warrior convincing himself that a bold statement in Oklahoma City could trigger a general uprising. In both incarnations, he was indeed the good soldier, confident of his mission and clear about his cause.
Many people were shocked when McVeigh dismissed the children who died in the Murrah Building’s day-care center as “collateral damage,” the necessary price of warfare. But these words were military terminology he had learned in the army. McVeigh was extraordinarily callous in his choice of target, and he made a crucial strategic error in killing so many innocent people, because his act provoked only revulsion and snuffed out the revolution he hoped it would start. Still, he defended the military integrity of his actions to the end.
In many ways, this is a story of failure. The radical far right wanted to wage a war of “leaderless resistance,” in which hardened fighters would form paramilitary cells and make command decisions that would be shared on a need-to-know basis. But these were not people temperamentally disposed to waging a subtle war of attrition, and they lapsed easily into indiscipline and poor judgment. Everything about the Oklahoma plot screamed overkill, where a more carefully targeted attack might have been more effective. Several people in the far-right believed McVeigh would hit the federal courthouse next to the Murrah Building as part of a nationwide assault on the judiciary. Others thought he would detonate the bomb at night. But McVeigh had his own ideas.
The government’s law enforcement agencies also failed—by taking their eye off the radical right at a time when advocacy groups were sounding the alarm, and by shying away when presented with evidence of actual criminal behavior. The FBI and the ATF spent a lot of energy after the bombing blaming each other for the warning signs they missed, and for information they failed to share about known radicals congregating to plot a revolutionary war. But both agencies were at fault.
The overwhelming pressure to hunt down the bombers gave rise to a sledgehammer approach to questioning and apprehending McVeigh’s closest associates, offering them and others a chance to destroy evidence and rehearse stories. The government stopped investigating certain suspects—Michael and Lori Fortier, Steve Colbern, and Roger Moore—because it was more interested in securing their testimony against McVeigh and Nichols than in exploring their deeper involvement. That, too, constituted a profound failure.
Once the shape of the case was set, the search for other suspects, or a larger conspiracy, came to be viewed as a risky fishing expedition. Evidence that might have established links between McVeigh and other criminal cells was ignored. In some cases, it was destroyed.
CHALLENGING THE OFFICIAL ACCOUNT OF A MAJOR HISTORICAL event can seem presumptuous, even foolhardy. Journalists and authors, after all, do not have subpoena power, forensics laboratories, or polygraph kits. We cannot interview 18,000 witnesses or run down 43,000 leads, as the Oklahoma City investigators did.
What we do have, in this case, is the opportunity to review the government’s work from start to finish. This book is based on records that have been unearthed for the first time, including the complete archive of documents shared with the defense teams in the two federal trials and in Terry Nichols’s state trial in Oklahoma. We also have a voluminous body of writings from Nichols, who did not utter a word for ten years after his arrest but agreed to discuss the case with us in great detail.
Much of the freshness of our perspective comes from the people at the heart of the effort to bring the bombing perpetrators to justice: law enforcement managers and street agents, federal prosecutors, even—as the quote at the beginning of this preface demonstrates—the trial judge. Many continue to harbor strong feelings about what they experienced, the pressures they faced, the screw-ups, manipulations, and lost opportunities, and the shocking number of talented senior investigators—the ones best placed to penetrate the bombing’s enduring mysteries—who were prevented from contributing to a case that should have been the crowning pinnacle of their careers.
Institutionally, the narrative was kept simple and straightforward. A sign on the prosecutors’ office door read: DON’T BURY THE STORY IN THE EVIDENCE. But many of those quoted in these pages remain skeptical that all the perpetrators were caught, that the FBI and the other investigative agencies tracked down every lead, that the case really was, as Oklahoma’s then-governor Frank Keating put it, “the FBI’s finest hour.”
Oklahoma City was by far the largest criminal investigation in the United States before 9/11. In hindsight, it looks less like a detective story than an anti–detective story, in which government investigators chose not to follow the evidence wherever it led. Instead, they closed down critical lines of inquiry, for fear of what they might find and what it might reveal about their own failings.
The official narrative of two sad misfits acting alone underwent some corrections at trial. Nichols was cleared of first-degree murder and spared the death penalty, following a series of prosecutorial setbacks and “gotcha” moments on the witness stand. Still, the trials were principally about the government’s evidence, as trials almost always are; attempts by the defense teams to extend the case to possible coconspirators, or to the involvement of other countries, fell largely flat.
Michael Tigar, who was brilliantly effective as Nichols’s lead defense attorney, has written how the full story never quite seems to be told at trial but is reduced to “shadows on the courthouse wall”—shards of witness narrative here and forensic evidence there, all of which needs to be ascribed meaning and fashioned into shape for the jury. Some of that epistemological uncertainty applies to this book, too. The FBI did not record its interviews, so its witness reports are fraught with problems of interpretation. Did the agents ask the right questions? Did they write down the answers accurately? Were they, too, interested in telling their bosses what they wanted to hear? Were there deliberate attempts, motivated by internal politics, to keep things out of the written record? Some of the FBI’s missteps were exposed at trial, particularly under cross-examination of witnesses who did not like the way their statements were misinterpreted. But the witness testimony itself was problematic. Federal law does not preclude FBI agents and prosecuting attorneys from taking witnesses through their statements before trial—an exercise which, if done honestly, can conceivably enhance precision but, in practice, can look a lot like coaching or coercion.
Without the full story, it can be tempting to look at those shadows on the wall and construct phantoms—shapes and patterns that are seductive for one reason or another but do not have the solidity of documentable truth. Government agencies responding to criticism of the Oklahoma City case have frequently sought to tar their detractors as conspiracy theorists, dishonest information-brokers pulling together random pieces of information to serve a self-interested agenda. Some of that tarring has been richly deserved. Just as there was nothing simple about the people who perpetrated the bombing, there was nothing inherently crude or sinister or conniving about the investigators and prosecutors who brought them to justice. If they were incompetent or dishonest, it was not by default.
That said, the “conspiracy theory” label has also been misused and manipulated by government officials who have preferred not to engage with their critics or address their mistakes. Daring to criticize the ATF for inconsistencies in its agents’ accounts of April 19 is not the same as accusing the agency of collusion in the bombing. To draw that inference, as the ATF has sometimes done, is lazy, dishonest, and a deliberate attempt to confuse the real issues.
This book makes no apologies for humanizing its characters, whether they are lawyers, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, rescue workers, bereaved victims, white supremacist agitators, or hardened criminals. They are all human beings, which makes them complex, flawed, idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and prone to disagreements with their friends and associates. Humanizing them is not the same as indulging or excusing them; nobody reading this book will come away feeling that its subjects have been given a free pass for their transgressions. But it is important not to caricature or demonize even the worst of them, because understanding can come only with an appreciation of the messiness, complexity, and ambiguity of their motives and interactions.
The Oklahoma City bombing was a conspiracy, and McVeigh and Nichols were charged accordingly. The real question is: how far did the conspiracy go? In preparing for trial, the FBI and prosecution wanted to keep things simple, so the jury would see a clear path to conviction. In the process, they mangled evidence, withheld documents, distorted testimony, gave deals to potential suspects, and lost sight of crucial chunks of the real story. The government was fortunate that its desire to pin the crime on McVeigh coincided with McVeigh’s own desire to take full credit and become a martyr-hero to his cause. Both sides, in the end, colluded to cover up the truth.
An author has an important advantage over law enforcement or even the most adept trial lawyer: he can weigh the available information without worrying where it might lead, or who it might compromise, or whether it will meet some high burden of proof. The following pages are an attempt to reconstitute events as they happened, to understand what went right and wrong, to separate what we know from what we don’t know, and to identify the appropriate lessons. Those who are still living can speak for themselves and are entitled to be heard. The dead deserve as much truth as we can offer.