Tim McVeigh woke up on February 24, 1991, to the greatest test of his young life, the launch of the ground war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The battle plan envisaged up to 70 percent casualties, effectively turning McVeigh’s company and others like it into sacrificial lambs for the next wave of tanks and ground troops. They expected to encounter mines, barbed wire, artillery and antitank fire, and maybe nerve gas. “Take your worst nightmare, then quadruple it, then quadruple it again,” a Vietnam veteran who led the platoon next to McVeigh’s said, “and you still won’t get to where you’ll be this time tomorrow.”
At 3:00 P.M., a line of M1 Abrams tanks, equipped with giant blades, began plowing up the desert sand. McVeigh’s job, as a gunner atop his own infantry tank, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, was to take out enemy positions before they could fire on him. “No one knows,” he later told the journalist Jonathan Franklin, “what the feeling is like to know that any second you could be hit by a bullet or shell from indirect fire or from a tank.”
Once the fighting began, the Iraqi frontline units—tired, hungry, lice-infested conscripts—wanted nothing more than to surrender. Many did not get the chance. Those who crawled out of the sand churned on top of them by the M1 tanks immediately faced Bradley gunners like McVeigh. The battlefield was a slaughterhouse. Trench by trench, the Iraqis were given sixty seconds to surrender, and those who hesitated, or did not hear the warning, were buried alive or blown to smithereens. Thousands of Iraqis were pulverized, dismembered, or burned. Many were plowed into shallow desert graves.
This went on for four straight days. When McVeigh wasn’t manning his gun, he took hundreds of photographs of corpses and mangled Iraqi equipment. James Rockwell, the unit’s supply sergeant, was given several as keepsakes. “One of them,” Rockwell said, “was of an Iraqi soldier sitting in a deuce-and-a-half truck that had been bombed. The guy was literally burned like a piece of toast, but his hands were still on the steering wheel.”
McVeigh and his comrades were high on killing. “If it’s in front of us, it dies” was one infantry company’s slogan. McVeigh nicknamed his Bradley “Bad Company,” after the rock song he liked to blast through the vehicle. The crew sang along to the lines about killing “in cold blood,” and fighting, gun in hand, “’til the day I die.” On the second day, McVeigh wowed everyone with his gunnery skills, using just a single round to hit two Iraqi soldiers dug in at a machine-gun emplacement a thousand yards away. He hit the first man in the chest, obliterating his upper body and leaving a red vapor trail where his head used to be. The episode became legendary across the 16th Infantry, earning McVeigh an Army Commendation Medal. That was one of five awards he won by the end of Operation Desert Storm, including the Bronze Star. He was described as an inspiration to his fellow platoon members and a credit to the army—the most lavish praise he had received over his brief and troubled life. And it stemmed from his skills as a killer of devastating efficiency.
EVEN BATTLE-HARDENED VETERANS OF VIETNAM AND OTHER WARS thought the rout of the Iraqi forces was particularly grim, a spilling of largely innocent life that prompted lawyers and human rights activists to accuse the United States of war crimes. The dead were not counted or identified, much less “honorably interred” as the Geneva Conventions prescribed. And there were multiple reports of Iraqis being killed after they had dropped their weapons and put their hands up.
According to at least three of his fellow soldiers, McVeigh breached a number of the rules of war himself. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Larry Frame, Richard Cerney, and Todd Regier disclosed that McVeigh had shot surrendering soldiers, including four who had already been taken prisoner. Frame told the FBI he was in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle directly behind McVeigh’s and saw him kill “several” Iraqi soldiers as they climbed out of a trench. Cerney called McVeigh a “cold-blooded bastard” who thought life was very cheap. When the FBI brought these allegations to McVeigh’s old company commander, Scott Rutter, he worried he was being investigated for war crimes himself and refused to answer their questions.
It is impossible to know how these experiences altered McVeigh’s psyche or otherwise hardened him for the slaughter he would perpetrate four years later. But his exposure to combat certainly changed his outlook and behavior. Before, he always strived to be the ideal soldier. He did not allow himself to succumb to boredom or get demoralized by the long months of waiting in the Arabian desert, as many of his fellow soldiers did. He took the conditions as a challenge and somehow kept his 25-mm cannon as well-greased as it would have been back at Fort Riley. Scott Rutter felt in retrospect he was almost too good. His compulsion to perform at the highest levels was in some ways a facade, a show of bravado covering something darker beneath.
After his return home, McVeigh lost focus. In the spring of 1991, he flew to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to try out for Special Forces, but had to withdraw on the second day because his feet were too badly blistered to complete a five-mile march. This should have been only a temporary setback; everyone understood he was out of condition after his stint in the Gulf, and he was invited to come back for another shot. But McVeigh took this as a signal to get out of the army.
McVeigh had been thinking about his time in the Middle East and now recoiled at his own gung-ho enthusiasm amid the slaughter. He became convinced that the government had manipulated him into fighting an army of hapless conscripts who were not really enemies at all. “We were falsely hyped up [to kill Iraqis], and they are normal like you and me,” he told Jonathan Franklin.
McVeigh’s epiphany about American power was not a condemnation of neo-imperialism or of a lust for oil. He felt the military’s role was strictly to defend America’s domestic borders, and that the United States had been hoodwinked into a United Nations policing operation. These thoughts fed into his long-held belief that the United States’ true enemy was an international cabal of money-grubbing liberals, multiculturalists, and Jews intent on stripping citizens of their basic rights, starting with the right to bear arms. This view had been ingrained in him over and over in The Turner Diaries, a book he discovered during his earliest days in uniform.
Politics was the means by which McVeigh forged a new identity for himself after the security of his old world—the army, and his place in it—fell apart. Most likely, his fixation on government manipulation masked a severe bout of post-combat depression, as the psychiatrists who examined him after the bombing would later postulate. James Rockwell, the Charlie Company supply sergeant, remembered McVeigh coming into his storeroom at Fort Riley and talking about having a computer chip in his backside. It was not clear if he meant this metaphorically or literally. McVeigh said he was leaving the army, because the military had done things to him he didn’t like.
“Like what?” Rockwell asked.
“I think they’ve brainwashed me or injected me with something,” McVeigh said.
Rockwell was astonished. He probably knew the men as well as anyone; he encouraged McVeigh to sit and talk whenever he came in for tank supplies or tools. McVeigh visited regularly and opened up in ways he rarely did to others. He talked about his parents’ divorce when he was sixteen years old, and the bitter fights, about his mother moving to the next town with his two sisters and leaving him with his dad. Still, Rockwell saw McVeigh as the ultimate “squared away” soldier, a man so in control it was hard to imagine him encountering anything he couldn’t deal with. The government conspiracy talk made no sense.
“Tim, you don’t really believe that, do you?” he asked.
McVeigh replied: “Yes, I do.”
Rockwell asked why he would throw away his promising military career and the recognition he had earned. McVeigh delivered a line Rockwell later recalled with a shiver. “There’s things I got to do, Sergeant Rock,” he said, “and I cannot do it from within here.”
AFTER TRYING AND FAILING FOR THREE DAYS TO CONVINCE Jennifer McVeigh to talk, the FBI put her on a plane back to Buffalo and got her father to urge her to cooperate. When she said no, she was taken to the FBI office and put on the phone to her mother. Still she would not answer questions about the bombing. “I didn’t know what was going on,” she said, over and over. She was clearly frightened.
The FBI had been through her room at her father’s house and found some incendiary documents on her computer. They were written by her brother, but the feds made it clear that if she didn’t speak up she would have to answer for the contents herself. The first document was a letter to the American Legion and characterized the ATF, FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service as “a bunch of fascist tyrants” and “power-hungry stormtroopers of the federal government.” The second document was an unsigned one-paragraph rant about the ATF. “All you tyrannical motherfuckers will swing in the wind one day,” it read, “for your treasonous actions against the Constitution and the United States. Remember the Nuremberg War Trials. But…but…but…I was only following orders!………Die you spineless, cowardice bastards!”
Jennifer’s interviewers let her sleep on that, then upped the pressure the next morning by displaying poster-size photographs of her and Tim, along with a timeline of their movements leading up to the bombing and a list of charges they said they were considering. The agents even opened a book of federal statutes and showed her some choice paragraphs. “Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal,” one of them read. Next to the printed words, an agent had scrawled: “I.e., death.” The next page had a section on treason, this time with a handwritten addendum that said: “Penalty equals death.”
Jennifer began talking and didn’t stop for the next eight days. She didn’t know the FBI’s threat to bring capital charges against her was strictly a scare tactic, or that treason can be prosecuted only in wartime. She talked until her head was spinning and she was crying so hard she was all but gasping for breath.
For the first several days, she was determined not to rat out her brother, but the FBI kept applying more pressure. “They told me he was guilty,” she later testified, “and that he was going to fry.” She understood that if she did not want to be prosecuted herself, she needed to tell them everything she knew. It took her a full week to do that; she reached her breaking point only after the agents forced her to look at graphic, full-color photographs of mangled babies’ bodies from the Murrah Building.
“It was controversial at the time to show her pictures of dead children,” Weldon Kennedy, who gave the authorization, acknowledged—so controversial that it was omitted from the official record.
But the move paid off, and Jennifer was ultimately smart enough not to throw her own life away after her brother’s. “I think that was the reason, the tipping point, that made her decide she would cooperate,” Kennedy added. “There’s no question a lot of pressure was put on her.”
LIKE MCVEIGH, NICHOLS WAS ROCKED BY HIS PARENTS’ DIVORCE. AS a child, he sat so quietly in class his teachers wondered if he had hearing difficulties. Long after his arrest, it was determined that he had Asperger syndrome. Still, he was smart and resourceful, and dreamed of a career in medicine. But when his mother was given the Decker farm in her divorce settlement, she ordered him to leave college and help her run it. He complied without a murmur. The farm crisis of the early 1980s was setting in, compounded by floods that turned the Michigan fields to mud. Right away, the bounties of Terry’s childhood gave way to poverty and constant struggle. He hardly talked to his father anymore, and his older brother Les was an abiding worry after a horrific accident at a grain elevator, which left him with burns over 95 percent of his body. Joyce, a matriarchal figure with a propensity to drink, rammed her car into her ex-husband’s tractor, and was once found by a sheriff’s deputy throwing beer cans into a cornfield. When he challenged her, she turned on him with a chain saw. Mercifully, she was too drunk to start it up and threw it at him instead.
Nichols dabbled in property investment with the help of his real estate agent, then known as Lana Osentowski. She was twice divorced, with two children, and she encouraged Nichols to follow her into a sideline selling insurance. They married in 1981, and Josh was born a year later. By 1988, the marriage was in trouble, and Lana suggested that Terry enlist in the army. She filed for divorce shortly after he left for basic training, by which time she was living fifty miles away in Bay City and checking in on her three children, whom she left with various relatives, just once or twice a week. Nichols requested a discharge so he could return home and take care of Josh.
James Nichols was no luckier in his marriage to Lana’s younger sister, Kelli. Their 1987 divorce was so contentious that Kelli accused her husband of molesting their son. Nichols eventually managed to rebut the charge, but he could not forgive his ex-wife, or the courts; it was a turning point in his hostility toward the government.
By the end of the 1980s, James and Terry were back on the farm. Terry wanted to get married again, so he flew to the Philippines and selected a seventeen-year-old mail-order bride in Marife Torres, the daughter of a provincial police chief. Months went by while they processed the paperwork enabling Marife to come to the United States. And when Nichols flew back to the Philippines in June 1991 to pick her up, he discovered she was five months pregnant by another man—“complicating matters some,” as he later put it.
Just about the only thing Nichols did not regret was his bond with Josh. Father and son were so close that Lana could not believe Nichols would ever jeopardize the relationship by involving himself in a major criminal conspiracy. Years later, as Josh struggled with drug and alcohol addictions and shuttled in and out of the Nevada criminal justice system, Padilla could not contain her anger at Nichols for abdicating his parental responsibilities. “I truly believe [Josh] is in prison because he depended on a father who abandoned him,” she said. “Not to mention a mother who abandoned him, too. But I didn’t blow up a building. People get divorced every day, but their ex does not blow up a building.”
EARLY IN THE INVESTIGATION, THE FBI THOUGHT MCVEIGH AND NICHOLS might be gay lovers, or at least that they had a strong homoerotic bond. Padilla said McVeigh was certainly controlling and possessive of Nichols, almost to the point of jealousy. But that, Padilla said, was as far as it went: “McVeigh never approached Terry, you know…in that way. He was always high on methamphetamines.”
When they met, Nichols was thirty-three, at least ten years older than most of the recruits in basic training. They saw him as a natural leader, none more so than McVeigh, a skinny twenty-year-old unsure of his physical abilities. McVeigh began working out obsessively to build up his muscle strength, and would clean and re-clean every item of his equipment while others went out drinking and partying. He and Nichols stayed on their commanders’ good side, but ran in a wild crowd including a kid from Boston who once lobbed a CS gas canister into a topless bar; Mike Fortier, who was into drugs; and another troublemaker who accompanied them on secret outings to detonate black-powder bombs.
McVeigh and Nichols also delved into white supremacist literature. McVeigh read The Turner Diaries first, then passed it on to Nichols, Fortier, and anyone else in the unit he thought might be receptive. They were radicalized by the book’s revolutionary spirit more than its breathtaking racism. Still, McVeigh and Nichols had grown up in places where there was a casual disdain for blacks, Jews, and foreigners, and they were uncomfortable around many of the African-Americans in their unit. They weren’t beyond cracking jokes about “niggers” and “porch monkeys,” as McVeigh freely acknowledged in his prison interviews. Before he was out of uniform, McVeigh also signed up with the Ku Klux Klan.
SENIOR CASE MANAGERS BEGAN TO SUSPECT SOMETHING WAS WRONG with the sketch of John Doe Two. They issued two versions, one bare-headed and one with the zigzag-patterned cap described by Tom Kessinger, but the leads these generated were a waste of time. By April 26, a week after the bombing, the task force brought in Jeanne Boylan, a different sort of sketch artist, whose technique did not involve showing witnesses stock facial features but rather used an idiosyncratic method of interviewing subjects to draw out their memories strand by strand. Time and again Boylan had corrected the work of conventional artists and helped crack cases. Now Danny Coulson was instructing her tersely: “Find out what’s wrong with these damn drawings.”
Within hours, Boylan was face-to-face with Kessinger at Eldon Elliott’s shop and picking up a welter of new details. Kessinger had seen John Doe Two only from the side, not head-on as the original sketch portrayed him, and many of the facial details were wrong. Kessinger saw him only briefly, as he stood with his arms crossed in front of a poster, but noticed his muscular frame and the beginnings of a tattoo poking out from beneath his left T-shirt sleeve. Boylan started working up a brand-new sketch.
Kessinger also wanted to talk about John Doe One and offered a fascinating new detail. Robert Kling was a tobacco-chewer, and did something that made Kessinger stare and stare. “When a guy chews,” he told Boylan, “he tucks the chaw over to one side or the other so he can talk, know what I mean? But he doesn’t divide it in two. This guy standing at the counter had a long, thin face, blue eyes, this sorta flat-top hair like an army guy, and two puffs, two plugs of chew, one tucked over on each side of his bottom lip. Funniest damn thing I ever seen.”
The FBI was working on the basis that McVeigh and Kling were the same person, but McVeigh was not a tobacco-chewer. With the other inconsistencies raised by Kessinger and his fellow employees—that Kling was five foot ten (three inches shorter than McVeigh), had a line or deformity across his chin, and rough skin (McVeigh’s was smooth)—the government’s case was starting to look shaky.
When Boylan told one of the top FBI supervisors what Kessinger had said, he had her escorted to a hotel room in Junction City and told her to stay put until further notice. Two agents subsequently grilled her about her interview with Kessinger. She felt she was being interrogated and told them to lighten up.
Come on, she said, we’re all on the same side. They paid no attention.
An hour later, one of the agents returned to her room. “Ms. Boylan?” he said, looking straight at her. “The information you produced this afternoon does not exist.”
Boylan was stunned. “Wh-what information?” she stammered.
“Very good,” the agent replied. He nodded once, turned around, and left.
IN THE WINTER OF 1991–92, TERRY AND JAMES NICHOLS BEGAN FOLLOWING Ralph Daigle, a local extremist preacher, who persuaded Terry to max out his credit cards on the quaint theory that the banks were not backing up their money with silver or gold, and so were defrauding the American people every time they made a loan. Daigle—who was later prosecuted and convicted of tax evasion—was a common-law advocate who argued that the government and the banks were an offense to the Constitution. Daigle derived many of his ideas from a notorious racist preacher James Wickstrom, who once argued that “Jew money barons” created the farm crisis of the 1980s and were “financially and morally rap[ing] the white Christian-American people.” Credit card bills, Daigle preached, merely needed to be returned with the phrase “dishonored with due cause,” and the banks would have no option but to cancel the debt.
The Nichols brothers certainly liked the idea of fleecing the banks, especially now Terry was married and starting a new family, and signed up to the ideology that went with it. Terry ran up credit card bills of more than $26,000 with Chase Manhattan and the First Deposit National Bank of Pleasanton, California, and then tried to challenge his creditors in court, acting as his own counsel.
It did not go well. Nichols argued that the court had no jurisdiction and the banks should pay him damages of $50,000, or 14,200 ounces of silver, for “fraud and misrepresentation.” He also attempted to invalidate his own signature as a way of nullifying the pledge he made on his credit card applications to honor his debts. He was a no-show when the First Deposit National case came up for trial. And in the Chase Manhattan hearing, he refused to recognize the Chase lawyer and said he wanted the bank’s whole board of directors to come and face him instead. He refused to approach the microphone recording the proceedings, saying he didn’t want to acknowledge the court by walking all the way into the room. The judge threatened to throw him in jail for contempt.
By June 1993, even Nichols realized his quixotic adventures in court were futile. His only choices were to conjure up more than $30,000 in debt and accumulated interest, or drop out of the system. He chose the latter. “I was pissed at Ralph [Daigle], the banks, and myself, and I decided not to pay the judgment,” he said. “I went on a cash basis with everything…. And I decided not to put my name on anything that would be on a database to where the banks could track me down.” And so Nichols sabotaged any remaining chance of a normal life.
MCVEIGH WAS ALSO COMING UNSTUCK FROM MAINSTREAM SOCIETY. Quitting the military left him with few enviable options. It was not a good time to be a white working-class man. The Buffalo area was depressed, and the only work he found was as a minimum-wage security guard. On the side, he joined the National Guard reserves and found a part-time job at a gun store.
For more than a year, McVeigh wavered between depression and anger. He read comic books and spent money he did not have betting on the Buffalo Bills. With thoughts of suicide in his head, he called a Veterans Administration hospital in Florida and asked about mental health counseling. But he let the idea go when he was told he had to give them his name. He dropped his memberships to the Ku Klux Klan and the National Rifle Association because he could not afford them. But he was still absorbed by politics and read radical right-wing periodicals and books voraciously.
In early 1992, he wrote a revealing letter to the local paper, expressing his belief that stable employment and anti-Communism seemed to be giving way to social incoherence and political corruption. “America is in serious decline,” he wrote. “We have no proverbial tea to dump. Should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports? Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it might.”
This is when McVeigh started spending weekends at gun shows. He was interested in firearms and thought he could generate a little extra income by selling blast simulators, smoke grenades, and copies of The Turner Diaries. Principally, though, the shows offered McVeigh a new social network, one where taboo ideas like white supremacy, nostalgia for the confederate South, and radical antigovernment action could be discussed openly. William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, described the gun shows as a “natural recruiting environment” for his brand of race warriors; the number of shows, and of firearms changing hands outside the context of licensed gun dealerships, increased so rapidly in this period that both the government and the gun-control lobby lost count.
The militancy of the shows escalated decisively after the Ruby Ridge incident of August 1992. What began as a misguided attempt to dismantle the Aryan Nations turned to needless tragedy, as the man the ATF tried to recruit as an informant, Randy Weaver, refused to play along and slowly grew in agents’ minds into a Rambo-style menace.
Weaver reacted angrily when an undercover ATF agent sold him an illegal weapon and tried to trap him into ratting out his friends in the white supremacist movement. He became angrier still when the government pressed charges, retreating up his mountain and refusing to come down no matter how many times he was summoned to court. Weaver’s wife, Vicki, then raised the stakes by writing a letter to the local U.S. attorney, whom she described as “the servant of the Queen of Babylon,” and declaring that a war was imminent.
Eventually, a small army of federal agents surrounded the Weavers’ cabin to bring matters to a head. Shooting began when the Weavers’ Labrador heard the surveillance team and started barking. Minutes later, the dog, fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver, and a U.S. marshal were all dead. The next day, an FBI sharpshooter, operating under hugely controversial rules of engagement authorizing him to shoot to kill on sight, hit Vicki Weaver in the face while she was cradling her fourteen-month-old baby. She died instantly. Randy Weaver and a family friend were wounded, and it seemed they were all destined to die before the siege was over. The feds, though, revoked the rules of engagement they had imposed, and open hostility gave way to more psychological forms of confrontation.
After nine days of negotiation, the surviving members of the Weaver household gave up peacefully and were later absolved of murder and multiple other charges. The government walked away shamed and humiliated.
The mainstream media hardly covered Ruby Ridge, but its impact on the populist right was profound. On the radical fringe, it inspired a widely publicized meeting of the country’s top neo-Nazis and antigovernment agitators, who vowed to resist a federal government “gone mad”—Louis Beam’s words—with bloodlust for its own citizens. “Over the next ten years you will come to hate government more than anything else in your life,” Beam told his fellow Patriots in Estes Park, Colorado. “If you think that this generation of men will maintain its present freedoms without also having to fertilize the tree of liberty with the blood of both patriot and tyrant, then you are mistaken.”
McVeigh was as transformed by the moment as anyone. The “tree of liberty” line would, of course, end up on the T-shirt he wore when he was arrested. He was also deeply influenced by an essay Beam had republished earlier that year, which advocated a revolutionary strategy of “leaderless resistance.” If the soldiers of the radical right worked autonomously or in small cells instead of taking orders from a centralized command, Beam argued, law enforcement agencies and their informants were less likely to find out about their plots in advance and could never catch up with the entire movement. “Let the coming night,” he declared, “be filled with a thousand points of resistance.”
McVeigh was determined to be one of those resistance points and started cutting many old ties. He had already quit the National Guard. In September 1992, he sold a rural plot of land near Buffalo he had bought in his more narrowly survivalist pre-army days and used the $9,000 proceeds to travel more extensively, including his first trip to the Nichols farm in Decker. He also built a file of newspaper and magazine clippings pointing to egregious abuses of government power—a list of grievances that would feed his growing rage for the next two and a half years. Usually the episodes involved federal agents acting on faulty information, who burst into the homes of innocent citizens: a computer executive from San Diego shot three times by customs and DEA, or a Washington housewife slapped in handcuffs while the feds tore the place apart, leaving her twenty-one-month-old daughter alone in a bathtub.
In early February 1993, McVeigh piled some possessions into his trusty 1987 Chevy Geo Spectrum and left New York for good. He later told Michel and Herbeck that the spur for leaving was losing a thousand-dollar bet he made on the Buffalo Bills in that year’s Super Bowl. But McVeigh had quit his security guard job on January 26, five days before the game, and had been selling off anything he could not comfortably fit in his car.
A more likely motivation was an invitation to go into business with a rich gun dealer in his late fifties, whom he had met at a recent show in Fort Lauderdale. The dealer was known to McVeigh as Bob Miller, but his real name was Roger Moore. He would play a pivotal role in the events leading to April 19, 1995.
THE FBI AGENTS QUESTIONING JENNIFER MCVEIGH WERE INTRIGUED by a December 24, 1993, letter from her brother that suggested he was funding his revolutionary enterprise through bank robberies. The letter denounced the banking system as the financial arm of a corrupt and evil government, echoing the “common law” language Ralph Daigle had used with Terry Nichols. And it cast robbers, credit fraudsters, and illegal arms traffickers as romantic heroes fleecing the rich to champion the poor. McVeigh said he and his unnamed friends were justifiably breaking the law to fight against a “higher evil.” He continued: “We are at war with the system, make no mistake about it…. We have to fund our war efforts with, sometimes, ‘covert’ means.”
Jennifer could not, or would not, say what those covert means were. McVeigh referred to a “friend who knocks over banks,” and a credit scam of some sort. “In the past,” McVeigh wrote, “you would see the news and see a bank robber, and judge him a ‘criminal.’ But, without getting too lengthy, the Federal Reserve and the banks are the real criminals, ‘cash’ as we know it is counterfeit, and a dollar is just worthless paper, so where is the crime in getting even…? I guess if I reflect, it’s sort of a Robin Hood thing, and our gov’t is the evil king.”
On the third day of Jennifer’s questioning, one of the agents asked the FBI crime lab in Washington to check McVeigh’s and the Nichols brothers’ fingerprints against evidence left behind at a string of unsolved bank heists across the Midwest. This was the beginning of an attempt to tie McVeigh to the Aryan Republican Army. It was never discussed in court, but it would consume untold man-hours over the next several months.
CHRISTOPHER BUDKE, AN FBI AGENT FROM KANSAS CITY, WAS IN line at the Fort Riley Burger King when a man in uniform approached and asked: “How long are you all going to be here?”
Budke was startled and initially brushed him off. But the man approached again and introduced himself as Sergeant Rick Wahl. He explained how he had gone fishing at Geary Lake with his son the day before the bombing and had seen a Ryder truck with a second vehicle. Wahl knew right after the disaster that his information could be important, and he put in a call to the FBI’s tip line. A dispatcher said someone would get back to him, but nobody had in days.
Budke scrawled a few notes in pencil and promised to follow up. Wahl would soon prove invaluable, telling the FBI where and when the bomb was built and leading them to the exact site. A more alert FBI could have started working on all that on April 19 or 20. As it was, only a chance encounter almost a week later prevented them from missing it altogether.
TIM MCVEIGH WAS WEARING HIS FULL GULF WAR BATTLE DRESS and carefully polished black boots when he encountered Roger Moore for the first time. Moore had never seen combat duty, but he was fascinated by anyone who had. So he and McVeigh started talking about McVeigh’s service in Desert Storm and his political ideas. They became fast friends.
Ostensibly, Moore should have been enjoying his retirement but he was also driven by an abiding anger against the government, if not the world. He had made a fortune in the boat-building business in the 1970s, and now divided his time between Arkansas and southern Florida. He had a wife, who generally stayed in Florida, and a girlfriend he kept openly in Arkansas. He ran an ammunition supply business with his girlfriend, because it gave him an excuse to travel to gun shows and meet fellow right-wing radicals. Officially, the company was called the American Assault Company, but more commonly it went by the nickname, The Candy Store.
After the bombing, Floyd Hays, an FBI agent in Arkansas, spent many hours with Moore and described him as “infatuated” with McVeigh. That Desert Storm uniform clearly spoke volumes, because everything else about McVeigh was down-at-the-heels that January weekend at the National Guard Armory in Fort Lauderdale. He barely had money for gas, slept in his car, and was never sure where to find his next meal. Moore’s wife, Carol, took pity on him and fetched some sandwiches. Later, Moore invited him to split the costs of a table at an upcoming gun show in Miami’s Coconut Grove. McVeigh was thrilled. A few weeks later, Moore called McVeigh at his sister’s house near Miami to confirm the invitation. They worked the show together, then planned to meet again for another show in April.
At the end of February, McVeigh’s antigovernment fire was further fueled by the botched ATF raid on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco. The ATF believed the community had built an armory of automatic weapons, grenades, assault weapons, and 50-caliber Barrett rifles and launched a full-scale assault on the property. The Davidians, though, were forewarned, and soon four ATF agents and six Davidians lay dead, with two dozen others injured. The FBI moved in, for what would turn into a fifty-one-day siege. Unlike Ruby Ridge, this grim spectacle was prime-time news on every station, confirming to citizen militias and the Patriot Movement every suspicion they had harbored about the government’s propensity for waging war against its own citizens. The FBI borrowed hardware from the military, including a line of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which were particularly shocking to McVeigh, because he knew firsthand how much damage they could do.
McVeigh drove to Waco in the middle of March. He could not get within three miles of the compound, because of police barricades and checkpoints, so he parked his car in a field alongside dozens of others and laid out a bunch of bumper stickers. FEAR THE GOVERNMENT THAT FEARS YOUR GUN, one read. WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, I WILL BECOME AN OUTLAW, read another.
Although McVeigh never said so, one person he probably met in Waco was Louis Beam. Beam arrived as a credentialed journalist for the far-right magazine Jubilee and drew immediate attention when he likened the ATF to the Nazis and the KGB at a press briefing on March 14 and asked if a police state was on the way. Beam was swarmed by police and security guards, who checked him for outstanding warrants before letting him go. Three days later, when he tried to return for another briefing, he was slapped in handcuffs and arrested for trespassing. Beam relished the attention, telling every television reporter he was being punished for asking “the forbidden question.”
McVeigh almost certainly heard about Beam’s misadventures, and would have had plenty to talk about if he sought him out. Was this where the godfather of “leaderless resistance” passed on some lessons to his most ruthless disciple? FBI and ATF agents worried about the radical far-right at the time were in no doubt about Beam’s potential for fomenting violence on an alarming scale. Jim Cavanaugh of the ATF described him as “the most dangerous man in America.” Beam and his blisteringly charismatic speaking style were to the Patriot Movement, Cavanaugh said, what Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s pitiless protégé, had been to the planning of the Holocaust at Wannsee.
THE FBI KNEW MICHAEL FORTIER WAS TROUBLE WHEN HIS FRIEND and neighbor, Jim Rosencrans, came at them screaming and waving an SKS assault rifle. That was on April 21. They couldn’t help noticing, too, the coiled-snake flag in the front yard of Fortier’s trailer home bearing the Revolutionary War slogan DON’T TREAD ON ME. This guy did not love the federal government.
The agents grilled Fortier for four days while he continued to say he knew nothing and that McVeigh was not capable of slaughtering so many innocent people. The FBI became ever more suspicious that he had foreknowledge of the bombing or that he had played a direct role. The more they delved, the more obvious it became that Fortier was lying. He said, for example, that McVeigh had not visited Kingman before February 1995, but the FBI knew McVeigh had been using a Kingman address for his correspondence for close to two years.
The FBI asked Fortier to take a polygraph test. He agreed to be asked about his whereabouts leading up to the bombing, but not about his knowledge of the plot itself. Having first pleaded ignorance, he now pleaded fear. “If I tell you what you want to know,” he said on the fourth day, “I’m a dead man.” The agents were unimpressed. Kenneth Williams (who would later become known as the author of the “Phoenix Memo,” one of the disregarded pre-9/11 warnings about Middle Easterners enrolling in flight schools) called Fortier a “baby killer” and tried to scare him straight. It didn’t work.
When Fortier and his wife, Lori, were home alone after their interrogations, they tried to rid their house of incriminating items. Even before the FBI first came, Lori realized her typewriter ribbon still bore the imprint of the name Robert D. Kling, which McVeigh had typed onto his fake driver’s license. As soon as she heard the news that Kling had rented the Ryder truck, she ripped out the ribbon and burned it. Michael had taken a 50-caliber rifle and some explosive components and hidden them inside a kit car at his brother’s house on the other side of town. He still had to worry about a half-empty bag of ammonium nitrate, which Fortier and McVeigh had used to make test explosives; some galvanized steel tubing typically used to make pipe bombs; and a .22 Hornet rifle and scope left over from the stash of weapons he had obtained from McVeigh the previous December.
Fortier did not dare carry any of the items off his property himself, so he passed them over the fence to his meth-head buddy Rosencrans, who agreed to dispose of them. Rosencrans buried the ammonium nitrate in the desert, where it was recovered three months later, and he pawned off the rifle for cash and another weapon. Fortier also handed Rosencrans a paper grocery bag with a miscellany of smaller items from McVeigh, including books, two videotapes on Waco, an army supply catalogue, and a copy of the radical right-wing Patriot Report. Rosencrans took these to the safest place he knew, a house shared by his mother and his half-brother Chuck, who—improbably—was also his stepfather.
The only drug-related object the feds found at the Fortiers’ house was an old tinfoil pipe containing marijuana residue, raising the question of whether they had ditched drugs, too. Michael Fortier denied any attempt at concealment when he took the stand in McVeigh’s trial; he wanted the jury to believe his house had been empty of any illegal narcotics since the eve of the bombing, when he spent all night tweaking on crystal meth with Jim Rosencrans. Had they really smoked their way through everything? The feds did not pursue this. The FBI was itching for a member of McVeigh’s inner circle to come forward about the bomb plot, and Fortier seemed the most likely candidate. So Weldon Kennedy sent Danny Coulson, one of the bureau’s most experienced agents, to turn one or both Fortiers around. Coulson first applied for a warrant to search the Fortiers’ home, and then he drew up a proffer letter, a take-it-or-leave-it deal under which Fortier was invited to talk without risk of self-incrimination as a prelude to a plea bargain. The one condition was that he could not lie.
With the warrant in hand, Coulson invited Fortier to meet him and his colleague Bob Walsh at a sheriff’s substation near his house. They promised the search would be as noninvasive as possible. Fortier was welcome to stick around and watch. Coulson, who was intimately familiar with the mentality of right-wing radicals, also did his best to disarm any notion that the search constituted an assault on Fortier’s fundamental rights. “This is not a war,” he told him. “You and your friends may be at war with your government. Your government is not at war with you.”
Coulson wasn’t just making a fine speech; he was also playing for time, because he knew that agents were already swarming over the Fortier property. The media was right outside, tipped off by the local police scanner. So, too, was Jim Rosencrans, who was again brandishing his SKS rifle and doing a little dance up and down McVicar Avenue. He was raving about the “fucking FBI” and telling anyone willing to listen that the sheriff’s department was stockpiling ammunition under the Kingman hospital for the United Nations and its New World Order shock troops. When he strapped on a gas mask and announced he was going coyote-hunting, sheriff’s deputies and the FBI chased him into a field and disarmed him. The FBI search team, meanwhile, took advantage of Fortier’s temporary absence to bug the phone and place listening devices around the house. Coulson’s kid glove concealed a sharp fist.
MCVEIGH’S FIRST TRIP TO KINGMAN IN THE SPRING OF 1993 WAS A quick one. He dropped in on Michael Fortier and scouted for gun-show material. He also set up a mailbox, signaling his intention to return. But soon he was off again to a big gun show in Tulsa a thousand miles to the east. He was supposed to meet Roger Moore there, but ended up introducing himself instead to Moore’s girlfriend, Karen Anderson, who was working their table alone. The next day, McVeigh brought his things and asked if he could share the space. Clearly, they got along, because by the end of the weekend, Anderson and Moore invited McVeigh to follow them back to the ranch for several days.
First, McVeigh made another significant acquaintance. Andreas Strassmeir, fresh in from Elohim City, wandered by the table and ended up buying McVeigh’s Desert Storm battle uniform for $2—a terrific bargain, he later told Justice Department lawyers—as well as a pair of gloves. Even better, he sold McVeigh a knife he’d been trying to offload all day. The two men talked and found they had similar views on Waco.
McVeigh joked around with Strassmeir, who wore a black leather jacket and camouflage pants. “I was a little worried, because you looked like a Nazi,” he said. “I’m glad you’re not a Nazi.” Strassmeir said he was relieved that McVeigh was not a “right-winger,” apparently meaning he was not an overt racist. “He definitely was not a right-wing guy, I would not say that. And he liked the fact that I was not one,” Strassmeir insisted. “Tim was not antigovernment. He was against certain agencies making war against their own citizens.”
There is an irresistible streak of comedy in two adherents of radical right-wing ideology insisting that neither was right-wing at all. Clearly, though, they found each other memorable, far more so than Strassmeir was willing to admit after the bombing. According to McVeigh, Strassmeir called over the two friends he was with—most likely Pete and Tony Ward, or Dennis Mahon—and told them: “This guy feels the way we do.” The feeling was mutual: McVeigh thought he and Strassmeir were “brothers in arms.”
When reporters and investigators asked Strassmeir about the encounter two years later, he told them he could barely remember it and had not recalled McVeigh’s name until it was plastered all over the news. But his pinpoint recollection of their Nazi banter and the exact terms of the purchases they made from each other suggests otherwise.
Another indicator that Strassmeir felt a kinship with McVeigh was that he gave McVeigh a business card with the Elohim City address and phone number, and an invitation to drop by any time. Grandpa Millar had given Strassmeir some cards mostly to ensure he would not forget the Elohim City phone number; he certainly did not want him passing them out indiscriminately. “I was very careful handing out the Elohim City business card,” Strassmeir later acknowledged.
SOMETIME IN LATE APRIL, STEVE CHANCELLOR, THE ARMY CID man in Oklahoma City, noted the FBI’s interest in Elohim City and in Strassmeir. Chancellor had just come home from an undercover narcotics case in Hamburg, which was the last place Strassmeir had been stationed before coming to the United States. Chancellor told his colleagues: “I have a fantastic German informant from Hamburg. I’m telling you, he could talk the underwear off Mother Teresa. He’s that good. If you want, I’d be glad to introduce you guys.”
At this stage, the FBI had Carol Howe’s reports about Strassmeir’s threats to blow up buildings and wage war against the federal government. And the Daryl Bridges phone records indicated that one of the card users had made a two-minute call to Elohim City on April 5, two weeks before the bombing. At least some government agencies—the State Department, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and ATF—also knew that Strassmeir had overstayed his visa.
Chancellor persuaded his army superiors to fly his informant in from Germany. “I had him meet with the FBI and ATF, and I made arrangements for him to work up a cover story [to go into Elohim City]. I think he would have been very successful,” Chancellor said. But the task force turned down his offer. Perhaps the investigation leadership was counting on Carol Howe to come back from Elohim City with some actionable intelligence. The State Department’s diplomatic security section had asked after Strassmeir’s criminal record, and reported back to the task force that he was clean.
Chancellor was surprised. “My feeling was, they didn’t believe this guy, which was too bad,” he said. “I offered it to the FBI. They chose to go a different way, or maybe they thought it wasn’t important. I just moved on.”
ON APRIL 19, 1993, MCVEIGH WAS AT THE NICHOLS FARM IN DECKER and loading up his Road Warrior to take both brothers down to Waco, when Terry yelled at him to come inside. The television news was showing flames licking up around the Branch Davidian compound.
It was the fifty-first day of the siege, and the FBI had decided to choke the Branch Davidians out with CS gas. When that did not work, they punctured big holes in the property with M728 combat engineer vehicles on loan from the army. Soon, three separate fires fueled by sixty-mile-per-hour winds were raging in the main building, consuming everything.
Seventy-five people died, including twenty-five children. Some were burned to death, while others, including David Koresh, were found with gunshot wounds. In his own account, McVeigh was speechless and felt tears running down his cheeks. He and the Nichols brothers convinced themselves that the FBI had set the fires—not the Davidians, as the government and a number of subsequent official inquiries would conclude.
WHEN THE FBI SEARCHED MCVEIGH’S MAILBOX IN KINGMAN, THEY found an extraordinary unopened letter sent from Little Rock, Arkansas, nine days before the bombing. Written in a near-illegible scrawl, it was signed by “Bob” and written to Tim Tuttle. There was no return address. Next to Bob’s signature, in block capitals, was the word BURN. The letter appeared to be answering a previous letter from McVeigh, and that made it even more difficult to decipher. One particularly alarming line read: “Plan is to bring the country down, and have a few more things happen, then offer the 90 percent a solution. (Better Red than Dead).” The letter referred to a robbery, to worries about security being compromised, and to a plan for May that Bob said should now be dropped. It also mentioned someone named Karen, who was “not interested in risks” and “not interested in the slightest at this point.”
The FBI’s linking of this letter to Roger Moore was one of its more inspired pieces of detective work. Agents had been working for days to figure out the significance of two safety-deposit keys found in Terry Nichols’s garage. One was traced to a Union Bank of North Carolina branch in Florida and the other to the Arkansas Bank & Trust in Hot Springs. The banks said the keys belonged to Moore and reported that a few months earlier he had changed safety-deposit boxes because of a security problem connected to the loss of the keys.
A check on Moore revealed he had a live-in girlfriend named Karen Anderson, who was a plausible fit for the Karen in the letter. They also learned that the previous November Moore had reported a robbery at the ranch, in which he said he lost $60,000 in guns, precious stones, gold and silver bars, photographic equipment, and rare artifacts, as well as almost $9,000 in cash. Among the missing items were the two keys. Moore had volunteered the three names he thought most likely to have pulled off the robbery, and one was Tim McVeigh.
The FBI was perplexed. It had strong grounds to suspect McVeigh and Nichols of carrying out the robbery. But Roger Moore was also exchanging cryptic messages with McVeigh months later, suggesting that the two men still trusted and confided in each other. Was the Moore robbery intended as a fund-raiser for the bombing? Or was the robbery a scam orchestrated by Moore as well as McVeigh, either to defraud the insurance company or to create some plausible distance between them as they plotted an antigovernment revolution? Investigators initially worked on both scenarios.
Moore was extremely indignant when he was brought in to meet with the FBI at the Garland County Sheriff’s Office in Hot Springs. “I obviously was lied to and fooled,” he said about the bombing. “I almost shit when I saw it on TV.” He gave the first of many accounts of the robbery, describing how a masked man with bad body odor, full camouflage dress, and Israeli combat boots confronted him with a shotgun fitted with a garrote. The intruder trussed him up like a turkey and spent ninety minutes ripping through the house in search of valuables before taking off in one of Moore’s own vans. In this iteration—the details would change over the next two and a half years—the man had a dark complexion and a beard visible beneath his ski mask. His accomplice stood ready to pounce at the slightest sign of struggle, and later helped load the wares. Moore said neither man was McVeigh—the intruder was shorter and thicker-set—but he suspected that whoever robbed him had done so at McVeigh’s behest. When the FBI showed Moore the safety-deposit key from the Arkansas Bank & Trust, he exclaimed: “He robbed me!” Moore assumed the FBI had recovered the key from McVeigh; he didn’t know about the Terry Nichols connection.
Moore became discombobulated when he was shown the letter he had sent to McVeigh shortly before the bombing. He acknowledged he had written it and said “Bob” was a shortened version of his alias Bob Miller. But he insisted that most of the letter was about the gun-show business and the robbery. His aim was to lure McVeigh back to the ranch and figure out if he had been responsible. He said the line about security being compromised was a reference to the robbery and the fact that someone clearly knew he had a large number of valuables in the house. When he wrote that Karen was not interested in risks, he was referring to their efforts—which Karen no longer wished to make—to track down their stolen weapons in the militia movement.
Moore was winging it. When asked about the lines “the important thing is to be as effective as possible” and “let’s let May go,” he said he couldn’t remember what they meant. But the FBI was more inclined to believe him than not. In the official write-up of that first interview, the agents did not mention the most startling line in the letter, the one about the “plan to bring the country down.” They also appear to have forgotten to ask why he wrote BURN in upper case next to his signature.
Moore insisted he had nothing to do with the bombing and was never told anything about it. McVeigh was smart, he said, but probably it was the other guy—John Doe Two—who was the brains of the operation.
ONE MONTH AFTER WACO, MCVEIGH ORDERED A BOOK CALLED Homemade C-4, published by Paladin Press in Boulder, Colorado, a fertile source of how-to books on guns, ammo, and explosives. It was sent to his mailbox in Michigan at a time when he was traveling extensively, so it probably sat around for several months before he read it. Over time, though, it would prove almost uncannily influential on the Oklahoma City bomb plot.
The term “homemade C-4” has nothing to do with plastic explosive; it is paramilitary slang for ammonium nitrate bombs, so called because they pack a big wallop and because their ingredients are readily available to ordinary citizens. Ragnar Benson, the book’s pseudonymous author, suggested purchasing the AN at farm-supply stores, which is exactly what McVeigh and Nichols ended up doing. He talked about the standard blend of AN and fuel oil commonly used by miners and farmers, but he also suggested using nitromethane. “The stuff is a real pisser,” he wrote, “as fast as TNT, with just as high a brisance. It is useful for cutting steel and other paramilitary survival applications.” The best way to find nitromethane, Benson went on, was at drag strips and stock-car races. Sometimes, it could be found in hobby shops. McVeigh and Nichols would explore all of those options to obtain their own nitromethane.
All of that still lay some way off, however. McVeigh settled in Kingman for a while, finding a place of his own and a new job as a security guard. He was still doing gun shows, and sometime in June or July, he came across a videotape titled Waco: The Big Lie, which restoked the radical fire within him because it purported to show that the government had used tank-mounted flamethrowers to start the blaze that consumed the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel.
The video gave McVeigh grounds to believe the incident was a premeditated crime. “No convincing will come close if you don’t actually see it for yourself,” the film’s promotional teaser said. “But be warned, you may not be able to sleep again.” McVeigh brought a copy to Kingman to show Mike Fortier. It was his new Turner Diaries, the call-to-arms he felt compelled to share with everybody.
JENNIFER MCVEIGH WANTED TO LOOK OUT FOR HER BROTHER’S INTERESTS, but her resolve was no match for the FBI’s pummeling. On the eighth day of questioning, after her mother was flown in from Florida to plead with her, she finally spilled her guts. “Tim is fried anyways, so I might as well tell you,” she said. She was scared and exhausted and looking for a way out.
Her most startling stories concerned a visit McVeigh made to Pendleton in November 1994 to help settle the affairs of their grandfather, who had died a few weeks earlier. Jennifer said he had a wad of $100 bills, three of which he asked her to exchange for other banknotes. When she asked where the money came from, he said it was his take from a bank robbery. Jennifer’s impression was that the robbery had taken place recently. Her brother told her he had not participated but knew the people who had. Her affidavit refers to “participants,” indicating more than one.
The affidavit also describes a time when Jennifer found her brother in a “fuming” rage. On the spur of the moment, Tim told her to leave him alone, but the next day he said that someone he knew had failed to carry out a murder as planned. “I believe my brother was then trying to decide what to do about the individual who had failed to carry out these orders,” the affidavit said. “I recall that prior to this revelation he had been awaiting a telephone call, and I now believe that this call was directly related to this murder plan.”
The intended murder victim was most likely Roger Moore. Maybe the robber was supposed to carry out the killing, or maybe someone was supposed to come in afterward to kill Moore. Michael Fortier testified at McVeigh’s trial that the motive for the robbery was to find a list of names of people Moore had threatened to turn over to the federal government if he ever got into trouble. That doesn’t sound like a persuasive motive for a robbery—Moore would have been more likely to go to the feds, not less, if he felt under attack—but it could have been a plausible motive for murder.
Jennifer left the FBI office on May 2 determined to find a lawyer and negotiate an immunity deal in exchange for her testimony. The FBI came away with an impression of McVeigh as a multifaceted criminal more akin to a mafia boss than a lone-wolf domestic terrorist.
“I believe that my brother was more involved as a leader in his group rather than as a follower,” Jennifer said in her affidavit. The bank robbery and the attempted murder were, in her eyes, an indication that he had moved past the propaganda stage of his revolution. “My assumption,” she said, “is that my brother was now taking some kind of action in support of his political beliefs.”