Shortly after noon on April 21, Tim McVeigh found himself in an overcrowded room in the Noble County courthouse under a barrage of questions.
“Do you have any idea why the FBI wants to talk to you?” Agent Floyd Zimms asked.
“Yes,” McVeigh responded. His eyes were expressionless.
“What do you mean by yes?” asked Zimms’s colleague Jim Norman.
“That thing in Oklahoma City, I guess.”
It was a lame, uncharacteristically incriminating response, but McVeigh was exhausted and demoralized. Barely two hours earlier, he had still been hopeful as he waited in an empty courtroom to be called in to the judge. But then Sheriff Cook, whom he had not previously encountered, told him the judge was running late, and McVeigh began to suspect something was up.
McVeigh couldn’t help noticing people looking at him strangely. His cell mates were being taken outside one by one, and he figured, rightly, that they were being questioned about him.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Cook and McVeigh’s prosecutor, Mark Gibson, had to decide what protocol to follow before the feds arrived. Gibson didn’t want to keep McVeigh waiting indefinitely, because he had already been in custody for forty-eight hours without a hearing, so he pushed to proceed with a bond hearing. Gibson even got on the phone with the FBI and told them they needed to hurry. “Until you’ve got something,” he said, “we’ve got to treat this guy like we treat anybody else. If bond is set, and you’re not ready and he can make bond, he’s going to make bond.”
Gibson asked McVeigh where he was from and what his financial circumstances were. He needed to consider how likely it was that his defendant might flee, or commit other crimes while out on bond. Even without the bombing, McVeigh fit into a number of high-risk categories. He had been arrested with a semiautomatic and a cop-killer bullet, and he had no fixed address. (He told Gibson he was traveling from Arizona to Michigan and lived “here and there.”)
Bail was set at $5,000, far beyond his means. McVeigh tried to charm the judge, pointing out that he had no criminal record and meant no harm. The judge appreciated his input, but it made no difference. He was sent back to the fourth floor, where he made three separate calls to a local public defender, Royce Hobbs. He could only leave a message and, shortly after, the lines went dead. A passing jail employee told him they must be out of order, and McVeigh slammed the receiver in frustration.
It was Sheriff Cook who cut the phone lines, on the recommendation of Walt Lamar, the first FBI agent to arrive in Perry. Lamar told Cook he should lock down the courthouse, surround it with crime tape, and set up a press area in anticipation of the coming media scrum. “You really think all that is necessary?” Cook asked. Lamar knew it was. The first thing he had encountered after arriving via helicopter was a television news crew from Tulsa. Shortly after, the phones started ringing with inquiries from other reporters. “If they are calling,” Lamar told Cook, “they are coming.”
Moments after McVeigh realized the phones were dead, he heard the whirring of a second FBI helicopter. This one contained a whole team of investigators, who had first stopped at the site of McVeigh’s abandoned car on I-35 and discovered its trove of antigovernment literature. That, along with the timing and location of the arrest, made them feel sure they had their man. Unfortunately, it also put them in a gung-ho mood that did little to induce McVeigh to open up. Rather than questioning him in an intimate setting, they found the biggest room available, the county elections office across the hall from Sheriff Cook’s cramped workspace, and invited every law officer on the scene to pile in.
McVeigh answered the agents’ perfunctory questions about his name and weight and height, but stopped when asked for his birthplace. He was back in soldier mode, determined to give nothing away to the enemy. He would not even sign a form advising him of his rights.
“There should have been two people max in the room with McVeigh,” a seasoned bureau agent on the scene lamented. “I’m in no doubt he wanted to shout to the heavens that he did this.”
Instead, McVeigh merely listened as the FBI told him how he had been identified, and showed him the John Doe One sketch. His main concern was that someone might shoot him as FBI agents escorted him from the building. A crowd of several hundred was already massing noisily outside.
THE ENTIRE DETROIT DIVISION OFFICE OF THE FBI WAS MAKING preparations to descend on James Nichols’s farm. They took their time, because they wanted to be sure their raid didn’t turn into an armed standoff, and because they still needed to establish whether Nichols was a suspect, a material witness, or just a guy who kept spectacularly bad company.
Joe Martinolich, the Detroit special agent in charge and one of the bureau’s most widely respected senior managers, knew Nichols was a person of interest by midnight on April 20 and had his assault team assembled by dawn. Martinolich asked the Sanilac County sheriff, Virgil Strickler, to keep the growing law enforcement presence hidden until they were ready to pounce. Strickler knew the layout of the Nichols farm, and also had a good idea who had been coming and going over the past several months.
Most important, Sheriff Strickler provided access to his informants. One was Daniel Stomber, Nichols’s neighbor who said he had seen James and Terry make bombs out of fertilizer, peroxide, and bleach, and detonate them in plastic soda bottles. He recalled how James Nichols boasted about his bomb-making skills. He also remembered the brothers’ vitriolic comments about Waco, including James saying he wouldn’t be sorry to see someone pop off a federal judge or even assassinate the president. Stomber further remembered a camouflage-clad friend named Tim—he did not know his last name—who had lived on the farm for a while but moved away in early 1994.
Another witness said that in December 1993 he saw two white men enter a hobby shop in Marlette, about ten miles south of Decker, and ask for 100 percent liquid nitro model airplane fuel. One of the men gave his name as Terry Tuttle and left a bogus phone number that was one digit off James Nichols’s real number. The store assistant said he stocked only 10–15 percent liquid nitro but would order the stronger stuff. Two weeks later, the men returned, but the store would not or could not fulfill the order—probably because pure liquid nitro airplane fuel can be used as an explosive. The surname Tuttle was later established as a frequent alias of McVeigh’s.
This was now more than enough to seek a search warrant on the Decker farm. And, in the early afternoon, the feds were given the perfect opportunity to move in, as James Nichols got in his car and started driving south. He later said he was simply going about his business, stopping at the bank and at an auto parts store to pay for repairs on a tractor engine. But he also mentioned that, just before he left his house, a neighbor tipped him off that some farmhouse in Decker was about to be raided. So he could have left for his own protection.
As Nichols drove south, he saw helicopters, news trucks, and an ambulance heading in the opposite direction. As soon as he arrived at the bank, he asked the staff to turn on a radio so he could find out what was going on. He later claimed he still had no idea this had anything to do with him. His account adopts an almost ridiculous tone of aw-shucks innocence: “I tried to imagine who in this area could be involved in anything nasty enough to interest federal law enforcement agencies,” he wrote. “I couldn’t think of anyone…. Who could it possibly be?”
Soon, the feds were crawling over every inch of his property. When he returned from Marlette, the crush of police vehicles and satellite trucks surrounding his house was so great he had to ask a state trooper for help getting through. The trooper asked him who he was, then called over an FBI agent, who conducted a thorough body search and went through the contents of Nichols’s car.
AGENT STEPHEN SMITH HAD A PROBLEM: HE COULDN’T FIND TERRY NICHOLS’S house in Herington. He was the advance man for an entire FBI search team, but nobody had checked the address provided by Lana Padilla before he took off from Fort Riley. By the time he learned from local police that Nichols lived at 109 South Second Street, not 901, the rest of the team was already closing in.
Smith did a quick drive-by, noticing Nichols’s blue GMC pickup outside the modest wood-framed house, before he ditched his rental car and returned with a colleague in a more weather-beaten Cutlass Supreme. With luck, nobody would notice them. They sat, and watched, and waited.
BACK IN LAS VEGAS, THE FBI HAD BEGUN QUESTIONING TWELVE-YEAR-OLD Josh Nichols. Agents wanted to know everything—about the week he had just spent in Herington with his father, about his father’s movements, about any contact he had had with Tim McVeigh.
The boy was initially leery but opened up a little to a female agent named Debbie Calhoun. She asked Josh about his family and the time he spent on the Nichols farm in Michigan. She also asked Josh if he had any contact with explosives. “My dad has a lot of guns,” the boy replied. “We shoot and we make some little bombs sometimes.”
Both Calhoun and Lana Padilla, who was in the room at the time, were stunned. Neither said anything, preferring to let Josh keep talking. “I know how to build a bomb,” he went on. “It really isn’t hard. My dad and I used to build them all the time.”
Calhoun was soon convinced Josh knew more about the bombing than he was letting on—as was his mother. During a break in questioning, shortly after the family learned that McVeigh had been found, Josh whispered to Padilla: “Mom, there were going to be other bombs. There were supposed to be three bombings. Don’t tell anybody.” Josh went on to say: “The plan was to do one, followed by two others. Three altogether.”
If Padilla had been able to think straight, she would not have allowed the FBI to ask another question without calling a lawyer. But she clung to the belief that Nichols had nothing to do with the bombing. Maybe Josh and Terry had some information to point the FBI in the right direction, she rationalized. Let them tell what they know, then the family’s lives could return to normal.
AS HIS BROTHER WAS BEING APPREHENDED IN MICHIGAN, TERRY NICHOLS was driving home from a lumberyard and heard on the radio that McVeigh had been taken into federal custody. Even more shocking, he learned that he and his brother were wanted in connection with the bombing and should be considered “armed and dangerous.”
He could not drive home fast enough, and immediately asked Marife if she had been watching the television coverage. She had not. She was fuming about the conversation he had had earlier that morning with his ex-wife, and was threatening—not for the first time—to go back to the Philippines. She didn’t like his relationship with Lana, or with Josh, or with Tim McVeigh, and was sick of dealing with all of them. Nichols was too frazzled to fight back, so he turned on the television. When he saw the two composite sketches, he felt momentary relief—he did not think John Doe One looked like McVeigh, and neither did Marife. But when he heard Janet Reno, the attorney general, calling for the death penalty, and President Clinton vowing to deliver justice that was “certain, swift, and severe,” Nichols had visions of heavily armed agents barreling down on the house. “I panicked,” he recounted, “and I said to myself, this is a case where they will definitely shoot first and ask questions later.”
Nichols phoned his brother James, and Lana, but reached neither. When CNN started calling from Los Angeles, he barked at Marife to pick up their infant daughter, Nicole, and get in the car. The safest place for them, he decided, was the Herington police station. In the garage, he gave everything a once-over. He noticed a fuel meter he had bought a few weeks earlier to resell at a gun show, only to realize it was broken. “I have to do something about that,” he said quickly. Interestingly, he disregarded a siphon pump sitting on a shelf directly above the fuel meter, which he had used three days earlier to mix the bomb components. The only thing he picked up was a crate McVeigh had dropped off the previous week. He was concerned about a single item in the box, a mercury switch, and decided he should get rid of it before going to the police.
Nichols made an otherwise curious stop at a warehouse store on the southern edge of Herington, where he used the anonymity of the parking lot to smash the mercury switch on the asphalt. Later, he told the feds he intended to go shopping, but changed his mind once he sensed he was being followed. That, though, was largely untrue: Stephen Smith and his colleague Jack Foley had overshot the Surplus City store and turned around only once they realized Nichols was not heading out of town after all.
Marife was in a daze of her own. She could tell her husband was extraordinarily agitated, but she had no clear idea why. She blurted out the question uppermost in her mind: “Are you involved in this?” And Nichols answered no. He fretted that he did not know the way to the police station; Marife told him to calm down. He confessed he had not told the truth the previous Sunday when he said he had gone to Omaha to pick up McVeigh. He had, in fact, met McVeigh in Oklahoma City, and lied about it at McVeigh’s direction. That, he said, was the reason he thought the feds might be after him.
Around 3:00 P.M., the Nichols family walked into the police station like three strays begging for shelter. Nichols told Barry Thacker, the deputy chief, that he wanted to talk to someone about the radio reports and assured him he was neither armed nor dangerous. At that very moment, Dale Kuhn, Thacker’s boss, was on the line with an FBI supervisor, who told him that a hotly sought-after bombing suspect had just entered the building. Smith, Foley, and two other agents hovered outside, too afraid to enter as they entertained the notion that Nichols and his wife and infant daughter might somehow take the police department hostage. Kuhn assured the supervisor that, no, Nichols was not threatening anyone. But the police chief certainly understood the significance of the situation. He raced to the front desk and suggested that everyone move out of public view. All three Nichols family members were searched for weapons, even eighteen-month-old Nicole, who was held by her mother as an officer ran a finger around the top of her diaper.
Then the FBI agents ventured in and ordered everyone into a training room in the basement. Nichols asked why he was being mentioned in the news reports about the bombing. The agents said they did not know but wanted to ask him some questions.
“Good,” Nichols countered, “because I have some questions for you.”
MORE THAN ELEVEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, IN KINGMAN, ARIZONA, the news reports on McVeigh hit his old army buddy Michael Fortier like a punch in the gut. Not only had Fortier known about the bomb plot; he had come perilously close to taking part himself. Since the start of wall-to-wall coverage of the bombing, he had not stopped fretting.
As soon as McVeigh’s name aired on the news that Friday lunch-time, he went over to his neighbor Jim Rosencrans’s house and announced: “Tim’s the one that did it.” Rosencrans’s girlfriend later remembered how nervous he was. Rosencrans, who was close to Fortier and regularly did drugs with him, never had any doubts that their friend Tim was involved. “Damn, our boy has been busy,” he thought.
Fortier shook his head in amazement. “Wow,” he said, “that shit’s intense.” Then he and his wife, Lori, went around the house, ditching all the incriminating material they could find.
The FBI came calling that same afternoon.
MCVEIGH WAS STILL WORRIED ABOUT HIS SAFETY. HE REMEMBERED how Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters in 1963, and told his captors he wanted a helicopter airlift from the courthouse roof rather than having to face the restive crowd outside. The FBI took his request seriously; if someone took a potshot, an agent could get hit just as easily as McVeigh. But the roof was deemed unsuitable for a helicopter landing. So they opted instead to drive him in a sheriff’s department van to a secured helicopter staging area a short distance away.
First, though, they had to overcome a legal hurdle, as Royce Hobbs, the public defender McVeigh had sought to reach, made an unexpected appearance and demanded a hearing with Judge Allen. The judge agreed—over the objections of Mark Gibson, who refused to attend. All Hobbs could do, though, was advise McVeigh to find himself a federal public defender.
Finally, around 5:00 P.M., it was time to move. This was the public’s first chance to see McVeigh, and the timing was perfect for the evening newscasts. The prisoner emerged from the courthouse in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit, his hands cuffed and his legs in irons, and the crowd exploded. People were shouting “baby killer,” and worse. Several agents clustered around him, scanning the crowd for signs of trouble. McVeigh looked up at the surrounding buildings, worried that someone with a rifle might be on the rooftops. His gaze was vacant, emotionless, a snapshot image the media would feast on and designate as the face of a ruthless killer.
In a moment, he was gone—into the sheriff’s van and, shortly after, onto a helicopter to Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City. Taking him to the federal courthouse next to the Murrah Building was out of the question; there was no telling what an incensed crowd would do if it got near him and, besides, the courthouse was too badly damaged to be functional. Tinker would work fine as a venue for the arraignment. A federal magistrate judge, Ronald Howland, was ready and waiting. After that, McVeigh would be taken to a specially prepared wing of El Reno federal prison outside Oklahoma City, his home while he awaited trial.
The lasting impression that Danny Coulson, the senior FBI agent in Perry, retained of McVeigh from that afternoon was his utter surprise at finding himself in the feds’ clutches. “McVeigh,” he said, “regarded his arrest by Charlie Hanger as a minor inconvenience—he thought he’d be out of jail and on his way in short order. He was shocked we got to him as fast as we did.” Coulson sat next to him on the helicopter, putting his hand on McVeigh’s shoulder and telling him sternly that he needed to behave himself.
“Act like a gentleman, and you will be treated like a gentleman,” Coulson said. “If not, you will be very sorry. Do you understand me?”
“Yes sir,” McVeigh replied. “I understand.”
WHEN DANIELLE HUNT, THE FORMER OPERATOR AND DIRECTOR OF the America’s Kids day-care center, saw McVeigh’s face flash across her television screen, she knew at once he was involved. He was the same tall, lanky young man with a military buzz cut who had visited the day-care center in December, claiming he had two young children and asking her a lot of strange questions. He wasn’t interested in the kids’ daily routines, or in the teachers and their qualifications. He was interested only in the layout of the place and the security arrangements—whether there were cameras, and how many entrances and exits the day care had. He was transfixed, too, by the plate-glass windows next to the infants’ nap area. “There’s so much glass,” he said, over and over. Hunt told him how the children liked to paint pictures on the glass, and look out at the changing seasons. “Now, thinking back,” she recalled, “he must have been imagining how easy it would be to blow up the children.”
McVeigh showed up at the tail end of the business day in battle-dress uniform and said he was a military recruiter transferring from Wichita within a few months. He was looking for a place for his three-year-old and an infant. He had no name tag on his uniform, and no badge or other form of identification. He would not give his name, or his children’s names.
When Danielle’s soon-to-be husband, Tom, the head of the Federal Protective Service, came to pick her up, McVeigh became visibly nervous. “How did he get in?” he asked. Danielle Hunt replied: “He’s my husband and he’s also a federal agent, so he has keys to the whole building.” McVeigh insisted on moving around a corner where they could not be seen. Shortly after, he left by a secondary door so he would not have to cross paths with Tom Hunt again.
As the Hunts drove home, Danielle told Tom her visitor didn’t have a name tag. Tom immediately sniffed trouble. “If he’s a recruiter,” he said, “he has to have his name and his grade and the words ‘U.S. Army.’” But at that point there was nothing he could do.
Danielle told her story to the FBI but nothing ever came of it—most likely because when she gave her account in the immediate aftershock of the bombing, she confused the timing of McVeigh’s December visit with another incident at the Murrah Building in early March, involving two suspicious men who went from office to office telling people they wanted to apply for a job. Her testimony could have been devastating to McVeigh, forever erasing any doubt that he knew about the day-care center in advance and strongly suggesting that he targeted the kids deliberately. If the FBI had reinterviewed her, they could have connected her story with the known movements of McVeigh and Michael Fortier, who were in Oklahoma City on December 15 (but in Arizona in early March).
They did not. “I was really shocked they did not call me as a witness,” Hunt said. “I can’t imagine why they didn’t.”
THE FEDS HAD MCVEIGH, BUT THEY ALSO HAD A PROBLEM. HE WAS not a close fit to the composite sketch of John Doe One. Once he was in custody, they could have shown either his picture or the man himself to the employees at Eldon Elliott’s body shop. But the FBI chose not to, not even when they arranged a lineup for the Oklahoma City witnesses on the first weekend after the bombing. Eldon Elliott was not shown a photograph of McVeigh, or formally asked if he was a match for Robert Kling, until June 8, forty-eight days after McVeigh was tracked down and arrested on federal charges. If he had an opinion about the face being flashed all over the news, he didn’t volunteer it.
The feds never properly explained their thinking. They weren’t overly impressed with the body shop witnesses and might not have wanted to rely on them too heavily at this early stage. They were even beginning to conclude that the sketches were unreliable. Though they were growing more certain that McVeigh was responsible for driving the truck into Oklahoma City and detonating the bomb, there was the possibility that someone else rented the truck from Eldon Elliott’s.
Plenty of things did not fit right. McVeigh’s fingerprints were never found at the body shop—not on the counter, which the FBI took the trouble to dismantle and haul off to their lab in Washington, and not on the Robert Kling rental agreement. John Doe One was five foot ten (Vicki Beemer said he was about the same height as her husband), while McVeigh was six foot one. The body type and the facial features were not quite the same, either. Each witness who had linked McVeigh to the composite sketch—Lea McGown, Pat Livingston, Carl LeBron—had other reasons to be suspicious of him. None made the identification on physical resemblance alone.
MEANWHILE, SOME STARTLING EVIDENCE SURFACED THAT John Doe One might be someone else entirely. Once the composite sketches were released, Angie Finley, an ATF agent in Tulsa, received a phone call from a confidential informant, a slightly built former debutante on the Tulsa social circuit with killer looks, blond hair, and a black swastika tattooed on her left shoulder. The informant, who was later revealed as Carol Howe, had spent much of the previous half-year in Elohim City, providing evidence of illegal weapons handling and numerous threats by the residents to wage war against the government.
Howe had come to the ATF as a result of romantic as well as political entanglements. Following a short marriage to a White Power activist, she became involved with Dennis Mahon, a bombastic neo-Nazi leader whose checkered résumé included cross-burnings in Germany and a bizarre appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s television chat show. Mahon ran a Dial-A-Racist hotline in Tulsa, which Howe called after she was confronted by some African-Americans at an outdoor party, fell off a platform, and broke both her heels.
Mahon became Howe’s protector, then her suitor, flattering her into posing in eccentric military uniforms and draping her in nothing but a Nazi flag. Soon, though, she was accusing Mahon of molesting her. When she took out a restraining order, it attracted the attention of the ATF, which had been looking into Mahon for years. Howe thought working as an informant was an ideal way to get even, and was soon reporting on Mahon’s fondness for detonating homemade grenades and outlining plans he had to blow up a Mexican-owned video store.
The ATF asked Howe to conduct a drug buy on behalf of the Tulsa Police Department, which they said was to test her loyalty. They also polygraphed her, and tapped her phone and wired up her apartment for both audio and video. Amazingly, Mahon was willing to forgive the court order as soon as she renewed contact with him. And she proved very effective at delivering incriminating material, both on Mahon and on his friends at Elohim City. Weekends in the community gradually extended into longer stays, during which Howe eavesdropped—and reported on—many conversations about fomenting revolution, including specific threats to blow up government buildings.
Howe said she could provide a match for the composite sketches—to people other than Tim McVeigh. To her, John Doe One looked like Pete Ward and John Doe Two resembled his brother Tony. Finley passed the information to her superiors, who shared it with the FBI. And the FBI, in turn, decided it needed to talk to Howe. While McVeigh was still being plucked out of jail, Finley and an FBI agent from Tulsa drove Howe to Oklahoma City to be extensively debriefed.
The encounter did not show the FBI in its best colors. The bureau’s notes, typed up in an official insert, are marred by every conceivable error, including grotesque misspellings, inaccurate dates, and a general lack of understanding of the subject. Still the gist of Howe’s reporting was clear. The two men she fingered most damningly were Mahon and Andreas Strassmeir. Mahon had not only expressed a desire to blow up a federal building, he named Tulsa and Oklahoma City as possible targets. He also had a plan to initiate mass race riots by destroying power lines at the height of summer and creating panic.
Howe described Strassmeir as contemplating “assassinations, bombings, and mass shootings,” and characterized Elohim City as an armed encampment whose armory included more than three hundred rifles, MAC 90s and Ruger mini-14 semiautomatics and “various fully automatic weapons,” possession of which is flagrantly illegal.
One would think this information constituted a major new lead. But Carol Howe was a touchy subject for federal law enforcement. The ATF had abruptly discontinued her services a month before the bombing, claiming that she had become mentally unstable. Now that decision looked distinctly unwise, particularly since the information she provided before her dismissal had been viewed as both credible and alarming by her immediate handlers. So the FBI and ATF decided, together, to recall her and send her back into Elohim City to see what connections she could pick up to McVeigh or any possible coconspirators.
It was never more than a halfhearted initiative, and the onus of further investigation was placed almost entirely on her. The feds sent neither uniformed agents nor covert operatives into the community to help. No effort was made to interview Andreas Strassmeir, or Pete or Tony Ward, or any member of the Millar family except one inconsequential son-in-law who offered nothing useful.
Bob Ricks, the head of the FBI’s Oklahoma City office, who had been aware of Elohim City for years, maintained that, contrary to appearances, investigators took a strong interest in links between the community and the bombing. But, he said, they saw little benefit in conducting aggressive interviews without acquiring some baseline knowledge first. Elohim City was difficult to penetrate or monitor—because of its remoteness, because it had no useful phones to tap (its one main line was too public for sensitive conversation), and because of its hostility to outsiders. “Generally we don’t want to ask questions until we know the answers,” Ricks said, “and we had a vast unknown in Elohim City…. We had no leverage, no evidence of criminal conduct. Without something to use as a hammer, conducting interviews would have done us no good.”
That defense holds only to a point. The feds did have considerable leverage over Dennis Mahon, because of Howe’s evidence that he’d made and detonated grenades. And they could have had more leverage still over Strassmeir, who was arming Elohim City even though, as a foreigner, he had no legal right to purchase weapons.
In these early days of the investigation, though, Elohim City was mostly the subject of a turf war between the FBI and the ATF. The FBI wanted to know what the ATF knew, but the ATF—as its director, John Magaw, has subsequently acknowledged—was reluctant to share. Even after the ATF gave the FBI its Carol Howe file, the feds continued to suspect that more information was being suppressed; that the ATF was sitting on potentially explosive information and running “hip-pocket informants,” in Ricks’s phrase, who were kept out of the official record for reasons of internal bureaucratic convenience. Danny Defenbaugh, who would take over leadership of the investigation from Weldon Kennedy, struggled with the problem for months on end. “When you get agencies working together in a joint Task Force, they should be holding hands, not keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs,” he said. “[The ATF] didn’t handle it well, nor did we know in a timely manner what we should have known.”
The FBI carries its own share of the blame. It seems inexcusable, given the bureau’s usual practice of chasing down every lead, that Carol Howe’s allegations were not pursued more aggressively. At least one senior FBI agent, Danny Coulson, came to believe the investigation into Elohim City was deliberately shut down for reasons of bureaucratic cowardice or incompetence. When Bob Ricks was asked in an interview why Dennis Mahon was never questioned about his threats to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma, he answered, simply: “I don’t know.”
Nobody was more delighted or relieved by the feds’ inaction than the Elohimites themselves. Once the bomb went off, Robert Millar and his followers feared the FBI and ATF would descend with a full array of paramilitary hardware. Some of that was fed by paranoia and exaggerated notions of how much the government was spoiling for a fight. Some of it, though, was entirely rational, given the community’s ties to right-wing radicals, and its links, both direct and indirect, to McVeigh.
“The feds were looking for excuses to come after us,” Andi Strassmeir said. “We slept in our fatigues and boots, with rifles by our side.”
IN THE HERINGTON POLICE STATION, TERRY NICHOLS TOLD THE FBI he was willing to answer any questions, even without a lawyer present. The agents said repeatedly that he was not under arrest and could leave any time. He stayed put, partly to support his contention that he had nothing to hide and partly to figure out how much the FBI had on him. But if he thought he could outsmart the feds, he was wrong.
The agents found him weird and suspicious, and the impression only deepened as the hours passed. They were struck when Nichols said he no longer used his social security number and when he refused to sign a form advising him of his rights because he objected to the word “interrogation,” which reminded him of the Nazis.
A short time later, as he authorized the FBI to search his house and his pickup, he expressed concern that they might mistake some items for bomb-making equipment. The subject of bombs had not yet come up, and Agent Scott Crabtree wrote in a search warrant affidavit the following day that Nichols gave no reason why the FBI might make such a mistake. Rightly or wrongly, the line struck the agents as a tacit admission. Over the next nine hours, Nichols would tip his hand further, ducking and evading questions and telling so many demonstrable lies his credibility never recovered.
Nichols described how he and McVeigh became friends during basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1988. They were close for a while, and McVeigh stayed at the Nichols family farm for several weeks in early 1993. But Nichols claimed he’d had only minimal contact for several months, and then only to ask McVeigh to transport his television set from Las Vegas, as he had promised. This was not true, as phone records and other evidence would later demonstrate.
Nichols continued to use the television to explain away his movements on Easter Sunday, when he helped McVeigh stash the Mercury in Oklahoma City. He said he drove to Oklahoma City alone—in fact, he and McVeigh convoyed down—and picked up both McVeigh and the TV on a street corner. (The television, which Nichols genuinely wanted, was in a storage locker in Kansas all along.)
Years later, Nichols acknowledged that he agreed to drive to Oklahoma City not because of the TV but because he was afraid of what McVeigh would do to his family if he said no. He could not tell the FBI that, because it would open him up to other questions about his involvement, which he was not ready to answer. “I lied to them and said I had picked up my TV…to make my story sound more plausible,” he said. “I was in denial at that time and was trying to distance myself from McVeigh and his evil act as much as possible.”
Still, Nichols dropped hints that McVeigh was up to no good—in ways that did not involve him. In his account of their return journey to Kansas, Nichols told the FBI that McVeigh had pointed out the upcoming Waco anniversary and announced, cryptically: “You will see something big in the future.”
“What are you going to do,” Nichols recalled asking, “rob a bank?”
“Oh, no,” McVeigh responded. “I got something in the works.”
McVeigh later complained to Michel and Herbeck that Nichols had “hosed” him with lines like these, and the judge presiding over the two men’s trials certainly believed Nichols had incriminated his partner. Nichols described McVeigh as “nervous” and “hyper,” and when asked about the bombing told the FBI his friend “could be capable of doing it.” But Nichols later insisted: “I did not rat him out. I did not admit McVeigh actually did the bombing. I really didn’t give the FBI much useful information.”
That much appears to be true. Nichols’s interview did far more immediate damage to his own cause than it did to McVeigh’s. Time and again, his responses made him look like he was hiding something. He claimed he couldn’t remember much about the rest of the journey back to Kansas, because he became “sleepy-tired” and kept losing the thread of the conversation. He said that several times during the drive McVeigh asked him what they had just talked about, and he couldn’t remember. Nichols’s interrogators thought that was a lame excuse to drop an uncomfortable subject. Their sense was that McVeigh and Nichols were in the final stages of planning the bombing and had plenty more to talk about that Sunday night.
Some of Nichols’s lies were more sophisticated. He realized that someone—the fisherman and his son, for example—might have seen his pickup at the lake. He said McVeigh had called early that morning to borrow his truck, saying he wanted to drive around and shop for a new car. Nichols collected him at a McDonald’s and asked to be dropped off at Fort Riley so he could attend a surplus auction. McVeigh was supposed to pick him up at noon but did not arrive until after 1:00 P.M. When McVeigh was late, Nichols went to a different auction in another building, the one he really attended and signed in for, and hung around for the extra hour.
By this stage, however, Nichols couldn’t put any story past his interrogators. They had already decided to take him into custody as a material witness and were mostly stringing him along until the warrant arrived. In fact, their bosses in Kansas City had the warrant ready as early as 4:45 P.M. but sat on it while they waited to see what Nichols would spill on his own. Nichols’s defense team would later argue that denying him knowledge of the warrant was deliberately misleading. A federal public defender who heard about the interrogation on the radio made several attempts to let Nichols know he was volunteering his services, but the message never got through. Nichols chose to believe he would soon be back in his car, heading home with Marife and the baby.
WHEN JENNIFER MCVEIGH HEARD HER OLDER BROTHER’S NAME ON the radio, her first concern was to avoid being sucked into the bombing conspiracy herself. She was in Florida, visiting friends and family on an extended spring break. But many people knew she was close to Tim, despite their six-year age difference, and knew she shared many of his political ideas. She was not surprised that he had involved himself in a big, revolutionary act, because he had all but told her already.
A month or two earlier, Tim had written to warn her that something big would happen “in the month of the Bull” and that she should stay in Florida for as long as possible. He wanted to protect her and told her to burn the letter, which she did the same day. Jennifer was living in her father’s house in Pendleton, New York, and working (much to the FBI’s amusement) at a Jell-O wrestling bar while attending community college; so she had some flexibility in her schedule. He wrote a follow-up at the end of March, making sure she had done as he asked. “Send no more [mail] after the first of April,” he said, “and then even if it’s an emergency, watch what you say because I may not get it in time and the G-men might get it out of my box, incriminating you.”
Jennifer understood the need to take precautions. The night before she took the long drive down to Pensacola, she separated everything she had from her brother into two boxes. She kept the first one, containing his high school yearbooks, military records, medal citations, and other personal documents, in her closet. McVeigh had sent most of this material at the beginning of the year for safekeeping; he hadn’t told her why, but she must have guessed he was preparing for a new life underground. The second box, containing McVeigh’s letters, photographs, political literature, and a videotape accusing the government of mass murder at Waco, was more sensitive. She asked her best friend, Rose Woods, to keep it at her house while she was away.
When she heard about the bombing, she was staying with an old friend, Dennis Sadler, and his family in the Florida Panhandle. She kept her reactions quiet until she heard about her brother’s arrest. She was out on a driving errand with Sadler at the time, and immediately asked him to take the wheel. She smoked a lot of cigarettes on the way back to the house. When she called her family, she learned the FBI was already at her father’s house, asking about her relationship with her brother. She did not have much time. She took a handful of clippings from The Turner Diaries she had with her and burned them in Sadler’s laundry room. When the FBI appeared, a short time later, they searched the house and Jennifer’s pickup, finding a collection of right-wing literature.
The FBI wanted to bombard her with questions, but she would not cooperate. Like her brother, she saw the feds as the enemy. They came back to question her again and again over the course of the weekend, and she became only more resistant. “Defiant” was the word the feds used to characterize her. But she soon learned how persuasive the FBI can be.
SINCE MCVEIGH HAD BEEN IN THE MILITARY, THE ARMY WAS GIVEN the job of rounding up look-alikes to participate in a lineup for eyewitnesses who had seen him with the Ryder truck on the morning of the bombing. Twenty-four men were dispatched to Oklahoma City from Fort Sill, and five were selected. At first, the task force leadership worried the similarity was just too great and told Steve Chancellor, the army’s point man: “You got McVeigh’s brother, cousin, and uncles.” They were, Chancellor said, “scared shitless.”
But the witnesses did fine. Mike Moroz, the mechanic at Johnny’s tire shop who had reported McVeigh asking for directions around 8:30 A.M., was the only one who hesitated a little. He chose two people, including the man in custody. McVeigh was clearly fingered as a guilty man—by people who also swore they had seen him with others.
AT 9:00 P.M. THAT NIGHT, A GAGGLE OF FBI AGENTS DESCENDED ON Okemah, a tiny speck of a town about seventy miles east of Oklahoma City, convinced they were about to make another major arrest. The name of their hot lead was Ray Jimboy, a Native American who had served in McVeigh’s unit during the Gulf War. He was a ringer for John Doe Two—short, stocky, muscular, with dark hair and deep brown eyes. His fellow soldiers reported he had a temper and was covered with scars from knife fights. He also had a history of political activism.
Louis Freeh was so gung-ho for Jimboy that he sent Bob Ricks and a handful of his best men to supervise the operation. But it didn’t work out as planned. Jimboy not only had an alibi, he was falling-down drunk, and had clearly been on the bottle for years, in no state to participate in a major criminal conspiracy. Ricks broke the bad news to Freeh, only to have the director tell him to put Jimboy under twenty-four-hour surveillance—personally.
Ricks couldn’t believe it. “I got to watch this drunk myself,” he said, “and I was a special agent in charge.” It took another full day before the FBI brass finally cleared Jimboy, by which time the humiliation of Bob Ricks had descended to a whole new level.
TERRY NICHOLS WAS DIGGING HIMSELF IN EVER DEEPER. HE SAID HE had some knowledge of bomb-making, but insisted he’d never put it to use. Eight hours in, close to midnight, he acknowledged that he had bags of ammonium nitrate in his house, the ones he stored to sell off at gun shows. He said he hadn’t mentioned this earlier because he was worried it would “make me look guilty to a jury.”
By this time, the interviewing agents knew about the material witness warrant and felt they could throw tougher questions at him. Agent Crabtree asked about the package of materials Nichols had left for Lana Padilla when he flew to the Philippines the previous November. Nichols described it as a sort of will, drawn up in case he did not return. Nichols was flummoxed when Crabtree asked him about the two most incriminating phrases—the “go for it!!” line and the sign-off, “As far as heat, none that I know of.”
Agent Smith later testified: “He sat there and looked at us for approximately a minute, and did not respond to the question.” The warrant was served shortly afterward.
Even at this stage, the FBI lacked concrete evidence to tie Nichols to the bombing. Mostly, they had leads to check out—the ammonium nitrate bags, McVeigh’s possessions in his garage, the Herington storage locker. Two FBI agents sent to guard his house pending a formal search spotted some blue-rimmed barrels in the garage, reminiscent of a large number of blue plastic shards found at the bombing scene. (The government would later argue that these were incriminating, but they were most likely from recycling bins on the Murrah Building’s first floor.) The agents also saw a large number of ammunition and fuel cans, and picked up a strong odor of ammonium nitrate. None of this looked good, but it didn’t prove anything, either.
When investigators went to U.S. District Judge David Russell for the warrant to hold Nichols as a material witness, they chose not to tell him that their suspect was, of his own free will, sitting in the Herington police station and talking up a storm—a symptom, perhaps, of their nervousness about the solidity of their case. A first version of the warrant stated, erroneously, that Nichols had attempted to leave the country and would be a flight risk if he was not taken immediately into custody. The Justice Department later explained this away as an innocent blunder by Jim Reynolds, the department’s top anti-terrorism lawyer.
A new warrant was subsequently drawn up, this one stating that if Nichols were “left to his own devices, it would be impracticable to secure his presence”—a tortured form of wording that, again, ducked the fact that he was very much present and cooperating.
AS THE INITIAL FLURRY OF BREAKTHROUGHS BEGAN TO SLOW, THE FBI resorted to its hallmark taste for extreme thoroughness to hunt down additional suspects. The mania for detail started with Louis Freeh, who made it his personal business to pick out the lineup photographs that witnesses would be shown alongside McVeigh’s. This was normally a low-level job for a field agent. “I was micromanaging,” Freeh acknowledged in his autobiography, “which nobody likes the boss to do.”
The bureau was prepared to track every last person McVeigh had encountered in the military, if that was what it took to find coconspirators. Steve Chancellor, the army’s point man on the task force, was asked early on how many people trained with McVeigh at Fort Benning, and he said about a hundred. Then he was asked how many were in his infantry company, and Chancellor said just a few more. But, he cautioned, they should take a baseline number—120, say—and double it to account for a large turnover during the three years McVeigh served. The agents soon returned to ask how many people were in McVeigh’s battalion. Chancellor said between 500 and 600, maybe 1,200 over three years. Soon they were asking about the entire brigade.
Chancellor looked skeptical. “Now you’re talking in the thousands. Five, ten thousand people over three years,” he said. And how many people were stationed at Fort Riley? “I looked at this guy,” Chancellor recounted, “and thought, you got to be shittin’ me. We’re looking at 32,000 people. And the agent said, ‘Okay, I think we’ll stop.’”
CHARLIE HANGER RETURNED TO PATROL DUTY ON SATURDAY MORNING after two days off and instinctively checked the inside of his police cruiser to make sure nothing connected to McVeigh was left behind. On the rear floor behind the passenger seat, he spotted something: a crumpled business card for Paulsen’s Military Supply in Antigo, Wisconsin. The front had an ink drawing of a tank and a military helicopter. The name DAVE, all in upper case, and a Chicago-area phone number were on the back, along with these words, in McVeigh’s unmistakably spindly handwriting: “TNT. $5 a stick. Need more.” And, beneath the phone number: “Call after 01 May, see if I can get some more.”
Dave was Dave Paulsen, the son of the owner of Paulsen Military Supply, who had been in frequent contact with McVeigh in late 1994 and early 1995. When the FBI first saw the card, they immediately suspected Paulsen of providing McVeigh with bomb-making materials. TNT could have been used as a detonator in Oklahoma City; the feds did not yet know any different.
When the FBI tracked him down, the following evening, Paulsen acknowledged meeting McVeigh at a gun show in Kalamazoo in December 1994 and said he purchased some AR-15 assault weapon parts that McVeigh had on his display table. In exchange, McVeigh said he wanted dynamite. Paulsen told him repeatedly over the next few weeks that he could obtain some, but he had no intention of following through. They arranged a meeting to make the swap, but Paulsen was a no-show.
Paulsen was on the lookout for “interesting” gun parts and figured McVeigh was a good source. McVeigh also offered him blasting caps, at $500 a pop, and Paulsen said at the gun show that he was interested in those, too. McVeigh subsequently called him more than thirty times, both at work and at home—more calls than Paulsen was prepared to admit to initially.
Paulsen told the FBI he never intended to purchase blasting caps from McVeigh and only told him he would to maintain their connection. The FBI became suspicious enough to put him through a long grind of interviews, and these intensified after Paulsen failed a polygraph test. Paulsen was asked if he sold explosives to McVeigh; if he had discussed blowing anything up with McVeigh; and if he had more than one face-to-face meeting with McVeigh. On all three questions, Paulsen answered no; on all three, the polygraph showed his responses were “indicative of deception.”
Paulsen remained under investigation for weeks until the FBI was satisfied he was not involved in the bombing. At one point, he broke down in tears in front of an agent, clenched his fists and exclaimed: “That son-of-a-bitch McVeigh, that cocksucker skinny son-of-a-bitch, I could kill him!”
His frustration and anger were understandable: McVeigh had dropped his business card in Trooper Hanger’s cruiser as a deliberate act of revenge, exacted because Paulsen had let McVeigh down. McVeigh acknowledged as much to Michel and Herbeck. He let Terry Nichols know, before the bombing, that he not only planned to make trouble for Paulsen but would do the same to anyone who got in his way. McVeigh even showed Nichols the business card with his incriminating scrawl on the back.
“The impression I got was Tim was telling me this as a warning to me not to betray him,” Nichols recounted. “McVeigh said that whenever someone screws him, his act of retribution in return would be multiplied by a factor of ten, at the minimum.”
THE SEARCH OF TERRY NICHOLS’S HOUSE IN HERINGTON WAS NOT exactly the FBI’s finest moment. Early on, they decided to seek court warrants for the search and not use the consent forms signed by Nichols and Marife. The agents wanted to take the time to assemble a full evidence recovery team and make sure the place was not booby-trapped. While the Nicholses were being questioned, however, the perimeter was breached at least once.
According to the Nicholses’ home phone records, a call was placed from the house to James Nichols’s farm in Michigan at about 8:40 P.M. on April 21 and lasted close to twenty minutes. Terry Nichols was in the police station basement, so he could not have made that call. Marife Nichols was not allowed home that night, not even to pick up a few toiletries and a change of clothes for herself and the baby. And James Nichols could not have received the call, because he was in federal custody. One possible explanation is that an FBI agent in Herington entered and got on the line to a colleague in Decker in violation of all the safeguards. An FBI report detailing the activities of the on-scene agents stated that “no law enforcement officers had entered the Nichols residence or the detached garage,” but failed to offer any alternate explanation for the phone call.
The evidence recovery team came in from Omaha the following morning, supplemented by local agents and forensics and fingerprint experts flown in from Washington—fifteen people in all. It wasn’t until 4:30 P.M. that they received the all-clear to move in, by which time they could have been amply briefed on information provided by Nichols. He had drawn a map of the property showing the location of all his firearms and ammunition, and had gone through the inventory of his gun-show supplies, including the ammonium nitrate sprinkled on his lawn and the broken fuel meter. He said the duffel bag and rucksack in the garage were McVeigh’s, as well as the Ruger. For some reason, none of this was passed on, making the search seem much more hazardous.
The initial search lasted close to twelve hours, and yielded some valuable evidence, including five sixty-foot lengths of Primadet shock tube with nonelectric blasting caps attached, and a pink customer receipt for forty large bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer purchased at the Mid-Kansas Co-op on September 30, 1994, by Mike Havens, later established as a Terry Nichols alias. The receipt would be pivotal at trial, because it had McVeigh’s fingerprints on it. Its discovery, though, was a little odd: it was found in a kitchen drawer, behind some dish towels, wrapped around two gold coins Marife intended to use to pay for her passage home. Why would Nichols keep such an incriminating piece of evidence? Why would he keep it there?
Nichols himself insisted he gave the receipt to McVeigh at the time of the purchase and never saw it again. “Why would I wrap that receipt around two one-ounce coins and put it with my other coins? It makes no sense,” he wrote years later, long after he had admitted purchasing the ammonium nitrate and using it to mix the bomb.
It might be easier to accept the good faith of the FBI recovery effort were it not for the breach in security the night before, and the lack of a fully rigorous sequence of photographs—showing the unopened drawer, the drawer with the exact placement of the contents, and the contents separated one by one. Nichols believed the FBI might have planted the receipt, but had no corroborating evidence. McVeigh might also have planted it to incriminate the Nichols brothers. He was never formally invited into the Herington house, but he could have gone there on the night of April 17, while Terry and Marife were driving Josh to the Kansas City airport.
The first search ended at about 4:00 A.M., but soon the team was sent back to retrieve a number of items they overlooked the first time. They had missed the fuel meter, which was sitting in pieces on a crate in the garage. They also had to collect Nichols’s old Michigan license plate and sift through the garbage cans. In their first search of Nichols’s books, they managed to pull out works on health food and cancer but missed Nichols’s copy of Hunter, William Pierce’s follow-up to The Turner Diaries, which features sniper killings of interracial couples and the destruction of a Mossad office by an ANFO bomb. On Sunday afternoon, more than twenty-four hours after the search began, Marife Nichols wondered why there was still no sign of the $5,000 in cash and a bag of gold coins she knew were hidden beneath her mattress.
FBI managers and street agents who heard about the botched search could only shake their heads. When agents came back a third and fourth time for additional search warrants, a U.S. attorney dealing with the paperwork was overheard saying: “You gotta be kidding me.” Back at headquarters, assistant director Bear Bryant was about to ream out the Omaha special agent in charge for sending such a lousy evidence response team when he learned that the operation was being directed by the Kansas City SAC, a protégé of his named Dave Tubbs. He went quiet again.
Two weeks later, on May 8, Marife was given permission to collect clothes and toys from her house. When the FBI agents accompanying her—not recovery specialists—reminded her of a story she had told about her husband grinding up fertilizer, they asked if they could take the food mixer into evidence. She agreed and went straight to the kitchen cupboard where it was still sitting.
The mishandling of the search affected the way some evidence was characterized in court. Of the six most incriminating items listed in the initial affidavit supporting Nichols’s prosecution, only two—the Primadet and the fertilizer receipt—constituted evidence of Nichols’s guilt. The fuel meter had nothing to do with the bombing. Neither did the gas cans found in the garage or the containers of ground-up ammonium nitrate Nichols sold at gun shows. The white barrels from Nichols’s garage were erroneously described as having “blue lids made from material resembling the blue plastic fragments found at the bomb scene.” Actually, the barrels had no lids at all.
The government made other blunders. It never recovered the siphon pump, which Nichols used in the mixing of the bomb materials. And it never figured out that the duffel bag and rucksack were McVeigh’s, even though Nichols told the FBI they were. The question of where McVeigh left his personal effects would end up consuming untold man-hours and send agents on at least one wild-goose chase into the Arizona desert. The answer was under their noses all the time.
Also undiscovered were the blasting caps and nitromethane tubes Nichols had buried beneath his crawl space. These could have had a profound impact on the investigation and trials, and perhaps led to the indictment of other coconspirators. Instead, they lay undisturbed for another ten years.
THE AGENTS AT TERRY NICHOLS’S HOUSE MADE ONE DISCOVERY THAT became a central part of the bombing investigation. It was a telephone calling card in the name of Daryl Bridges, obtained through the far-right publication The Spotlight. In an age before cell phones, these cards were the easiest way for people of limited means to stay mobile and still keep a single telephone account. Subscribers called an 800 number, entered a PIN number, and then used as many minutes as they had paid for.
Nichols had purchased the card, using the made-up name, when he was still living with his brother in Michigan. He maintained a ledger of payments, also found by the FBI, to keep the card solvent. There was nothing criminal about running a calling card under an assumed name, but as investigators started to dig through the card’s phone records, it became clear that Nichols and McVeigh had used it to talk to each other, to talk to friends and contacts like Michael Fortier and Dave Paulsen, and to contact potential vendors of key bomb components—everything from the nitromethane to the Ryder truck.
Published accounts suggest that the Daryl Bridges investigation began when the physical card was discovered by the FBI on April 23. But forty-eight hours earlier, a Miami-based Secret Service agent named Mary Riley had already established some key links between the card and the bombing conspiracy. Riley’s field notes indicate that she pulled together several pieces of the puzzle, via a maze of telephone companies, switchboard protocols, computer database interfaces, and other technological complexities. But something went wrong—so wrong that when it was time to present the case in court, all of Riley’s work, and even her name, had disappeared from the record.
Riley was one of the savviest telecommunications and computer investigators in federal law enforcement. But, instead of working solely with the task force to obtain subpoenas for the relevant records, she established a second line of communication with Donna Bucella, one of Janet Reno’s top aides in the Justice Department. It is not entirely clear who initiated contact with whom—neither would return messages requesting an interview. They were friends from Bucella’s time as a federal prosecutor in southern and central Florida. Bucella was now deputy director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, overseeing top prosecutors around the country. According to several FBI veterans, Riley’s channeling of information to Bucella broke the chain of command, which should have gone directly through the task force leadership in Oklahoma City. There was also a secondary problem of overreaching, which according to the FBI risked jeopardizing the admissibility of the phone records—the guts of the government’s case against McVeigh and Nichols—as evidence in court.
Riley’s big break came on April 21, when she heard that someone had called Eldon Elliott’s body shop using the calling card number, 1-800-793-3377, which was traced to the Spotlight company. Spotlight, she discovered, was an MCI subscriber, and MCI’s security department told her that the Spotlight account had been sold to a company called West Coast Telephone. John Kane, the entrepreneur behind WCT, was happy to look through his company’s records and even called MCI to consult their confidential reverse directory to identify the subscriber.
That brought up the name Daryl Bridges and a Michigan address, matching the Nichols brothers’ information. Riley then asked Kane for any calls Bridges might have made on April 14, the day Robert Kling called Vicki Beemer for a Ryder truck rental. Kane discovered that two calls had gone out in quick succession, the first to Terry Nichols’s home in Herington and the second to Eldon Elliott’s. It was not immediately clear where these calls originated, or whether they were made by the same Spotlight subscriber. Kane also contacted the Boston Financial Group, which handled payments on the Spotlight cards, and gave them the PIN number associated with the Bridges calls. Boston Financial reconfirmed the subscriber as Daryl Bridges and said he had $117 left on his account.
All this was privileged information with implications for subscriber privacy. It was perhaps understandable, given the speed of Riley’s work and the urgency of the investigation, that she did her digging first and, to judge by her own records, worked on securing subpoenas thereafter. Not even her fiercest FBI detractors begrudged her that—they said they would have done the same, and could not imagine a judge or jury objecting, given the scale and urgency of the investigation. The executives at MCI and WCT were on stickier ground, because of their own obligations to protect their customers’ privacy. But the time lag between information and legal cover was not great at this stage.
Then the information flow turned from a trickle to a flood. Already on April 21, Riley had a printout from Kane of hundreds of Daryl Bridges calls from December 1993 to April 17, 1995, two days before the bombing. These included calls to Terry Nichols’s number in Herington, Lana Padilla’s number in Las Vegas, and a cluster of numbers in the Philippines. Riley also learned that the all-important call to Eldon Elliott’s body shop on the morning of April 14 came from a pay phone in Junction City—a discovery that would establish a significant link to McVeigh, because he had been across the street that morning, exchanging his clapped-out station wagon for the Mercury Marquis.
Riley’s notes indicate that she believed her findings would move quickly into the hands of front-line investigators. She even communicated directly with some FBI agents. But the task force commanders somehow did not receive the information. Riley faxed everything to Don Stephenson, the Secret Service liaison in Oklahoma City, who should have briefed the task force leadership. While there is evidence Stephenson spoke to individual FBI agents, it’s unclear if he did or did not talk to their commanders. There was definitely a monstrous communication failure. The FBI team who questioned Terry Nichols in the Herington police station would have been delighted to know about the Bridges card on the night of April 21; Riley had the information that afternoon, including evidence contradicting Nichols’s assertion that he and McVeigh had had no phone contact for months before Easter Sunday.
Was the Secret Service leadership holding on to the information for itself, as some senior FBI agents have alleged? Or did something go wrong in the internal workings of the FBI? The available documentation, along with the memories of senior investigators and prosecutors, make it difficult to draw a conclusion, except that miscommunication was rampant. In one instance, Riley called a phone company in Michigan to get a subscriber name for what turned out to be James Nichols’s number, only to be told that a bureau agent had already been in touch to ask the same question. (The bureau person, though, had two of the digits transposed.)
The problem with the second line of communication started on April 22, when, according to Riley’s notes, Bucella asked her to send four pending subpoena requests through her. Soon, they were in regular contact by both phone and fax.
It was not a widely advertised relationship. The task force leadership was unaware of it, and remained so until some were questioned about it for this book. Weldon Kennedy said: “If I’d have known that, I would have taken her head off. I would have thrown her off the task force in a heartbeat.” Another top FBI case manager was equally harsh on Bucella: “If she didn’t know the basics of that, then she sure should have. She was one of the DOJ’s lead prosecutors at that time.”
Two days later, on April 24, Riley and the FBI were at cross-purposes again. Someone went to a pay phone near the Fort Riley command post at 3:30 A.M. and used the Daryl Bridges card to call a second pay phone nearby. Nobody picked up. This had to have been an FBI agent testing the card, but neither Riley nor John Kane at West Coast Telephone understood that, because the FBI did not tell them. They thought they might have picked up the trail of another conspirator. And so, they spent hours addressing an issue that was, in fact, no issue at all.
Later that same day, Riley contacted the Boston Financial Group and asked for the payment records of every Spotlight calling-card holder—about five thousand people in all. According to Riley’s notes, she fired off a subpoena request to Don Stephenson in Oklahoma City, and Stephenson later told her the subpoena had been issued. But the FBI soon came to worry that this line of inquiry was too broad, and that it somehow threatened the admissibility of the phone records. And it was not just the FBI that was concerned. By the next day, a manager at the Liberty Lobby, the avowedly racist organization behind The Spotlight, called John Kane’s office, demanding assurances that no information on his customers would be divulged. On April 26, the FBI decided, as one agent told John Kane, to “start at the beginning” and reanalyze the phone records as though Mary Riley never existed.
Nobody at the FBI has ever given a satisfactory explanation of what Riley did to incite the bureau’s wrath. Weldon Kennedy suggested she made mistakes in the actual technical analysis of the phone records. But Riley’s field notes address the points Kennedy raised. Kennedy’s successor as head of the task force, Danny Defenbaugh, said more explicitly he could not talk about the subject in any detail. When asked if Riley or the Secret Service had somehow overreached in the number of records they requested, Defenbaugh replied: “That’s a great theory.” He also confirmed that once the FBI took control, they no longer pursued the financial records of the Spotlight card holders.
There has been no explanation, either, of why the FBI placed so much blame solely on Riley. Didn’t she have bosses? Didn’t someone sanction what she was up to? What about Don Stephenson, who received her field notes on a regular basis? Was the FBI entirely blameless, given the contact its own agents had with Riley?
Riley was fired from the task force within days of her trip to Oklahoma City and ended up under internal investigation by the Secret Service—an inquiry that was not made public but resulted in Riley being cleared, leaving government service, and moving into a high-level, high-paying job with Bank of America.
Donna Bucella’s career was left entirely unblemished. She was soon promoted to head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys and has since occupied high-level government jobs in the FBI and customs and border patrol, interspersed with stints in private practice. Interestingly, she also worked at Bank of America for a while.
Not everyone blamed Riley. John Kane, who worked equally closely with the FBI when they took over the records search, saw her as the victim of a crude power play: the FBI was jealous of her work, and wanted to take credit for it. “She was as committed to finding the answers in this case as anybody could be,” he said. “Her attitude was, I don’t care what badge I’m carrying in my pocket…. Anything that could be done to get after these guys sooner, faster, better, she was all over it.”
When a couple of FBI agents visited Kane’s California offices and said they were there to investigate Riley, Kane wasn’t pleased. “I rolled my head and my eyes and said, fine, whatever…. They probably spent an hour and a half asking questions that didn’t seem like anything I could relate to the case,” he said. “She lost, and they won.”
Riley’s field notes were never handed over to the defense teams ahead of McVeigh’s and Nichols’s federal trials—a potential violation of the rules of evidence. The task force leadership insisted it, too, never saw the notes. “This is the first time I’ve seen this,” one senior FBI manager said when shown them. “If Judge Matsch sees this, I don’t even want to be in the same country as the guy. He will blow up, he will be seething, he will go try to find heads, and I don’t want him to go find mine.”
A more nuanced view was offered by a member of the federal prosecution team, who did not think the notes would cause much of a stir more than a decade after the trials, because they were not exculpatory to either McVeigh or Nichols. The prosecutor agreed that the primary problem was a turf war between the Secret Service and the FBI, in which nobody was blameless.
“The Secret Service was dying to do everything they could to hold on to that piece,” he said, “and they got shut out. There was a fundamental quandary whether they had the experience to do the job. But I never doubted Mary Riley.”
THE FBI WENT OVER EVERY INCH OF JAMES NICHOLS’S FARM, BUT they did not find a whole lot. For Nichols, having the feds crawling over his private property was the nightmare his radical politics had taught him to fear the most. He railed that he was never shown a search warrant and he might have been right about that—the warrant was signed by a judge at 6:54 P.M., more than four hours after the raid began.
“You people have no right to be in here,” Nichols remembered shouting. “I demand to see a Fourth Amendment warrant. I demand to talk with Janet Reno.” An ATF agent supposedly responded: “Oh shut up. We have more rights in here than you do.”
Still, Nichols answered all the feds’ questions. He was not shy about his friendship with McVeigh or their shared interest in explosives. But he was quicker than his brother in understanding the seriousness of his situation, and his show of candor was almost certainly calculated to minimize the trouble he faced. Nichols told the FBI that, in 1992, he, his brother, and McVeigh made bottle bombs out of brake fluid, gasoline, and diesel fuel and detonated them on the farm, just for kicks. He also constructed small bombs using prescription vials, Pyrodex, blasting caps, and safety fuse. But he had never bought ammonium nitrate and did not know if his brother or McVeigh had purchased any. He said Terry owned a bunch of bomb-making books. And he was “confident” McVeigh had the knowledge to manufacture one from ammonium nitrate.
Like his brother, James Nichols made insinuations about McVeigh’s involvement in the bombing, without offering evidence that might smack of collusion or out-and-out betrayal. He was also careful to proclaim Terry’s innocence. Since he claimed never to have visited Terry in Herington—apparently true—he could make a plausible case that he knew nothing about any interactions between his brother and McVeigh in the final days before the bombing.
The feds found no ammonium nitrate on the farm; the best they came up with were twenty-eight fifty-pound bags of fertilizer “containing ammonium nitrate,” which was far from the same thing. They found several large tanks of diesel fuel, some nonelectric blasting caps, Pyrodex black powder, and safety fuse. None of this was evidence of collusion in the bomb plot. These were commonplace farm items; such explosives are often used to blow out tree stumps or remove boulders.
At Joe Martinolich’s direction, agents divided the farm up into a grid, and went over all of it with metal detectors. But Martinolich ultimately concluded the feds had no grounds to arrest James Nichols. This was not what Louis Freeh wanted to hear, and he said so. He wanted James Nichols charged with conspiracy. Martinolich responded, as calmly as he could, that he didn’t have probable cause to seek an arrest warrant.
Freeh flew into a fury and said: “If you don’t do it, I’ll find someone who will.”
“We don’t have the evidence,” Martinolich told him.
“We’ll sort it out later,” Freeh insisted.
Martinolich shared his director’s gut feeling that Nichols was somehow involved in the bombing, but he questioned the ethics and the tactical wisdom of arresting him on charges that could not be backed up by real evidence. Freeh worried that Nichols might somehow disappear if he was not taken into federal custody. Martinolich was offended that Freeh questioned his ability to keep Nichols under surveillance; he understood the pressure Freeh was under to solve the case, but he also had his professional pride. The next day, he called headquarters and offered his resignation.
The last thing the FBI needed at this moment was a high-level defection pointing the finger at Freeh’s leadership skills. Bear Bryant called Martinolich at once, apologizing profusely for the way he had been treated and promising that his concerns would be addressed. The bureau then appealed to the Justice Department, which fashioned a compromise. Nichols would be arrested, but instead of bombing charges, he would be accused of conspiring to possess unregistered firearms and explosives. It was not much of a charge—who makes a bottle bomb and registers it?—and it was thrown out as soon as it was heard by a judge. Still, it provided a temporary way for all parties to save face.
The episode killed Martinolich’s desire to pursue his long and illustrious FBI career. He did not leave the bureau right away; it took another botched FBI job, the investigation of the 1996 Olympic Games bombing in Atlanta, to convince him to do that. Still, the pattern was set. For the second time in a few days, Freeh had ridden roughshod over one of his most experienced managers, exactly the sort of person he should have turned to, not against, during a major investigation.
THE HIGH-PROFILE ARRESTS OF MCVEIGH AND THE NICHOLS BROTHERS were hailed at the time as great breakthroughs, but they came at a price, because they closed down avenues that could have led to other potential coconspirators. Nobody was a better candidate for more subtle treatment than James Nichols: the feds could have put him under surveillance, given themselves time to analyze his phone records, and waited to see who visited or called over the next several days. Someone important might still seek refuge in Decker, or receive a phone call from Nichols to discuss another planned attack.
That was certainly on the minds of task force leaders in Oklahoma City. “At the beginning, we were not even sure McVeigh was the one responsible,” Bob Ricks recalled. “Was he part of some larger conspiracy?…Was he just a driver? A lot of times police arrest a driver, and the bad guys disappear.”
The investigation was further hampered by its inability to prevent media leaks. If the Nichols brothers’ names had not been all over the radio and television in the late morning of April 21, both brothers could have been put under surveillance. Lana Padilla, or Josh, could have made a monitored call to Terry to see what he might volunteer—not as a suspect in custody but as a free man. Mary Riley and the executives at West Coast Telephone could have kept monitoring the Daryl Bridges card.
The task force leadership did not understand at first why crucial leads were seeping into the public arena. Then Weldon Kennedy learned that ATF headquarters was routinely forwarding the Oklahoma City briefings to its entire staff, and so creating hundreds of potential news media sources around the country. “I blew up,” Kennedy said. “I went completely nutso.”
He plugged the leak as quickly as he could, but others soon developed in its place. For example, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News in Oklahoma City was having an affair with an ATF agent she knew from Texas and was pumping him for everything he knew. Several front-page scoops later, the agent was sent back to Dallas.
For these reasons, the early arrests were never more than a qualified success. Members of the Decker raid team became convinced that James Nichols had known they were coming and removed incriminating evidence—something Nichols himself has always denied. One odd thing Nichols insisted on was that his incarceration was somehow designed to prevent him from retrieving crucial evidence from the scene in Oklahoma City, which he said could have exonerated him, and his brother, and McVeigh, and pointed to the “real” perpetrators.
What was it that James Nichols was so anxious to do in Oklahoma City? Why, too, did he seem determined to make contact with Terry and McVeigh? Over and over, Nichols expressed a wish to talk to one or both of them face-to-face, a move he seemed to think would help clear all their names but which, to law enforcement, suggested he wanted the three of them to get their stories straight.
Such face-to-face meetings might have been very useful to the investigation, of course, if the participants could somehow have been lulled into thinking they were not being monitored or recorded. Once the feds launched their raid, however, this was no longer an option.