Mark Twain observed, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”1 In my line of work, I am often reminded of this, but never more so than one day in the White House in 1998. I was opening a stack of mail in the CBS News office in the West Wing when I ripped off the end of a large manila envelope. Out slipped an 8x10 color photo. Photographer Dennis Brack, of the Black Star photo agency, sent the image of a younger me, interviewing a soldier in the 1990 run-up to the Gulf War. There was nothing special about the scene. I wondered why, in that 1/500th of a second, Brack even bothered to pressure his shutter release. My seated profile is on the left side of the photo, facing the center. The soldier is on the right, facing me. He has turned his back on a game of checkers and is sitting backward in his chair. The soldier is dressed in Desert Storm camouflage pants and a white T-shirt. His profile is prominent. A heavy, ridged brow presides over his long nose that sharpens its downward angle just below the bridge, leaving a ridgeline as if the nose had run into a fist. His light brown hair, in military parlance, is “high and tight.” The background is filled in by my cameraman, Mike Marriott, bent over his tripod, eye to the viewfinder. My soundwoman, Mary Beth Toole, is holding a microphone on a long boom that resembles a fishing rod. Gray sandbags are stacked about six feet high behind the camera crew. Brack had been editing his old 1990/91 files when the image stopped him cold. What caught Brack’s eye eventually hit me like an electric shock. The soldier I am interviewing is Timothy McVeigh. Five years after the picture was taken, McVeigh would dominate my career when he lit the fuses on a five-thousand-pound homemade bomb. The enormity of the coincidence seized the breath in my throat. I had met, interviewed and forgotten Tim McVeigh long before he became the Oklahoma City Bomber.
In the Gulf War, Sergeant Tim McVeigh had been assigned to a Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle. He liked soldiering and he was good at it. His fitness reports were exemplary. After the liberation of Kuwait, McVeigh was selected for evaluation for Special Forces. But what looked like another step in his advancement became a mysterious break in his life. McVeigh washed out of the Special Forces program after only a couple of days.2 He would later tell me that he was in poor physical shape after months in the desert. I suspect it was much more than that. Whatever it was seemed to be personal. McVeigh became severely disillusioned and immediately quit the army. He drifted through the Midwest and Southwest attracted to anti-government groups and their inane conspiracy theories. That is what led him to Waco, Texas, during an FBI standoff in 1993. I was there too, covering the negotiations with a religious sect that called itself the Branch Davidians.
The Davidians formed a community in 1934 to await Jesus Christ. The day of the second coming was specified as April 22, 1959. When that day passed uneventfully, a group of followers split from the original sect and set itself up on a seventy-seven-acre ranch outside Waco. Eventually, they came under the charismatic spell of a self-styled preacher named Vernon Howell. Howell traveled the world to recruit members to his commune. He brought families from Great Britain, Australia and Israel to live with several American families in a sprawling, two-story ranch house. In 1989, Howell declared himself “The Lamb of God,” changed his name to David Koresh and reserved the right to have sex with any of the women and girls in the commune.3 The Davidians remained obsessed with the end of days. Apparently, they expected the end to be violent. Koresh amassed an arsenal. The local sheriff became concerned the Davidians were purchasing parts to make grenades and to convert legal semiautomatic rifles into illicit fully automatic machine guns. The suspicion was the basis of a federal search warrant and an arrest warrant naming Koresh.4 The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (as it was known then) planned an elaborate surprise for the morning of February 28, 1993. Seventy-six heavily armed agents planned to assault the ranch house. Many of them were to be towed to the front door hidden inside a long cattle trailer. They had rehearsed entering through multiple doors and windows, using ladders to assault the second floor. The hope was to get the drop on the estimated one hundred Branch Davidians before they had a chance to arm themselves.5
It might have worked but for a TV news crew that had been tipped off to the raid. In its preparations, the ATF had placed an ambulance on standby. The ambulance dispatcher told a friend at the TV station. In the hours before the ATF raid, the news crew was looking for a vantage point from which to film. The reporters spotted a mailman. They explained they were there in preparation for a federal raid and asked for directions to the Koresh compound. Unfortunately, the mailman was David Koresh’s brother-in-law.6 When the ATF arrived, the Davidians were armed and ready. A gun battle erupted. Four ATF agents were killed and twenty were wounded. Six followers of Koresh were killed. Koresh and several others were shot. The Davidians barricaded themselves in the compound. So began a fifty-one-day standoff, with more than 650 law enforcement officers surrounding the ranch. FBI hostage negotiators spoke to Koresh on the phone and succeeded in convincing fourteen adults and twenty-one children to surrender.7 Over nearly two months, the FBI spoke to fifty-four individuals inside the compound for approximately 215 hours.8 I covered the siege for the CBS News magazine 48 Hours. My son, eight-month-old Reece, took his first steps in a Waco motel room.
Tim McVeigh was one of those attracted to Waco by the notion that the federal government was oppressing a religious group. Zealots argued the Davidians had a right to defend themselves and should be left alone—never mind the illegal arsenal and the murdered federal agents. McVeigh parked his battered Chevy under a live oak tree on the perimeter of the siege. He sold anti-government bumper stickers displayed across the hood. “Fear the Government that Fears Your Gun,” one read. Another warned, “Ban Guns. Make the Streets Safe for a Government Takeover.”9 On a piece of cardboard, held in place by his right windshield wiper, McVeigh noted the bumper stickers were $1 each or five for $4.
On April 19, 1993, the end of days dawned for the Davidians. The FBI lost patience with a seven-week negotiation that was now heading nowhere. An armored vehicle pushed in a wall of the ranch house. Tear gas was fired inside. Smoke began to curl from the breach. The house suddenly erupted into an inferno. Nine Davidians ran for their lives. But seventy-six bodies, including that of David Koresh, were found in the wreckage. The US Department of Justice investigation concluded that the Davidians placed containers of gasoline around the house to ignite in the event of an all-out assault. During the fire, at least seventeen of those inside, including several children, were shot to death by other cult members.10 Tim McVeigh drove away from the ruins and wandered until he settled on a destination.
Two years later, April 19, 1995, I was trying to shoulder my car into the usual morning traffic between my home and the CBS News Bureau in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth. On the seat next to me, a beige, brick-sized Motorola cell phone shuddered to life. My boss, bureau chief Wayne Nelson, said, “Hoss, there’s been some explosion in Oklahoma City. They think it’s a gas main or something. There’s a Learjet waiting. You need to be on it.” I turned to Dallas’s Love Field airport. It didn’t cross my mind that this was the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian fire.
The flight took barely thirty minutes. From the jet, I could see smoke and ash rising thousands of feet. The front half of the nine-story Murrah Federal Building had collapsed. The little jet rumbled as it forced its landing gear into the slipstream. I realized this wasn’t just an explosion, it was a national disaster. When I reached NW Fifth Street, downtown, first responders and civilians were climbing a mountain of debris in search of survivors. The office tower housed about five hundred fifty federal employees from a variety of agencies and—a day care center. One hundred sixty-eight people were dead, including nineteen children.
The bomb had been built by McVeigh and an old army buddy named Terry Nichols. They had spent weeks buying and stealing the ingredients: five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with nitro methane racing fuel and an industrial explosive called Tovex.11 They packed the explosives in several fifty-five-gallon drums and placed the drums in the back of a panel truck that McVeigh had rented in Kansas. Nichols stayed behind as McVeigh drove the truck into Oklahoma City a little before 9:00 a.m. As he approached the Murrah Building, he lit two fuses: a two-minute fuse and a backup five-minute fuse. He parked in front of the Murrah’s immense glass facade, locked the truck and walked to a getaway car he had stashed in an alley nearby. The stupendous blast broke a column that shouldered an architectural feature called a “transfer beam.” The beam, which ran horizontally across the front of the building, “transferred” the load of the structure to its supporting columns and foundation. When the transfer beam buckled, the front half of the building roared to earth.12
Several miles north of Oklahoma City, ninety minutes after the blast, state trooper Charlie Hanger noticed the derelict 1977 Mercury Marquis ahead of him was missing a rear license plate. He stopped the car. Tim McVeigh stepped out. Hanger noticed a bulge under McVeigh’s jacket. He ordered McVeigh to raise his hands and turn away. As a point of information—not as a threat—McVeigh confessed, “I have a gun. And it’s loaded.” By this time Hanger’s pistol was near the back of McVeigh’s head. “So’s mine,” Hanger replied. Without incident, Hanger arrested McVeigh and took him to the Noble County jail on a weapons charge.13 McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt printed with the Latin phrase “sic semper tyrannis” which translates, “Thus always to tyrants”—the words allegedly called out by John Wilkes Booth as he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. McVeigh was not a suspect in the bombing. He had been arrested only for the gun, so he was processed in the jail and scheduled for release in a few hours.
In a triumph of police work, the FBI found an axle from the bomb truck. A vehicle identification number engraved on it led to Elliot’s Body Shop, an agent of Ryder truck rentals in Junction City, Kansas. Employees at the body shop remembered the young man who rented the truck under a false name and gave a description. An FBI artist drew a likeness, which the agents showed around Junction City. Lea McGown, the owner of the Dreamland Motel, told me she recognized the sketch immediately when the FBI brought it through her door. McVeigh was memorable, she said. He was neat, polite and asked for a discount. In a later interview, McGown showed me what she showed the FBI. In the motel registration book, McVeigh had used his own name. When the name was typed into a national crime database, it led to Charlie Hanger, who told the FBI he left McVeigh in jail. McVeigh was due to be released in an hour. The FBI asked the sheriff if he would be kind enough to hold McVeigh until they arrived.14 Then, on April 21, Terry Nichols learned he was wanted by the FBI and turned himself in. Ultimately, Nichols would be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole.
I spent two weeks at the Murrah building and in hospitals, interviewing survivors and piecing together the investigation. Then, I hurried home to Dallas in the nick of time to see the birth of my daughter, Blair. My overwhelming feeling of joy that day was strangely entangled with the loss of the nineteen children in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma City investigation and the trial of Tim McVeigh were the assignments that got me promoted to the White House. Now, sitting in the West Wing holding the photograph, I had no memory of the wartime interview. I asked the archivists at CBS News in New York to search for the videotape. A vast storehouse is filled with CBS News images and interviews from the late 1940s to the present. It is an irreplaceable treasure of world history. The archivists are famous for finding the obscure, but not this time. Tapes of what had been an unremarkable prewar interview with an unknown soldier went MIA in the chaos of the combat to come. I sent the photo to McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones. On February 16, 1999, Jones wrote, “What a remarkable coincidence. Seriously, no doubt that is Tim McVeigh and a younger Scott Pelley.” I also sent the picture to McVeigh, who was biding his time before his execution at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum (ADX) better known as “Supermax” on the plains of Eastern Colorado. On March 6, 1999, I received an envelope with a Stars and Stripes stamp. In vanishingly small letters in the upper left-hand corner, tight by the edges of the envelope, was written “T. McVeigh 12076-064 P.O. Box 8500 Florence, CO.” He had two years and two months before his life would end by lethal injection. The Oklahoma City Bomber wrote on lined paper in blue ink. He printed tiny letters as though he was squinting through a jeweler’s loupe. “Hey Scott,” McVeigh wrote, “I don’t know what to tell you about that (alleged) photo—it’s got me stumped too! I figure it can be one of three things: me, a look-alike (really alike), or a computer-assisted composite fake.” McVeigh’s mind, so susceptible to conspiracy theories, devoted considerable thought to his analysis. “If it’s a fake, it’s a good one as the sun appears to be striking us all from the same angle and direction,” he observed. McVeigh discounted his look-alike hypothesis by noting the soldier “apparently shares my habit of sitting backward in chairs in casual environments.” His letter is neat, every word spelled correctly, the grammar and punctuation precise. What it lacked was clarity. McVeigh wanted to be an enigma. He left his analysis without a conclusion. “Anyway, the photo provides me with mental exercise—thanks!”15
For me, the most disturbing thing about Tim McVeigh was his sanity. He was not mentally ill. I met him in jail twice and found him to be thoughtful, composed and rational—although he would say nothing about the bombing. I have read dozens of reports by prison psychologists who came to the same conclusion. In evaluations over years, the psychologists described him as cheerful, polite, conversational—possessing a “sharp wit” and “not in need of psychological services.” One of these reports noted that he expressed “no remorse for what he did.”16
We tend to dismiss people like McVeigh as “crazy” or “evil.” Sometimes they are, but labeling terrorists in this way can rob us of thoughtful analysis that would serve us well. I believe McVeigh was an early example of how far wrong a hapless man can go when he immerses himself in conspiracy theories without bothering to investigate the facts. McVeigh wasn’t insane, he was gullible. He came by his virulent obsessions the old-fashioned way, not on the internet, but with obscure fliers and publications including the venomous, racist novel, The Turner Diaries. He expected the bombing would ignite a revolt against the federal government. On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was convicted in a Denver federal court. That night, I wrote an essay for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. The essay ended with this:
Timothy McVeigh fancied himself the leader of a people hungry for revolution. Instead, he finds himself alone, among those who love justice.
McVeigh isolated himself in a society of extremists. He drove thousands of miles all over the West and Midwest to meet them. Today, the world’s drifters find like-minded fanatics online. Connections that took McVeigh weeks and months to make are now accomplished in minutes. The alienated, looking for something to believe in, find encouragement from a world wide web of outrage, entitlement and hate.
In 1995, the catastrophe unleashed on Oklahoma City was the worst terrorist attack in US history. We did not know Tim McVeigh was just a snapshot of the horror to come.