Even before Carol Howe learned Andreas Strassmeir’s full name, she had him marked for a dangerous man. They met when she and Dennis Mahon drove up to Elohim City for weekends in the fall of 1994, and she was immediately startled by the vehemence of Strassmeir’s antigovernment rhetoric. “His plans,” she wrote in her notes, which she later passed on to the ATF, “are to forcibly act to destroy the U.S. government with direct actions and operations. Assassinations, bombings, mass shootings etc. He believes we cannot outbreed the enemy so we must use mass genocide against them and of course the biggest enemy—the U.S. government.”
Howe saw Strassmeir and his ragtag security team on their regular patrols around the perimeter of Grandpa Millar’s community, and she heard him talk about converting an SKS rifle to full automatic using a piece from a food can. When he boasted he was stockpiling weapons and might have access to an M60 machine gun—a serious piece of military hardware unavailable on the open market—her handlers’ ears pricked up and they told Howe to find out as much as she could about the strange, belligerent man she knew as Andi the German.
As an attractive blonde in a predominantly male world of gun nuts and would-be revolutionaries, Howe did not have to try hard to coax Strassmeir, or anyone else, to open up. She accompanied him to a nearby swimming hole, giving him a good look at her inky-black swastika tattoo, and flashed her knowledge of military hardware. Howe knew she had Strassmeir’s attention when he shoved his hand down her shirt, although she later wondered if he was feeling for a wire. By Christmas 1994, she had his full name and birth date, enabling the ATF to check his immigration status and establish he was an overstay on his visa.
Howe was equally efficient in collecting evidence against Mahon. She gave him grenade hulls, which she obtained from Angela Finley, her ATF handler, and induced him on at least two occasions to fill them and detonate them in the woods. She recovered shrapnel pieces to pass on to the ATF, and she also reported with glee how he “hauled his fat butt” to safety after he had pulled the grenade pin, then demanded sex, or at least a back rub, as a reward for what he had done. “You realize we just committed a major felony here,” she reported him saying with obvious elation. Howe rejected his advances and said that if he found her cold, it was because good terrorists needed ice in their veins; he had told her so himself.
Nothing in Howe’s file suggests she came across Tim McVeigh or Terry Nichols at Elohim City, but she provided plentiful information pointing to threats of violence from within the community. As 1995 dawned, she told her handlers about a sermon in which Millar gave his blessing to a war against the ATF and the rest of the government. Patriots from Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma would join forces for the coming fight, Millar predicted, and carve out a swath of independent territory. She also reported Mahon boasting about a five-hundred-pound ammonium nitrate bomb he set off in Michigan.
Several people in and out of government have attempted to discredit Howe as a fantasist and a liar. Strassmeir dismissed her, with the benefit of hindsight, as a “dress Nazi”; Kirk Lyons, apparently taking umbrage at the way she flirted with Strassmeir to win his confidence, called her “a very screwed up little vamp.” But her work proved to be right much more than it was wrong. Bob Sanders, a former deputy director of the ATF, was impressed when he reviewed her file in 1997, and saw no reason to think she attempted to fabricate information, deceive anyone, or exaggerate. Dave Roberts, Angela Finley’s boss at the ATF’s Tulsa office, told a grand jury hearing in 1998: “I felt that Carol Howe was being effective as an informant, and I felt that she was sincere in her efforts.”
And yet her information did not lead to a broader investigation, or even to explosives and weapons charges against Strassmeir and Mahon, as Howe and her handlers expected. Bob Sanders thought this was an outrage. “The entire manpower devoted to this investigation seems to have been nothing but one trainee agent [Finley],” he wrote incredulously in a report for Howe’s legal representatives. “If the information provided by [Howe] is to be believed, as it clearly was, then the lack of investigation by BATF amounts to gross nonfeasance per se…. This was amateur hour in Oklahoma.”
It was not the first time the federal government had tiptoed around Elohim City, only to lose its nerve and shy away. Nor would it be the last. After the Oklahoma City bombing, many people in law enforcement wanted to know what had gone on there, and felt there was a strong chance it had some connection to McVeigh. But they were either reluctant to investigate, or ordered not to.
JACK KNOX KNEW ELOHIM CITY WOULD BE A PROBLEM AFTER THE bombing, because he had come unstuck in his own efforts to investigate the place eight years earlier.
At that time, he was still an FBI agent, based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and he had a very personal reason to be suspicious of Grandpa Millar, because he had been targeted for assassination by Millar’s friends Jim Ellison and Wayne Snell. Both of those men were now serving hard time, but Knox and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Fort Smith had ambitious plans to retry them, along with their most prominent brothers in arms, for the rarely prosecuted crime of sedition. It was only the third time in the country’s history that such a charge had been brought, but the government was determined to eradicate the threat from the radical far right once and for all. Many of the defendants in the case were in prison already but some, including Louis Beam, now started appearing on FBI Wanted posters.
One fugitive of particular interest to Knox was James Wallington, who had been a peripheral figure in The Order, the most dangerous of the 1980s white supremacist gangs. Wallington was suspected of having transported and hidden millions of dollars from a spectacular armored-truck robbery in northern California in 1984. And now the word was that he was hiding out at Elohim City.
Knox had Millar’s blessing to visit the community, but when he arrived with a full FBI search party, he was greeted by a posse of teenagers with semiautomatic and fully automatic weapons. “We radioed down for Millar and an assistant of his to come before there was an incident,” he recalled. The teenagers backed off.
Knox was disinclined to ruffle community feathers by sending armed agents into the Elohim City church, so he told Millar they would stay away as long as he had his word that Wallington was not inside. Millar assured him he was not. “I didn’t think they would disrespect God so much that they would hide a fugitive in there,” Knox said.
But Knox heard a few days later that Wallington was in the church after all. He had been living in a disused bus under the alias Charlie Green and raising a daughter, Sarah, who later married Dave Hollaway of the CAUSE Foundation. Sarah had vivid memories of spending part of her itinerant childhood sleeping on a sack full of banknotes from the California robbery in the back of a truck. The money was never recovered.
The sedition trial did not go well, either. Jim Ellison was the star prosecution witness, but he had no credibility, because he was so manifestly in it to reduce his prison sentence at everyone else’s expense. The defendants hated him for ratting them out, and the jurors were little better disposed. In the words of one observer, he came across as a “lying, deceiving sociopath.”
The dock included former members of The Order and Ellison’s Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, plus the radical right’s three most recognizable national leaders: Richard Butler of Aryan Nations; Robert Miles, an incendiary Ku Klux Klan leader from Michigan accused of plotting to put cyanide in the nation’s water supply; and Beam, who was arrested at a lakeside hideout in northern Mexico after a dramatic shootout with the federal police.
To the government’s dismay, Judge Morris “Buzz” Arnold dispensed with the usual jury selection procedure and handpicked an all-white jury who knew nothing about the defendants’ crime sprees and previous trials. One juror flirted openly with David Lane, who was involved in the murder of the Denver radio host Alan Berg, and another ended up marrying David McGuire, one of Jack Knox’s suspected would-be assassins. “The judge,” Knox complained, “was dredging right at the bottom of the barrel.”
After seven weeks of testimony, the jury acquitted everybody—a humiliation for the government and an unalloyed triumph for the radical right. The defendants marched from the courthouse to a nearby Civil War memorial and raised a Confederate flag. “The message was the same one God told Pharaoh,” the Arkansas Klan leader Thom Robb crowed. “‘Let my people go.’”
The FBI conducted an agonizing postmortem. “The bottom line was, the jury couldn’t understand how a dozen people could get together and overthrow the country,” Horace Mewborn of the bureau’s domestic terrorism unit said. The FBI decided that if it ever tried another case against white supremacists, it would keep the evidence as simple as possible: no subplots, no overreaching, and no attempts to tie individual crimes to a broader movement.
“We learned that the hard way with Fort Smith,” Mewborn said. Inevitably, this influenced FBI thinking after the Oklahoma City bombing and accounted for some of the reluctance to take the case beyond McVeigh and Nichols.
Soon, the FBI was further hamstrung by a scandal over its monitoring of CISPES, a left-wing group opposed to the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America. Since Watergate, the Justice Department had insisted that the bureau focus only on bona fide crime investigations, to the exclusion of more speculative intelligence-gathering. But when the FBI director was forced to admit to Congress that the bureau’s lengthy investigation into CISPES was groundless, the rules were tightened, and any subject that risked blurring the line between violence and legitimate political speech was suddenly deemed radioactive. That included investigations into the far right. “Everybody just walked in fear of domestic terrorism cases,” Mewborn said. “They were positive they were going to blow up in their face.”
The FBI never went back into Elohim City. Mewborn lobbied for a new warrant on Wallington and won the backing of the FBI’s Little Rock division. But Bob Ricks, then a deputy assistant director, killed it in Washington. “I don’t even remember if he gave me a reason,” Mewborn said.
The decision was almost certainly not Ricks’s alone, nor was it necessarily the wrong one at the time. “I was told that everybody was armed in there,” Ricks said in a 2010 interview. “The element of danger was extremely high…. A lot of people would have gotten killed, more than likely, all for a potential witness. It seemed to me that other means needed to be deployed.”
Sooner or later, though, the notion that the FBI would do nothing about Elohim City because it was dangerous risked looking like a dereliction of its fundamental responsibilities.
BY THE TIME ANDREAS STRASSMEIR CROSSED PATHS WITH CAROL HOWE, he assumed he was going to die in a firefight with the FBI or ATF. Years later, he made the extraordinary admission that he was more afraid of being sent back to Germany than of getting shot to pieces by the feds. “I wished they had come,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Why didn’t they?”
Since the Waco siege, the Elohim City elders had been jumpy about being next on the government’s hit list, and Strassmeir made it his business to ensure the community would not go down without a fight. He attended gun shows—where he befriended McVeigh—and arranged purchases of weaponry and ammunition. He organized platoons of young men, set up a shooting range, and showed them how to handle grenades and Claymore mines. With his military-trained eye, he surveyed the hilly terrain and saw in it “a mix of the Afghani mountains and the Vietnam jungle.”
“Helicopters are useless, tanks are useless,” he said. “It’s all about infantry.”
At different times, his crew included Pete Ward, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Brescia, with whom he shared a house. He taught Cheyne Kehoe to shoot and remembered him as a “rebellious spirit” and a “cool guy.” Once, a sheriff’s department narcotics officer dropped in unannounced and walked straight into an armed exercise. “He was impressed,” Strassmeir recalled. “The message was: We’re not some Jesus freaks on the mountain. It won’t be a cakewalk.”
Grandpa Millar placed greater confidence in Strassmeir and his military experience than in Zera Patterson, his nominal security chief, who had been Strassmeir’s host when he first arrived. Strassmeir’s ambition was to equip every adult with at least two firearms, and Millar gave his blessing to acquire SKS assault rifles, AR15s, and Ruger mini-14s.
Since nobody at Elohim City had any money, the budget did not permit a lot of frills. Strassmeir purchased Chinese SKS knockoffs by the crateload, and ammunition to go with them. “You get the rifle, bandolier, stripper clips, and folding bayonet for fifty dollars,” he said. A crate of 7.62 × 39–mm ammo, containing more than a thousand rounds, ran to just $90.
The ATF eventually caught up to his cut-price suppliers, warning thirty-five leading importers and all federal firearms license-owners in early 1994 that the government now regarded the ammunition as armor-piercing and therefore illegal. Strassmeir and his friends raced around every tackle shop they could find to snap up the dwindling supplies of “Chink” ammo.
Strassmeir was walking a dangerous line between defensive maneuvers and outright provocation. He knew he could not provide real protection from a full-on federal raid, but that did not deter him. “The funny thing,” said Dave Hollaway, who was furious when he found out about his friend’s activities, “is that Andi can’t shoot himself. He’s prehistoric, man, prehistoric!…You can only keep people out of trouble if you can command respect yourself. Andi was a quarter-eyed guy.”
It didn’t help that, as a foreign national, Strassmeir was not legally permitted to purchase firearms, or that he had ignored the stamp in his passport limiting his last entry into the United States to three months. Before he went to live in Elohim City, in 1991, he had kept his immigration status in order, either by flying back to Germany or hopping over the Mexican border. Now, though, he was an overstay, at risk of deportation at any time.
He was appropriately cautious about one thing, and that was the risk of informants. “Betraying the right wing in America,” he said, “is a career, not a death sentence.” He was forever telling Grandpa Millar not to trust outsiders, but Millar, to his endless frustration, paid no attention, repeating only that everyone came to him from Jesus.
This Strassmeir, the paramilitary radical, was very different from the young man who impressed the Israeli army and talked a seasoned CIA operative into considering him for a high-risk job on the Mexican border. He had been sucked into the far right during his time with Lyons and Hollaway in Texas and immediately felt comfortable mixing with weekend-warrior types. One place he visited was a gunnery range that Louis Beam co-owned in the mosquito-ridden rice fields east of Houston. Hollaway was married at the time to the daughter of Beam’s business partner, a Korean War veteran named Bob Sisente, whom Hollaway himself described as a “freakin’ gangster” with a “concrete head, neck, and shoulders, and a body of metal.” Lyons fell in love with the sister of David Tate, a member of The Order serving a life sentence for murdering a Missouri state trooper, and married her in a double ceremony with his best friend Neill Payne, who paired up with another Tate sister. The ceremony was at Aryan Nations headquarters in Idaho, with Richard Butler officiating and Louis Beam as best man.
Strassmeir was so enamored of this world that it did not occur to him that Lyons and Hollaway sent him to Elohim City to get rid of him. He said he loved the frontier spirit of rural Oklahoma, and loved being able to get by on just a few days’ construction or wood-chopping work each month. He lived for long stretches off homemade bread, garden cucumbers, poached deer jokingly known as “wild goat,” and expired almond butter supplied in industrial quantities by Tony Alamo, an eccentric preacher later convicted of child abuse and pornography crimes in Arkansas.
Strassmeir needed no money for everyday transactions, because Elohim City operated on a barter currency based on glass beads known as “glows.” Until the advent of a phone line, which the Elohimites rigged up by digging a trench and extending the public line, the only way to communicate with the outside world was to walk a mile and a half to a phone in a padlocked shed, nicknamed “EC phone home.” Strassmeir marveled: “We were like the first settlers on the continent, with a gun rack in the church…. It was like going back three hundred years.”
Strassmeir’s rural idyll was not without its deeper oddities. In February 1992, Pete Ward borrowed his car to buy some chewing tobacco, only to be pulled over by a state Highway Patrol trooper who had been on the lookout for Strassmeir for some time. Trooper Vernon Phillips issued Ward with two tickets—for driving without Oklahoma plates and failing to produce a license—and had the car impounded and searched. When Strassmeir found out, he had “an absolute fit,” according to the tow truck driver, Kenny Pence, and demanded his car back, claiming diplomatic immunity.
A flurry of phone calls followed—from Kirk Lyons, and from people saying they were officials from the state police, the military in North Carolina, and the State Department in Washington. Pence found the whole thing a “really strange deal.” One caller told him the governor was involved and urged him to release the vehicle without delay. Pence, assuming these people were who they said they were, complied.
Strassmeir gave the impression, once again, of having friends in very high places.
THE FBI TALKED TO ROBERT MILLAR ON A REGULAR BASIS BEFORE the Oklahoma City bombing, but could never tell if he was a stand-up guy or just stringing them along. Horace Mewborn said his domestic terrorism unit in Washington would funnel questions through the Muskogee resident agent, but would never receive helpful answers. “I don’t know who was playing whom,” he said. “Sometimes I got the feeling Millar was playing the resident agent, and feeding us a bunch of poop. It was all general information, of no help to us.”
The ATF also kept an eye out, liaising with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to watch the roads so they could track who was coming and going. Periodically, the ATF and FBI would get together for informal meetings to pool their knowledge on Elohim City. But Bill Buford, who was the ATF’s top agent in Arkansas at the time, said these were a joke, because nobody knew much, and nobody was willing to give away what little they had. “If the FBI had information,” he said, “they wouldn’t share it with us. And when we got information, we wouldn’t share it with them.”
This was a crucial period in the development of Louis Beam’s “leaderless resistance” movement, and Elohim City was as regular a meeting point for revolutionary fighters as anywhere in the country. Among those known to have sought shelter and support in the community at the time were Willie Ray Lampley, who was plotting bomb attacks on abortion clinics, gay bars, and antiracist groups; Chevie Kehoe, who murdered a gun dealer and his family in Arkansas in early 1996; and, of course, Mahon and most of the Aryan Republican Army.
Yet the feds were only dimly aware of the danger these men posed and—with the exception of just a handful of agents—did not think it worth the trouble to find out. Buck Revell, a veteran of the FBI’s top brass, felt the bureau knew “almost nothing” about the radical right, because of its aversion to intelligence-led investigations. Certainly, if McVeigh had visited—one of the persistent unknowns of the Oklahoma City investigation—there was no direct channel of communication to let them know, or to tip them off to what it portended.
Millar was a slick operator, rarely turning down an invitation to talk to law enforcement, or to the media. Each time, he drew on the pacifist rhetoric he had learned from his father, a Canadian Mennonite preacher, to depict Elohim City as a wholly innocent place of close-knit family values, hard work, and self-sufficiency. His credit with the feds went back to 1985, when he helped the FBI negotiate a peaceful end to a siege at Jim Ellison’s compound at Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas. Danny Coulson, the head of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team who oversaw the operation, remembered Millar as a spindly figure who strolled up the road “dressed as if a pretty widow had invited him to an ice cream social,” in a vanilla suit and shiny alligator shoes.
To many in federal law enforcement, Elohim City seemed more pleasantly quirky than dangerous. The Elohimites ran their clocks on sundial time, used the Hebrew calendar, organized daily services at high noon in a church with only circular walls, spoke in tongues, and healed the sick by laying on hands. To earn a living, they had a sawmill and a trucking company, which were run by two of Millar’s sons. On his business card, Millar proclaimed his community “a city of the universe.”
But there was a darker side. Millar was fascinated from an early age by theories of racial separation and the apocalypse. When he first settled in the United States, he established a community school in rural Maryland, whose brochure depicted him with a pencil mustache and arm outstretched in a Nazi salute over the caption: “Heil Hitler.”
He not only befriended Jim Ellison but anointed him “King James of the Ozarks,” the direct heir to King David. Two nasty child-custody disputes from this time, the early 1980s, elicited testimony depicting Elohim City as a cultlike community in which obedience was all, polygamy and incest ran rampant, and the Millar clan routinely took the law into its own hands. When one father showed up with a custody order to demand his daughter, he was beaten back by men with guns. The neighbors testified they were afraid of being “burned out” if they crossed the Millars in any way. A Canadian court, where one of the cases was heard, denounced a “lifestyle that reeks of hypocrisy and self-indulgence.”
Much of this history was overlooked or forgotten by the mid-1990s. Tim Arney, the FBI’s agent in Muskogee, drove to Elohim City several times—part of a nationwide initiative to sound out isolationist communities for signs of trouble after Waco—and never saw anything he found disturbing. “Most of them were pretty sweet people,” he recalled. “They didn’t flash guns, or throw up roadblocks…. Millar certainly attracted a lot of nutcases and right-wingers, but I think he left them disappointed.”
Arney was taking direction from his boss in Oklahoma City, Bob Ricks, who also appeared to view Millar as a reasonable man; he felt Millar would neither encourage violence nor do anything to provoke a government attack. According to Danny Coulson, Ricks and Millar talked once a week.
Was the FBI too indulgent? Arney and Ricks both bridled at the suggestion. “Don’t get me wrong,” Arney protested in a 2010 interview, “I’m not saying Millar is an innocent guy. He always looked unhealthy when I visited.” Ricks said it was an “overstatement” to say, as Coulson had, that he felt Elohim City was under control. But he acknowledged he had been reassured by Millar’s repeated undertakings to cooperate in the event of a crisis. “Anything you want to see,” Ricks remembered him saying, “we’re open.”
Regrettably, the FBI never properly took him up on that offer.
THE ATF HAD TWO REASONS NOT TO GO AFTER DENNIS MAHON after Carol Howe delivered the shrapnel pieces and the descriptions of him making grenades. The better reason was that the agency was investigating Mahon for as many as ten attacks on people and property since the early 1980s, and did not want to stop building its case for the sake of two harmless detonations in the woods. The less good reason was that the ATF did not want to share its information with the FBI.
The ATF needed the FBI’s help to make its case because of the bureau’s broader experience of criminal prosecutions. But it also knew the FBI was unlikely to help, because the bureau had looked at Mahon, too, and concluded he was all talk, a provocateur too unstable to be trusted with a real mission. And so the ATF decided to keep its information to itself.
After the bombing, the FBI was furious not to have been informed when Howe first reported on Mahon and Strassmeir. And Tommy Wittman, the ATF’s assistant special agent in charge in Dallas who kept a supervisory eye on Howe, said the bureau was right to be furious. The layers of bureaucratic infighting, as he described them in a 2010 interview, were almost too dizzying to comprehend.
“The thinking was, we don’t want to talk to Mahon, because, if we did, he’d know we’re super-interested in him and he might change his activities,” Wittman said. “But of course he already knew we were interested. The thinking was also, we don’t know if the FBI or another agency may be looking at him, so we won’t. If we make an inquiry, they’ll want to know what we know, and we don’t want others to know, because they’ll know we are interested and won’t share information with us.”
This was Milo Minderbinder logic straight out of the pages of Catch-22. “In hindsight,” Wittman acknowledged, “a lot of things should have been done very differently. A lot of things that made sense then look very different now, from the outside.”
The government tried to argue after the bombing that Howe’s evidence against Mahon did not amount to much. One federal prosecutor called it “crap.” But it wasn’t seen that way in the ATF. Tristan Moreland, an ATF agent who eventually arrested Mahon on bombing charges in Arizona in 2009, said the decision not to go after him was purely strategic. “If they had prosecuted him then for weapons manufacture and possession,” he said, “I have no doubt Mahon would have gone to prison.”
The awkward truth was that the ATF’s confidence was shot in the wake of its disastrous mishandling of Ruby Ridge and Waco, and senior managers did not want to confront another group of heavily armed survivalists with a grudge against federal agents.
“Elohim City, to me, was a situation [where] we had to be very delicate,” the head of the ATF’s Dallas field division, Lester Martz, later testified. “I specifically told Angie [Finley], Dave Roberts, and ASAC Wittman that I do not want any overt, covert, on-the-property surveillance—nothing done in Elohim City without my prior approval.”
The ATF knew, too, that the last thing the FBI wanted was to bail them out of another botched raid, as it had in Idaho and Texas. As the saying in bureau ranks had it at the time: “We’re not taking a bite out of that shit sandwich.”
In some ways it is remarkable, given the ATF’s pervasive fear of another armed standoff, that the Carol Howe investigation went as far as it did. Dave Roberts kept going mostly because of Howe’s report about the M60 machine gun. Roberts gave preliminary briefings to the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Tulsa and Muskogee, and sought advice on whether Howe’s sexual history—particularly her liaisons with people she was investigating—might affect her credibility in court.
Finley asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service for a formal certificate that Strassmeir was in the country illegally. She also invited the INS to participate in a raid the Tulsa office was planning to arrest Strassmeir—an invitation they took under advisement.
All the while, Howe’s work continued unabated. In January 1995, she accompanied Grandpa Millar and a group of elders on a trip to Oklahoma City, where they met, incongruously, with the pastor of a mixed-race Baptist church. Howe said Millar and the pastor talked about going into the weapons business—another potential violation of numerous gun laws.
The ATF also continued to talk to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. In early February, Wittman and Finley decided they should join an OHP flight to conduct aerial reconnaissance over Elohim City and see the extent of Strassmeir’s preparations for war. Ordinarily, the ATF would use its own planes, but Wittman understood that if he asked Lester Martz for one, he would be turned down. So he, Finley, and an ATF photographer hitched a ride with pilot Ken Stafford on his Highway Patrol plane and scoured the landscape for signs of military defenses, gun positions, trenches, or razor wire. “It doesn’t stick out in my mind that [the flight] was overly productive,” Wittman recalled.
That was the moment the Strassmeir investigation started falling apart. Somehow, the Elohimites heard rumors of an impending raid. Most likely, this was from a trooper safety notice put out by the OHP in mid-February, describing Strassmeir as an illegal alien who carried a .45. Millar was alarmed enough to visit Tim Arney in Muskogee and demand an explanation. Arney didn’t have one. But he did alert Bob Ricks, and Ricks was staggered by what he heard.
“My thought was, Jimminy Christmas, are we going to do that again?” he said. Ricks chewed out the ATF office in Tulsa, demanding to know if they really were contemplating a raid. They said no. Still, he wanted to know what information they had. Did it warrant an FBI investigation?
The ATF told Ricks nothing—about Howe, or Mahon, or Strassmeir. Ricks said he arranged a lunch with Lester Martz, because he had a feeling the ATF was stonewalling. But Martz insisted there was nothing going on. “He passed off what I was hearing as greatly exaggerated,” Ricks said. “It was not a lengthy meeting. I tried to make it unequivocal, that if there was going to be a raid, we wanted to know about it. I didn’t want to be called upon to clean up their mess.”
AS SOON AS TERRY NICHOLS WAS BACK FROM THE PHILIPPINES IN mid-January, McVeigh pressed him to keep helping with the bomb plot. Nichols wanted to say no: Marife was returning to America, he was looking for a house to buy, and he had started attending surplus auctions at Fort Riley to get back in the gun-show business, as a solo operator this time. But something about McVeigh, once again, proved too strong to resist.
McVeigh gave Nichols the impression he had changed his intended date or his intended target, but he offered no specifics. All McVeigh said—following the plot of his second-favorite book, Hunter—was that he was acting at the behest of a high-level government handler who had switched the mission. McVeigh called this handler “Potts,” after the FBI’s acting deputy director, Larry Potts. An overtrusting Nichols believed the handler really was Potts. But the name was most certainly symbolic, an indication that Waco was in the forefront of McVeigh’s mind and he had now chosen April 19, the day David Koresh’s compound went up in flames, as his new day of action.
Meanwhile, McVeigh was out of money. He told Nichols he needed $2,000 to pay for a Ford Ranger truck, which, in reality, he had already purchased. (This was the mystery vehicle for which the FBI subsequently found title documents but no other trace.) Simultaneously, he told Michael Fortier he needed $2,000 to repay Nichols; he didn’t mention that Nichols already had the Roger Moore loot to compensate him for everything he had fronted in September and October.
In short, McVeigh lied to both of them.
Fortier said he was broke, too, so McVeigh asked what he had done with Moore’s guns. When McVeigh learned they had not yet been sold, he drove straight to Kingman and dragged Fortier to gun shows in Reno and St. George so he could start offloading them and generating some cash. Fortier later went to a third show to sell the rest.
McVeigh understood at this point that he probably needed new recruits. Investigators on his defense team found witnesses who said that, around this time, he made repeated contact with Dick Coffman, a leading neo-Nazi in Arizona, and through Coffman introduced himself to a Utah skinhead leader named Johnny Bangerter.
McVeigh also made an offer to Jim Rosencrans. He needed someone, he said, to drive him a long way across the country and drop him off at an airport. If Rosencrans was willing to do this, he could have the car, plus $300 in cash and a rifle. Rosencrans, who was even more broke than McVeigh, discussed the offer with his girlfriend, Patty Edwards, but she was immediately suspicious. Why would McVeigh offer his car so freely? She told Rosencrans if this was something dangerous, he would have to make a choice between the job and her.
He chose her.
IN FEBRUARY 1995, HOWE TOLD HER HANDLERS SHE COULD NOT SUBSTANTIATE the M60 story, knocking the legs out from Dave Roberts’s best justification for pursuing Strassmeir. Then she failed to return to Elohim City as expected and cut back dramatically on her contacts with Finley. Finley stalled as long as she could, telling her bosses Howe “had personal matters to attend.” Howe herself claimed she was infiltrating a skinhead group in Tulsa at Finley’s direction, but the ATF later accused her of associating with the skinheads without authorization. Given how quickly their relationship soured, it is hard to say who was right.
In mid-March, Finley unexpectedly heard from Howe’s landlord, who said he knew about Howe’s informant work—a serious security breach in itself—and also that she had been admitted to a mental institution. Howe had gone to Parkside Mental Health Center with a police escort, on February 8, after officers found her with self-inflicted cuts on her face, neck, arms, and hands. They described her as “out of control.” Howe later confirmed the bulk of this, saying she felt under enormous pressure because of her ATF responsibilities. She spent just four hours at Parkside before transferring to a regular hospital.
On March 19, the Tulsa police told Finley that Howe was back in the hospital, this time because she had been pistol-whipped by an African-American man while out on paramilitary night exercises in the woods. The next day, the ATF severed its relationship with her, saying she was “no longer loyal or competent to operate.”
The ATF later made many excuses for failing to follow up on the leads Howe had established at Elohim City. One was that Howe had been a nightmare from start to finish and her information unusable—an argument undermined by the reliability of much of what she reported back. Another was that they were ordered by Bob Ricks to back off. That, too, appears to be untrue. John Magaw, the ATF director at the time, said the decision to stop almost certainly came from within his agency, before Ricks had a chance to express an opinion.
“I wanted to make sure that before we conducted any more raids of those kinds of places, we were properly retrained, had the right equipment, did really good intelligence, and had done very good practicing and planning,” Magaw explained in a 2010 interview. “We weren’t ready at that time.”
Magaw could not remember exactly how the decision was made, but Lester Martz most likely brought the problem to him, and he and his assistant director for operations supported Martz’s inclination to close Howe down. Remarkably, Magaw also acknowledged that the decision might have cost the federal government an opportunity to prevent the bombing.
When reminded of the human toll at the Murrah Building, Magaw blanched visibly, and did not deny that it might have had something to do with the decisions he made about Elohim City. He said his room for maneuver was constrained by the culture of the time: the aversion to domestic intelligence work (even though the ATF did not operate under the same restraints as the FBI), the frustrating reality that the ATF did not know how to handle volatile standoffs with extremists, and a generalized inability to assess threats from the radical right.
“It was a situation where everyone was hands-off,” he said. “Would Waco happen now? Absolutely not. Would the Oklahoma City bombing have occurred? Probably not. We would have moved in on that group [at Elohim City]. But at the time I wasn’t about to take chances I didn’t need to take.”
A case has been made over the years that Howe gave the government enough material to see the Oklahoma City bombing coming. But that is not corroborated by the available documentary evidence of her informant work. Howe certainly reported on Strassmeir, Mahon, and Millar expressing a desire to set off bombs and attack government buildings, but she offered nothing more specific than that before April 19, 1995. (Afterward was a different story.)
Were there grounds to follow up on these threats anyway? Bob Sanders, the former deputy director of the ATF, certainly thought so, and so did Tristan Moreland, the agent who pursued and ultimately arrested Dennis Mahon. “If they had looked into the files, they would have seen Mahon had a predisposition to blowing up buildings,” Moreland said. If Howe’s information was deemed to be solid and the concern was about her stability, Moreland argued, the logical thing to do would have been to replace her, not shut down the entire operation.
In the heat of the bombing investigation, the government took the line that the threats were not a big deal because such talk was part of the rhetoric of the radical right and did not, on its own, imply anything. That was Finley’s line of defense when she was questioned in court in 1997. She confirmed she had heard threats to blow up government buildings, but only “in general.”
It was also the official position of the Justice Department once news of Howe’s existence became public in early 1997. Don Thrasher, a producer with ABC News who was working on pieces about Howe and Elohim City, remembered being warned by Leesa Brown, the department spokeswoman, about the danger of jumping to conclusions based on threats alone.
“If you go beyond the story of an informant in a white supremacist compound hearing all of these stories,” he quoted Brown saying, “what have you got? This happens all the time.”
“Yeah, but there’s one difference here, Leesa,” Thrasher responded.
“What?”
“The goddamn building blew up, that’s what.”
The government, of course, had every reason to be defensive. The ATF had had a pair of eyes and ears in Elohim City and pulled her out, not because she was failing to pick up indications of serious criminality—she was—but because the agency was too afraid to act on them. It adopted a posture of studied ignorance and hoped for the best.
After the bombing, the ATF wanted desperately to avoid talking about Elohim City. Even after the FBI was given the Carol Howe file, Bob Ricks and Danny Defenbaugh never quite believed they had the full story. “Shame on them,” Defenbaugh said. “In upper case—SHAME ON THEM. Sometimes dealing with other players in this is like pulling teeth from a toothless tiger. Ask them why [they didn’t tell everything they knew]. They didn’t ever give me a good reason.” A contrite Magaw did not say a lot in the ATF’s defense. “He’s right,” he responded when Defenbaugh’s words were read back to him. “If we did know something and didn’t bring it forward, then shame on us.”
The FBI was far from blameless itself, having avoided looking into Elohim City for years. The decision to expend only token energy on the community after the bombing was the bureau’s alone. That mystified some of the FBI’s old pros, none more than Danny Coulson, who had spent his career chasing right-wing radicals and found the idea of shying away from Elohim City offensive and ridiculous.
“You still do your job, I’m sorry,” Coulson said. “You’ve taken an oath. You’re a professional, you figure out a way to do it. They’re afraid of another Waco…. If that’s your attitude, get out of the business. Go into the shoe business. Be a chef. By its nature it’s risky. You’ve got to be smarter than that.”
LATE ONE NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1995, TIM MCVEIGH WAS WALKING across the Colorado River bridge from Nevada to Bullhead City, Arizona, when a man in a Ford Mustang slowed down and asked if he wanted a ride. McVeigh had no better idea how to get back to Kingman, which was thirty miles away, and offered him $5. The man, whose name was Richard Rogers, laughed off the offer; he was looking not for payment but for casual sex. He had spent the evening at a casino in Laughlin and, as he later told the FBI, was feeling “a little horny.”
McVeigh’s camouflage fatigues and combat boots did not exactly fit the sexpot mold. But Rogers recognized him from an earlier hitchhiking encounter and remembered how McVeigh played with his penis and asked if he wanted to party. Rogers hadn’t been interested at the time, because he was on his way to meet another friend.
The conversation quickly turned to sex, and McVeigh asked Rogers, as he had six months earlier, if he wanted to party.
Rogers responded: “What do you mean?”
McVeigh spread his legs and groped himself. “We could have a really great time,” he said. McVeigh started rubbing Rogers’s penis through his clothes.
An hour later, the two of them were in Rogers’s trailer ten miles north of Kingman, sizing each other up and half-wondering if this was really a good idea. McVeigh talked about Waco, nobody’s idea of good foreplay, and peppered Rogers with questions about an airstrip in the desert hills. At 3:00 A.M., McVeigh grabbed his crotch again and said it was time for bed.
They took their clothes off and went at it. McVeigh’s tongue and throat action, Rogers later told the FBI, was “incredible”: “He was good at what he did.” McVeigh expressed an interest in anal sex, but Rogers turned him down, because he didn’t have a condom. According to Rogers, they were both too tired to reach orgasm. In the morning, Rogers made McVeigh eggs and bacon, and drove him into Kingman. Apart from brief sightings in the grocery store, they never saw each other again.
Assuming this story is broadly true—the FBI found Rogers credible enough to interview him seven times—it suggests that McVeigh, like Pete Langan, had some personal baggage he was not in a rush to share with the rest of the Patriot Movement. Rogers thought it unlikely he was actually gay, just fooling around. He told the FBI McVeigh was most likely bisexual.
Intriguingly, this is the one intimate encounter of McVeigh’s anybody has ever come forward to describe—either in the graphic detail offered by Rogers, or any other way.
OF ALL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING ELOHIM CITY, NONE IS MORE vexing than the question of whether McVeigh visited and, if so, whether he derived any part of the bomb plot—inspiration, training, manpower—from the contacts he established in the community. Nobody has come forward with definitive evidence that McVeigh spent time at Elohim City. On the other hand, a large number of people—from law enforcement, the federal prosecution team, the radical far right, and even Elohim City itself—have dropped hints that he was there, that the government either knew or strongly suspected he was there, and that the information was kept quiet to prevent the criminal case spiraling out of control.
We know McVeigh called Elohim City for just under two minutes on April 5, 1995, because there is a record of it on the Daryl Bridges card. Millar’s daughter-in-law took the call and later said the young man on the line was looking for Andi the German. McVeigh told her he was thinking of visiting in the next few days, and Joan Millar replied that, as a friend of Strassmeir’s, he was welcome any time.
The timing of the call was interesting: McVeigh had just spoken to a Ryder truck rental agency in Lake Havasu City, not far from Kingman, and was presumably making his bomb delivery plans. Was Strassmeir, or his planned visit to Elohim City, part of the calculation? Was he, as an FBI teletype later surmised, looking for new recruits because he did not think he could count on Nichols or Fortier?
The FBI files contain a reference to a second call from McVeigh to Strassmeir at Elohim City, this one on April 17, the day the Ryder truck used in the bombing was rented from Eldon Elliott’s. The information on this call is sketchier, because it was never linked to a specific set of phone records. According to an FBI teletype discovered in 2003, the bureau heard about the call from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the anti-extremist campaign group, but the SPLC has been reluctant to vouch for its authenticity ever since. Richard Cohen, the group’s president, said it was possible that the line in the teletype referring to a call “two days prior to the OKBOMB attack” could have been a clerical error and that the line should have read “two weeks.” In other words, just another reference to the April 5 call.
Over the years, the SPLC has backtracked from a lot of information connecting McVeigh with Elohim City. Twice in the 1990s, the group’s founder, Morris Dees, was quoted saying that he had information that McVeigh visited numerous times. He said it in answer to a reporter’s question at the Denver press club in May 1996, and he said it in an interview with the Indiana State University criminologist Mark Hamm in 1999. But when he addressed the issue again during a talk at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2004, he played down his previous statements. “McVeigh probably was at Elohim City, based on evidence we’ve been able to pick up—stuff I really can’t go into,” he said. “But I don’t think the entire connection is really there.”
If Dees was suddenly tentative on the question, other SPLC officials were emphatic: as far as they knew, McVeigh never went to Elohim City. “[Dees] may have said it,” a surprisingly dismissive Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, said in 2010, “but I very much doubt it’s true.” Both Potok and Cohen sought to minimize Dees’s role in the organization’s intelligence-gathering, and refused to make him available for interview.
All of this was starkly out of character for the SPLC, which usually broadcasts any sinister connection involving the radical right as loudly as it can. One possible reason for its reticence was its close relationship with the Justice Department, which had every reason to play down links between McVeigh and Elohim City. (Its official position throughout the federal trials was that no such link existed.) If the government had information, even secondhand information, placing McVeigh at Elohim City, failing to hand it over to the defense teams could have constituted a serious violation of the rules of evidence.
Did the government have such information? Bill Buford, the former ATF chief in Arkansas, said he was briefed on both verbal and written reports putting McVeigh at Elohim City. The material was not handed over in discovery, he said, but was put into a summary report written by the FBI and sent to the Justice Department. “I’d heard it by word of mouth and it was also in the report,” Buford said. “There’s a lot of information in there that has not been made available to the public.”
Buford could not remember the specifics, but the information referred to an actual visit, not just the April 5 phone call. How sure was he about this clamorous revelation? “I’m sure,” he said.
A number of other senior law enforcement officials were approached about Buford’s information, and none denied it. Bob Ricks said the FBI had found no evidence that McVeigh spent evenings or nights at Elohim City, but acknowledged: “He was always passing through.” Danny Defenbaugh said he could not remember what was in the FBI reports sent up to the Justice Department, but did not exclude it. Perhaps the most revealing line came from Scott Mendeloff, one of McVeigh’s prosecutors, who sought to argue forcefully that Elohim City was irrelevant to the investigation. “It’s not like we didn’t think he was there,” he said testily. “So he visited, but so what?”
When McVeigh’s own legal team asked about Elohim City, he did not acknowledge having been there, but he seemed to know all about Strassmeir patrolling the perimeter and standing guard in the driveway when visitors pulled up. McVeigh told his defense lawyer Randy Coyne that Elohim City was “pretty fucking hard-core.” And he said that Strassmeir and he were “brothers in arms.”
When would McVeigh have been at Elohim City? He received a traffic ticket just over the Arkansas state line in the fall of 1993, and spent the night in a nearby motel on September 12, 1994. Those have to be strong possibilities. Another intriguing date is November 1, 1994, when Tom Metzger, one of the godfathers of the radical right, paid a visit to Elohim City with Dennis Mahon. As Metzger remembered it, he spoke for half an hour in the church, watched the kids perform a dance, shook a few hands, and left again. But he also dropped a hint of more. “Those stories about sitting in another room and talking about stuff,” he said, without prompting, “that didn’t happen.” Was this Metzger pointing to the very thing he sought to deny? It is tempting to think McVeigh would have been there to take lessons from the master, and it was not far out of his way—he was driving from Kansas to upstate New York at the time. It would also have been an opportunity to meet Strassmeir, McCarthy, and Brescia.
The last time McVeigh could have visited—following the intentions he announced in his phone conversation with Joan Millar—was during the two weeks before April 19. This would put Elohim City at the center of the bomb plot. The timing would have been tight: McVeigh checked out of the Imperial Motel in Kingman on April 11, bought an oil filter in Arkansas City, Kansas—just over the Oklahoma state line—on April 13, and arrived at the Dreamland in Junction City on April 14. But it is also possible that he made a quick trip to the Midwest between April 7 and April 11. He was checked into the Imperial Motel on those dates, but the owner later said he did not see him, he used no towels, and his bed was undisturbed. There was a flurry of Daryl Bridges calls from the Imperial up to April 6, then nothing. Would McVeigh have wanted to keep paying for an empty motel room? He might have done if, say, he was transporting blasting caps, or the second Ryder truck seen by Lea McGown and her son on Easter Sunday. It was one way to cover his tracks and minimize the risk of exposure.
If all that sounds speculative, it is. The first two weeks of April are a big mystery when it comes to McVeigh’s movements, activities, and associations. On Saturday evening, April 8, a dancer at the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa was told by someone she later believed to be McVeigh that on April 19, 1995, she would remember him for the rest of her life. He was with two other men. Did they travel from the club to Elohim City? Kirk Lyons, of all people, did not exclude it—and he would have had an opportunity to know, because he was Strassmeir’s lawyer and confidant. “It’s possible he went through there on a weekend before the bombing,” Lyons said of McVeigh. “That’s possible.”
Grandpa Millar also did not exclude that McVeigh had been to Elohim City. A defense investigator who spoke to him in 1995 reported Millar saying “it was possible that he could have met Mr. McVeigh once or twice and that it was also possible that Mr. McVeigh could have visited Elohim City.” Millar was fiercely protective of his community, more interested in damping down speculation about criminal associations than in talking them up, so the indiscretion was unusual. In 1997, he was strikingly forthcoming once again when asked by the journalist Jonathan Franklin if any Elohim City residents were involved in the bombing. “There are legitimate questions to be asked, though I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I don’t mind an honest investigation.”
By that point, of course, Millar knew that no investigation had taken place, and after the trials there was little danger of one starting up. He had played the government masterfully for more than a decade. Jim Ellison’s disenchanted former deputy Kerry Noble summarized it neatly. “Two things the government doesn’t want,” he said, “another sedition trial that fails, and another Waco that fails. What have you got with Elohim City? A possibility of another sedition and conspiracy trial that fails, and another raid that fails. That makes Elohim City, unfortunately, have the upper hand.”