Transcripts For CSPAN3 History Bookshelf Andrew Gumbel Oklahoma City 20240713

Normally when you do book tours you go to different cities, you talk about connections the place has with whatever youve written about. This is a special place in this context and im certainly not here to tell you your own story of what happened in this city 17 years ago because im sure you know it much better than i ever will. And one of the things that is always moved me when i come here is first of all how warmly ive been welcomed by everybody but also how profoundly the bombing touched everybody here. It is a relatively small place. Ive never met from Oklahoma City who wasnt touched in a personal way in some way by the tragedy. The first time i came i spoke to a number of the relatives of the victims, especially the children who died in the Day Care Center and i thought im a British Foreign correspondent, ive been to a lot of not terribly pleasant places around the world, this is just another assignment and then having spoken to them, i went down to the memorial and saw that fence with all of the pictures of the dead children and the teddy bears and Everything Else and it just got me in a way that is still with me now. I went to the memorial again this afternoon and it had the same effect. And years later in the course of researching this book, i talked to people who were hardened veterans of vietnam and other conflicts and they said themselves, this is major brown here who was with the sheriffs department, bomb squad, he said that he had never seen anything like this and i think there is something unique about the spectacular violence that took place and the colossally unexpected, undeserved aspect of the fact that it happened here in Oklahoma City. So thats i want to say right from the outset i come to the suggest with a certain humility especially in this city and im not here to tell you anything you dont already know. But i do think that there is an aspect to what happened and the way its been told and retold over the years that has got lost. And that is really fundamentally the reason why this book got written in the first place and it is what i want to talk to you about tonight. Because i feel that this city was let down fundamentally in a number of ways. Both before the bombing and then afterwards as well. The starkest contrast is with 9 11 when you had an extremely active and welllistened to Victim Community who managed to press for congressional hearings and obviously a huge amount of political activity around the calamity that happened then. You had the 9 11 report. You had endless press being begin to the subject. The Oklahoma City bombing was rather different. I think people to a large extent grieved in silence. I dont think that congress was paying the kind of attention it should have done. There were one or two abortive attempts to start hearings that didnt occur and what you had was the trial and the trial is always a flawed exercise in finding out the truth. It is about the guilt or innocence of the defendant or defendants. It is not really about getting to the bottom of everything. Im very fortunate as a researcher that some of the trial materials that didnt come out publicly at the time and now are available and the spur for writing the book was getting access to the full archive of all of the materials that the government hands over to the defense teams in all three trials, mcveighs and Terry Nichols and his state trial here in oklahoma a few years later. So what the possibility that arose was instead of having guesses and questions and the sense that something was not quite right, there was a unique really important to look at precisely what was it the government knew based on the investigation and what did it do with that information, what leads did it follow, what leads did it not follow and what questions could one ask as a result of that. The other aspect of the project which was a blessing for me as a researcher and writer was having got ahold of all of the information. I thought this is an opportunity to go around and talk to everybody i possibly can. People who were in mcveighs circle in the radical Antigovernment Movement and the investigators who looked at the crime right from the very beginning, local, state and federal and the street agents and their managers and their bosses in washington, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and to my surprise and amazement all everybody was willing to talk. All willing to talk on the record. An a lot of them were frustrated and pretty angry about the things that were left out and the roads werent taken and the opportunities starting before the bombing and going through to mcveighs execution several years later. So what do i say when Oklahoma City was let down. Starting before the bombing, there were a number of things that occurred that i think in retrospect seemed very troubling. Some of them are basic and con dre concrete. The murrah building was build in the 70s. There was a decision made to skimp essentially on the way that the concrete pillars were reinforced. There were simple pieces of rebar, there was no the number of things that you could do to make buildings much stronger like having coils of rebar and other things that you could do. There was a fema study done after the bombing that showed if the people had built the building had spent one eighth of one person extra on the budget they could have raised the building to the level that met california earthquake standards and probably when the bomb went off you would have not had the pancake effect of the floors collapse on each other and three quarters of those who died might have had their life spared. That is one fact that did come to light at the time. And another failure is that in the course of my research i found out that the man in charge of protecting the building, hunt, head of the federal protective service and one of the judges in the courthouse next door Ronald Howland were concerned about a lack of security and concerned for a number of reasons because it was their job to worry about this kind of thing and specifically concerned after waco when the Antigovernment Movement declared war essentially on the atf, on the fbi. They made it clear that they thought anybody who worked for the federal government was a target. And in response to that hunt and how larnd and sat down and talked about how they needed to have 24 hour security coverage which doesnt exist and the accessibility of the outside of the building to vehicles. They also were very concerned that the video cameras that were ereskted on the north side of the building were not functioning and hadnt been for years and they wanted to rectify that. They went to the General Services administration that ran the murrah building and asked for money to make the chances and the answer was no. The gsa was trying to save money. Oklahoma city was not considered a place that would have anything happen and that was that. Another letdown i think. And then the bigger ones that i think affect the country as a whole and really get to the core of what im writing about in the book is that after waco, after ruby ridge, there was an Awareness Among federal agencies who followed these things for a living that there was a very serious threat of some kind of major attack. That was not a mystery to the people who tracked the order and the covenant and the arm of the lord in the 1980s who committed assassinations, bombings, they robbed an armor truck, a lot of very alarming things. They were very concerned about the radical Antigovernment Movement. They were very concerned about a community in eastern oklahoma called ala hine city in part because some of the people in the 1980s were gravitating back to that place. Information was starting to come out that other dangerous criminals later prosecuted for other crimes were liveing there or passing through. Much has happened in the runup to 9 11. The people who were shouting the loudest and issuing the warnings saying you have to do something were ignored. Not only were they ignored but the different federal agencies in particular in this case the fbi and the atf that had little pieces of information were not pooling or sharing it when they got evident of something alarming going on, instead of going to each other and the u. S. Attorneys offices and saying we really think that something needs to be done here. They took the opposite tact. Why did they do that . The fbi had been afraid for many years of being too proactive in terms of going after things that werent necessarily directly related to crimes they knew about but were more intelligence gathering operations to see if there was a possibility of future crimes. The fbi at the time was under attorney general guidelines not to do that. They had gotten into trouble a number of times, especially in the 1980s, for going after groups and congress had raked them over the coals. In the wake of the activity from the radical far right in the 1980s put together a trial, only the third time in the countrys history that anybody was put on trial for sadition. They had neonazi members and put them on trial and things went wrong. The judge decided he would dispense with the usual jury selection procedures and he picked the jury themself and they were all white and uneducated and made sure that they had read nothing in the newspapers about the crimes and the people on trial. And the jury, two of the members of the jury fell in love with two of the defendants. One of them actually got maried to one of the defendants. The star witness for the prosecution was a criminal from the 1980s by the name of jim allison who had no credibility and everybody suspected he was only in it to save his hide and reduce his jail sentence and the shot was everybody was acquitted. And the fbi said if anything happened again from the far right they would prosecute the crime at hand and not look for any links to the broader radical movement and that is exactly what happened when the bomb went off in Oklahoma City. The atf did not operator under the same strictures. Had no attorney guidelines. It had problems of its own. There was a sense the atf was primarily responsible for the disaster at ruby ridge in 1982, in one botched siege where people died needlessly and then primarily responsible for the siege at waco that ended in terrible tragedy and the deaths of dozens of people. So they were running scares of another screwup essentially. There was a new republican majority in congress led my Newt Gingrich that was out for the atf hide and waiting for something to happen to give them an excuse to say, were abolishing the agency completely. So they were very scared of putting a foot wrong. As it so happened they were looking at a man from tulsa by the name of dennis mahon, had gone to germany and participated in flag burnings and they suspected he had been involved in a lot of criminal activity. So they put an undercover informant on to him and, an attractive young debutante and had a swastika tattooed on her Left Shoulder and they took her to the city and she spent a long time there in the fall of 94 and started hearing people talking openly about possibility blowing up Federal Buildings and war against the government and Mass Shootings and so on and so on. What was the atf response to this. They should have gone to the fbi and said we dont have the operational capacity to deal with this but you should know about this. This finally gives us grounds to open a proper investigation and lets see what we could find out. Probably if that had occurred and this is i was told by the man who was the head of the atf at the time on the record. If we kept an informed operation up there, we probably would have found butt out about the bombing and been able to prevent it. Really startling thing to be told. Instead what did they do . They started hearing all of the alarming things from the informant whose name was carol howe and decided if we keep hearing these things, well have to take action because this is more than we could possibly ignore. So what were going to do is close down the informant operation and effectively block our ears and close our eyes and hope for the best and that is what they did. She was taken out of action in march of 95, a few weeks before the bombing and after the bombing there was a collective sense of oops and then they reacted carolyn howe and sent her right back into the city to say go find out what you can but by then it was too late. A lot of the people who were most sus pirpicious had left be the bombing. She was widely suspected of having been an informant because she disappeared so suddenly. She was told if she went back to the city her life would be in danger so she didnt. What is shocking from the point of the view of the fbi and the atf, talking to the agents who were deeply concerned about this problem, they expected the fbi would send agents in and start interviewing people. And they never did. In the meantime, all kinds of other things were going on here in Oklahoma City which again i think did the city a great disservice. One thing that was going on was that there was a huge bureaucratic war going on within the phish itself. Louie free, the director at time, was attempting to remove every Single Division chief in the country and replacing them with his people. And one of the people who he had his sights on most keenly was bob ricks, who was the special agent in charge right here in Oklahoma City. He was a candidate to be at the fbi at the same time of free and free got the job but there was insecurity about him and the first thing free does, instead of putting ricks in charge of the investigation, he brings in an old hand on the virginerge o retirement out in arizona and the immediate effect is this split the investigation right away. All of the agents here in Oklahoma City, some of whom were extremely accomplished, very get competent to tackle this tragedy, meanwhile kennedy was the leesiaison back to headquars and they were scrambling to assemble an Operation Center that would be open 24 hours a day to keep an eye on what was going on. So there was tremendous confusion in the first few days and i think that led to misguided decisions. Essentially i tell this at great length, there was a very roundabo roundabout panicked attempt to attract mcveigh. The feds found him within 48 hours. He was in custody in a candy jail in northern oklahoma in perry and been pulled over by a highway patrolman who saw he was missing a license plate. They got to him just in time before he was about to be released on bond from for his traffic offenses and for carrying a concealed weapon. And they also through mcveigh rapidly realized they were interested in a pair of brothers called terry and james nichols. What was important is that everything that the task force here in Oklahoma City knew was being transmitted by the atf to all of the field officers around the country so you had hundreds of potential leakers to the media and sure enough it got on the radio the same day that mcveigh was taken into federal custody. They heard this on the radio and took evasive action to make sure in their minds they werent going to be besieged and possibly killed by the feds because they were paranoid and anxious about that but from an investigation point of view it meant any possibility of putting them under surveillance, tapping their phones, see who they were talking to, see what else might be out there came to an immediate and crashing halt. And really that was the beginning of an unraveling of the potential of really getting to the bottom of what happened in the bombing. Over the next month or so there was a tremendous attempt to look for other coconspirators. Two people were seen renting the ryder truck and there were sketched put out known as john doe one and two and john doe one was assumed to be mcveigh. John doe two is a total mystery. And for a month the feds suspecs 12yearold son josh, because he was a big kid. It was preposterous he could have been there without his father. His father was row techi protec him. Ultimately, they couldnt figure out who this john doe two character was. They decided he didnt exist. They came up with a theory of m misassociation, that the employees had muddled up with what happen opened monday with what happened on tuesday. There are grounds i can go into this afterwards for doubting that. It was a convenient way of putting that issue to rest. There are a number of other people who had come to light as potential suspects. One by one, the fbi and the Justice Department, because a number of senior lawyers from washington came out and cut these deals themselves, decided to tell these people, if you can tell us everything you know about mcveigh, we will overlook Everything Else. That happened with five or six different people. So they the potential for pursuing them as suspects closed down. As i say, the interest in looking further afield grew narrower and narrower as time went on. The prosecution in particular was very worried that any kind of extra investigation might not lead to useful leads about you would only give ammunition to the defense teams at trial who could then use it to argue, you are saying that mcveigh is the mastermind, but maybe he was just the driver. Maybe the real people are still out there. There was a conscious closing down of the investigation. It wasnt something that was decided monolithically. Just to give one example of a major dispute about this. If you ask most from the fbi or atf, they will tell you they would have worked 24 hours a day for as long as it took. Give you an instance how that wasnt possible. A roadblock was set up by the fbi outside a city in kansas to ask people, did you see something in the days before the bombing. The feds had a good idea that was where the bomb was mixed on which in fact is where it was. They stopped people. What they found out is that a lot of people had seen a ryder truck not only the day it was there and when Terry Nichols and tim mcveigh, at least those two were building the bomb, but they had seen a ryder truck the week brch before. It couldnt have been the same. There was reported sighting of one at a motel where mcveigh stayed before the bombing. Bob ricks, amongst others, because i asked him about this, felt this is a terrific lead. We need to find out what the second ryder truck is about. The prosecutors and one or two other people in the fbi felt very vehemently this was a crazy thing to do, it was a fishing expedition, it was giving ammunition to the defense. Sure enough, all mention of the seco seco second ryder truck was put away. It was a very complicated mechanism youve got. Youve got investigators, youve got bosses, youve got competing interests of the agencies. Youve got freeh saying, i want arrests, i want to say this is a victory for the fbi. You have the atf struggling for its life. Prosecutors who disagreed among themselves. This is not something known as the time. They told me, this was not a merry trial team. We were under instructions to get mcveigh, make sure he was convicted, get in the Death Penalty. It didnt matter what it took to get there. I think what often happens, not only in the United States but in many countries, is that when you have a major public traumatic event like this, what you end up getting is an outcome driven investigation. Theres a sense, we want to say we have done our part. Mcveigh was the one they had. Terry nichols was the onesecond. They focused on them. Another way in which oklahomans were led down was at mcveighs trial. I think if you compare and contrast the mcveigh trial and the nichols trial, whatever you think of the outcome im certainly not here to say mcveigh shouldnt have had the Death Penalty or to say i applaud the fact that nichols did not, thats not something that i feel is my place to tell you as oklahomans how to feel. What i do feel as a researcher and somebody interested in getting to the bottom of things and understanding the full truth is that the defense in both trials had an opportunity to look at the governments evidence in the way that i had an opportunity to with my coauthor and really ask hard questions. Do they really know what they say they know . Were these witnesses statements reported accurately . The fbi famously never records interviews. Were witnesses picked selectively . Were there other people that should have been spoken to . Are there cases in the evidence, which there are, that a number of people in the radical far right had knowledge of the bombing . Why didnt the fbi talk to those people . The nichols team, to take it in rever reverse, did a thorough job of looking at the evidence against the defendant and asking hard questions. They managed to embarrass the government repeatedly, demonstrate things were not as the government had shown. That was a big part of the reason why nichols was not convicted on the main murder charges on which he stood trial. He was eventually convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter and conspiracy and got life instead of the Death Penalty. More significantly from the perspective of 2012, their investigative work and everything that had generated has given a tremendous amount of material to researchers and historians of the future to under more of what happened. Mcveigh defense team i would argue really fell down on the job. Steven jones in particular didnt drill down on the evidence. I think there were places he could have really shown the government up. Look through the trial transcript, just to give two examples, two things the government never proved. Number one was how mcveigh and nichols learned how to build a bomb. There are gaps in the official record how that happened. In the summer of 1994, they were messing around not too success it willy with pipe bombs. Nothing to do with Ammonium Nitrate. In 1994, they experimented with small version what was turned into the Oklahoma City bomb. According to tim mcveigh, in the book american terrorist, it was a success. According to Terry Nichols who corresponded with us, it was a failure. It went fut. We just dont know how they went from amateur hour in the fall of 1994 to devastating success from that point of view on april 19, 1995. The government just didnt know. I think a defense team could have put them on the spot on that. Another thing they never proved was that mcveigh was the one who rented the truck on april 17th. I dont personally know if he did or didnt. I can tell you his fingerprints were not found at the body shop. They couldnt match the signature. There was the problem of john doe 2 and john doe 1. There were detailed and con ver converging districts. One or two other physical dissimilarities which raised the question at least could it have been someone else. There were problems that the government had in showing how mcveigh got from mcdonalds in Junction City where he was caught on a surveillance camera just before 4 00 to the body shop and have the rental agreement printed out at 4 19. It was quite a distance away. It was raining that day. The person who showed up to rent the truck was dry according to the witnesses and on and on. There were a number of things that raised i think legitimate questions about the strength of the governments case. There was also most spectacularly the fact that on the morning of the bombing, about two dozen people had seen mcveigh. Every single one of them had seen him with somebody else. Some had seen him with other vehicles. Not a Single Person said what mcveigh said, which is that he was on his own, he parked the truck, he walked away by himself, put in earplugs and then heard the explosion from a few blocks away. Not a single one of them corroborated mcveighs version and yet mcveighs version prevailed at trial. For all these reasons i think many tricks were missed by the mcveigh defense team. I think there were opportunities for doing that kind of intention investigative work that the nichols team did do that was lost. I think elohim city could have been looked up. Some of the leads could have been looked at more thoroughly. Looking forward into the future, why does it matters to Oklahoma City. This is your story. Why does it matter to the rest of the country . Why does it matter in the context of todays preoccupation with keeping the country safe, with homeland security, with the threat from al qaeda and others . I think it matters first of all because as i mentioned a lot of the mistakes that were made around the time of the bombing were repeated around the time of 9 11 in terms of Law Enforcement not appreciating the threat adequately, not sharing information. And also looking now, i think that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned the threat from that antigovernment radical right has not gone away. We have a situation now where many young men have had combat experience in iran and afghanistan, have military training. Many of them were traumatized by what they went through. They come back in hundreds of thousands to a depressed economy. Inevitably, i think the vast majority of veterans are very honorable people. Inevitab inevitably, there will be a minority who will be attracted by extreme ideology, interested in using what they learned in the military in order to turn their wrath against the government and to certainly, theres been a huge uptick in the number of radical groups, white supremacist groups, neonazi groups, affiliated with extremists, religions. Much was the case in the early to mid 1990s. Having an africanamerican president has been a tremendous recruiting tool for many of the groups. You have a preoccupying situation. You also have a situation where despite the existence of the department of homeland security, despite the fact that terrorism is front and center in the preoccupations, you still have this bureaucratic imperative to look at the last threat that came along, not to anticipate necessarily the next one. Most of the money, most of the manpow manpower, resources are engaged in the fight to prevent al qaeda from doing a repeated 9 11. I was in washington last week and had the privilege of talking to members of the House Homeland Security committee. There are concerned about this. They feel that other islamic threatsregarded or not given enough attention. They felt the domestic threat was not pursued adequately. You have a situation now that a lot of the Institutional Knowledge of how to handle potential eruptions of crises has gone away. The people who understood waco was a disaster and who a few years later when the montana freemen were beseenl ieged, the understood how to bring that okay, they understood the culture, the people, many were transferred to international work. Many have gone into retirement. Im not here to tell ut fyou thi didnt know what its doing. Its not forthcoming with decision making. I think there are questions. Have the lessons of what went wrong around the Oklahoma City been articulated, learned . Have the effects been fully appreciated . Are we ready to face future threats . I can certainly tell you some things have got easier. Restriction on intelligence gathering has been lifted. There are potential abuses involved in lifting it, which is why they were imposed in the first place. The fbi can no longer say were not going to investigate so and so because were not allowed to. That has gone. There are other things that are still negatives in terms of looking at the ability to assess threats. The fbi and atf hate each other. They are in the Justice Department now. The atf hasnt been under treasury. It hasnt happened anything. When the atf was involved in the scandal of walking guns into mexico, the fast and furious operation, the fbi guys i talked to were fuming. There was smoke coming out of their ears say are irresponsible. How can Law Enforcement agencies represent the United States behave this way . Nothing has changed in that respect. I would also argue this is the outsider brit talking. Independently of the politics of the Second Amendment i dont want to get into that particularly. It has to be a problem that anyone who has a criminal intention has tremendous access, far more than existed in other countries, to deadly fire power. Theres a tremendous amount you can access legally. But theres also a tremendous amount you can access with ease that is illegal in terms of explosive materials. You cant buy Ammonium Nitrate without sounding alarm bells. But other materials could be used to devastating affect are not that hard to get ahold of. This is something that should be a concern for everybody. I have gone on for quite a long time. I would love to know your experiences, the things that may have concerned you, whether the fact that somebody comes from outside of oklahoma and starts talking about this is something that upsets you, its something you welcome. I dont know. I would love to have a conversation as much as a q a. Im an authority only to the extent i gathered information myself. Some of you may be authorities in your own right. I would love to hear what you have to say. I will do the moderating, as im the only one up here. I will try and call on everybody once before i have people come back for a second time. Sir, i saw you over here raise your hand first. Out of all the places in the world you have been, what caught your attention on Oklahoma City . You have been all over the world. You have seen pretty bad things. What made you focus a book on this incident than other places . It really stemmed from the first time i came here, which was in 2001. I was working for a british newspaper. They wanted me to write a piece about the bombing. In anticipation of mcveighs execution. I really knew very little about it. I had this vague idea, as everybody else did, that two guys from the heartland pulled this together. They had been caught and they had been punished. That was the end of the story. Until i read american terrorist, the booklength interview with mcveigh he gave to two journalists from his hometown, buffalo, new york. I thought, i dont know very much about this case, but this does not add up. I dont believe this. It seems like there are parts of the story that are missing. It seems like mcveigh is ee gra agrandizing his role. The governments version was not that different. Many of the fbi managers who want everybody to believe they did get to the bottom of the story will say over and over, we know that we were right because mcveigh confirmed it. I heard a million theories about what had been missed, what it might add up to. I did a lot of digging myself then at the time. Really, a lot of questions remained unanswered. It was only when there was the possibility of getting ahold of the full government case file and talking to everybody who was involved on the inside in the investigati investigation, there was this fabulous opportunity to look at a major historical event from the inside and in a with a thayd never been done before. That was a gift of a project. The experience i had is less important than the outcome. I did my very best to hear everybody, to try and account for everything. There are many things i still dont know. One of the rules that i teach when i teach journalism is its important to tell the difference between what you know and what you dont know. To make that very clear to the reader. Thats what i tried to do with this project. There are puzzles i managed to solve. There are others i didnt solve but i managed to ask the questions i hope a little more sharply than it was possible to ask them before. Yes. First of all, i would like to thank you for coming out here. I read your book as soon as it came out. I had it preordered. Its excellent. Thank you. For the audience, i would like jeanie is here. She lost her two children in the Nursery Center there in the murrah building. I would like to recognize her. Colonel George Wallace is wwas the investigation committee. My question is, like i said, i really love the work. I have been looking into the bombing for years. Im a filmmaker. We released a documentary on the bombing. I would like to present you with a courtesy copy. My question is, the subtitle is what the investigation miss and w why it matters. I would like your viewpoint i fail to see an indictment of Current Office holders who may have been involved with the coverup. Holders who may have been involved with the coverup. Im including eric holder, who was in charge of the coverup of the murder. And janet nopalitano. I was wondering why you chose not to go after those people who now hold offices of power who i think in my opinion were directly responsible with a role in that coverup and now janet is director of homeland security, eric holder is attorney general responsible for executing the laws of the United States. First of all, its a pleasure to see you. I mentioned right at the beginning of my presentation that when i went to the memorial for the first time in 2001 how it really hit home and it hit home because i talked to people who had directly lost loved ones. She told me with tears in her eyes about what happened to her, losing her two grandchildren and when i saw their picture on the fence, just outside the memorial, that was the moment when something in my stomach just flipped. I thought, this is just the most ghastly thing that could have happened. So that emotional reaction to the bombing is what in many ways sustained me and kept me interested in this story for a long time. Shes been somebody i have spoken to on and off for years. Admire the courage of everybody who lost people in the bombing and their ability to speak out and to have thoughtful ideas about what happened to them and why. Absolutely, i share what you are saying. In terms of the other issues you brought up with let me talk about nopalitano. She was the u. S. Attorney in phoenix. There was a tremendous amount of Law Enforcement interest in kingman, arizona. Mcveigh had lived there. His army buddy who ended up cutting a plea deal with the government lived there with his wife. There was a whole community of antigovernment activists mixed together with people who were involved in the crystal meth trade. Its quite an assembly of people. There was a man who ran a group called the arizona patriots. Who mcveigh almost certainly knew. I started out this project interested in the arizona angle. All the way through the short version of what i found is this. There were one or two people who should, i believe, have been str scrutinize more closely. One man in particular by the name of steve coburn. He was a chemist. He had worked in california in a hospital. Very bright guy. Also very unstable. He knew ho to buiw to build exp. The government was after him for a number of things, including a machine gun which he was caught with on video in california. There was an arrest warrant put out for him. He ended up disappearing in the desert in arizona. He knew mcveigh. The fbi established mcveigh and he exchanged letters. A decision was made in may of 1995 that they were going to overlook everything about coburn except what he could tell them about mcveigh. To corroborate the fact they had been in touch. It helped establish mcveighs motivation for the bombing. They overlooked a number of things. His bomb making ability. His uncle had said how he had always been afraid that steve would turn into a bad bomber. He felt steve was capable of carrying out the bombing. They ignored testimony from the people sharing a shack out in the desert with coburn who said on the day of the bombing he looked to the tv and seemed to claim some kind of ownership of it. He talked about nitromethane. The fbi and Justice Department overlooked this. Im not sure that was her decision. Again, i get this from the documentation that a woman by the name of donna gusella, the number two in charge of all the u. S. Attorneys, came out to arizona and sat in on that meeting with steve coburn on the 20th of may 1995 and she was the one who signed off on that decision. I dont know what the mechanics of that were. No one has spoken to me about it. Most likely, the decision came from very high up in washington and for the reasons i elaborated earlier. They made a decision, get the stuff on mcveigh. I also know that people within the fbi had this sense, excuse me, that steve coburn was too crazy to be effective in any kind of serious plot. I dont know if that assessment was correct or not. My suspicion is that he should have been looked at a lot more closely. Im not aware of janet directly closing down any lines of investigation herself. Which is not to apologize for her necessarily. Its just what you know versus what you dont know. I dont know. Eric holder, he was im not sure exactly what he was doing in 1995. In 1997, he became Deputy Attorney general. In 1995, the Deputy Attorney general was jamie gurellick who sparred furiously with freeh. Im not going to go into the details of what that was all about. Its in the book. Essentially, there was a tremendous bureaucratic battle between the Justice Department that wanted both the Justice Department and fbi had reasons to want to find somebody to blame for the fiascos at waco and ruby ridge. Congress was hot and heavy. The Justice Department had a certain amount of information against senior people in the fbi. The fbi had information on janet reno and how she behaved at waco. It was a giant game of chicken. They have should have been focussed on investigating the bombing. This got in the way of the investigation. The Deputy Director of the fbi at the time larry potts was first in charge of the investigation, then he became the subject of a ruby ridge related scandal. He was kicked out of the fbi all together. It was tremendously disruptive. Im going to address it very quickly for those of who you dont know. There was a man brought into federal custody in oklahoma in the summer of 95. He died very violently it appears he was bludgeoned to death. The ruling was a suicide initial. That was subject to review based on a lawsuit brought by his brother who is a lawyer in salt lake city. I looked into this fairly closely. Again, it comes under i dont know. He was convinced his brother was mistaken for john doe 2. I never found evidence in terms of paperwork, people talking about it that confirmed that. Which doesnt mean its not the case. It just means i dont know. Jesse had been leaked information because he was seeking justice of his brothers death. He had been told by federal agents it was mistaken identity. The fbi thought his brother was john doe number 2 because he fit the profile of someone with a bank robbery history, same tattoo, mustache, similar build. Let me stop you there. Everybody can watch it. Im sure you go into detail. As far as i know, jesses first source of information on that was somebody who was on death row with mcveigh. It wasnt somebody who was a federal agent. I dont know if hammer was the first. He wasnt the first. He wasnt the first . Anyway, i feel because he is so convinced his brother was mixed up in the bombing investigation has as a consequence filed many different suits for freedom of information, for release of documents let me talk. Thank you. Wasnt to give everybody else. To say briefly that he performed a valuable Public Service by bringing documents to light. He was part of the book project. It was a big i dont know. The focus of this book was really how the investigation unfolded and the things that were directly related to the investigation that we know about for sure that we can document and talk about. For that reason, we made a decision we werent going to talk about this particular issue. Not yet. Somebody else gets a chance first. Just a curiosity. The access that you all had to Terry Nichols, since he is in a super max, i was curious, how were you able to get that access . A great question. At the time we started, he was still prevented from having access to the media under the patriot act. It was a real problem. I cant tell you how we did it. Roger charles, my coauthor, was responsible for finding a way to get access to teri nichols. It was invaluable. I well tell you that nichols he was completely silent from the time he was arrested and brought into federal custody until about 2004 when he was finally he learned he was not going to be put to death. He was resentenced to life in state court here in oklahoma. He started writing a tremendous amount about what he knew. Those writings increased over time. Then once we got access to him, we asked him hundreds of questions to which he gave detailed answered. Its not that we believed everything he told us. But it gave texture and depth to the story and put a lot of things a lot of new light on to a lot of issues. Im extremely grateful for his contribution as a researcher. I also think that he has been very forthright in admitting his responsibility for a number of criminal activities directly related to the bombing. Whether he admitted everything, whether everything he told us was the truth, thats something that we parse very carefully. We couldnt have had the book in the form it is without Terry Nichols. For that at least he deserves recognition. The gentleman behind you. Can you talk up . With regard to these series of lawsuits filed by jesse. He had one in which he was trying to get cameras on the biddined by building, the north side of the building which would have shown the truck. The Central Intelligence agency got involved with it to object to it saying there would be they would not release them on the grounds of national security. I thought to myself, what in the world . Thats not quite right. One question about the explosive. A lot of people that were inside the building, for example, with the department of housing and urban development said they were taking a Computer Class at the time this happened and that the first thing that happened was the building shook. The instructor for the class said, its an earthquake. Everybody jump under your desk. Everybody got under their desk. There were people there from california. About five seconds later, another explosion hit. A lot of people, experts have suggested there were explosive devices inside of the building which would explain why explain the blast pattern, explain why debris was across the street, in the area which is the memorial. Could you address those . These are two things that were talked about at the time. And since. On the video cameras, i can tell you unequivocally they werent working. How do i know this . Tom hunt, the head of the federal protective service drew up a physical sur fvey of all t security. There in black and white it says the video cameras are not working. As i told you earlier, he and judge howland were concerned about this and wanted to do something about it. The answer came back no. Jesse, you know, i dont want to dwell too much on him. He sued the government believing the cameras might exist, there might have been footage from the cameras. In one of the comedy of errors, the people in the Records Department of the fbi clearly dont know have not seen the document i have seen. I dont think anybody at the fbi saw it. I was given it by tom hunt directly. They are operating on the basis, were not sure if this footage exists or not. We will fight this on legal grounds and cover our bases either way. This has been going on for years. I can tell you definitively that the cameras were not working. The cia thing is actually a different part of what jesse is suing over. I will leave that to one side. As far as the explosion, the fact that a lot of people, not just in the hud office but many people felt a double tlumhump. A shaking and a blast that came seven to 11 seconds later. This is something that there was a geologist at norman who thought there was two explosions. His boss and the u. S. Geological survey then explained why they felt that was mistaken. I have spoken to a tremendous number of explosive experts. The explanation given to me is that what happens when you have a big explosion like that is it creates a vacuum. Then a few seconds after the initial blast, you get a negative blast where the air sucks back in and that was what impacted the building hardest. Harder than the initial explosion. Thats what caused the pancaking affect that caused so many people to die. Lets talk about you mentioned many your spee eed in mentioned the explosive device was made at erie lake. When you mix fuel and Ammonium Nitrate, you cant do it after 25 minutes. Thats all you have to set it off. All i can tell you on that subject is that very briefly, both Terry Nichols to us and Timothy Mcveigh to the journalists from buffalo gave descriptions of the composition of the bomb. I showed it to end lless expert in government, out of government. They said both devices would work. What is interesting is they are very different from each other. In terms of how they described the bomb being built on the 18th. Which then raises the question, you know, mcveigh claimed to be the mastermind but he has less detail and his design seems less logical than nichols. The question i ask in the book is, this raises the possibility was nichols the mastermind or someone else showing them what to do and nichols remembered better than mcveigh . Which is another one of the big open questions. I heard from no credible explosive experts that it was not possible to transport the bomb the way mcveigh described it being transported. Thats not something that anybody i came across with real credentials said was a problem. Let somebody else have a go. Asked the question i was going to ask. I worked for bank of oklahoma a block south where the murrah building was. It was quite a different experience inasmuch as all the facts that have come out since then. It was more of an emotional thing that everybody downtown experienced. Not only the people personally involved at the building but the whole downtown area experienced quite an emotional shock for a whole day. There was a lockdown for two miles around the downtown area. I dont know how quickly that happened. But i know you could get out but you couldnt get back in that radius. Do you know anything about that . Actually, there was a big problem in terms of investigating the bombing in the way in which a perimeter was set up around the crime scene. It actually wasnt done properly. This was a big part of the reason why the fbi failed to gather the forensic evidence to make any meaningful conclusions about the device that exploded and they were absolutely taken to the cleaners at court over that for a couple of reasons. Number one, the defense had a terrific forensic lawyer from texas who pulled them apart piece by piece and secondly because the Justice Department Inspector General came out with a report about the Fbi Crime Lab in the middle of jury selection in april of 1997 blasting the Fbi Crime Lab over Oklahoma City and a number of other high profile crimes showing how they had done their work backwards. They had taken evidence from elsewhere to make draw conclusions about the composition of the bomb. They effectively blew the chance to put together a compelling forensic case for what happened. There were a number of failures. Some were understandable because the first impulse was to save as many lives as possible. People were trampi inling in an out. It was a crime scene and rescue scene. There was an initial followup bomb alert at 10 30 in the morning. An hour and a half after the initial blast, which gave the federal authorities the chance to set up a provisional perimeter. It was a small one. It wasnt big enough according to the experts who say what you need is the debris field plus 25 . That didnt happen for some time. Even once that wider perimeter was set up, there were security problems. There were red cross people coming in handing out water and food to rescue workers which from a human point of view understandable. It wasnt done in a way that respected the integrity of the crime scene. It could have been done betterment no one thought to cover the crater. There was a rainstorm and Ammonium Nitrate is destroyed on contact with moisture. Again, huge missed opportunity to gather evidence that could have been used effectively to work out how the bomb was built, who might have built it, how sophisticated it was, all these things. [ inaudible ] certainly from the point of view of search and rescue, there was no experience of this. Fema that came in on the evening of the bombing in particular had never had a disaster that was also a crime scene. Fema did not endear itself as i understand it to anyone in the way that they behaved. They tried to boss everybody around. They claimed credit for everything that the Oklahoma City Fire Department had done in terms of rescuing people, getting them out of there. They behaved appallingly. Thats also in the book. One of the ways in which they behave ed d appallingly, they disrespect the request of the fbi in terms of getting on the site as a crime scene. Once it became clear there were no more people alive, the fbi should have had control. They didnt get control for 11 days. That was femas doing. James lee witt who said, im bill clintons buddy said, i can do whatever i like. It didnt do favors to the crime investigators. Some of what the day of the bombing, i was working at the county assessors office, which is about 2 1 2 blocks from where the Federal Building was. I heard two explosions. Right. Thats what i heard two explosions. Everybody did. No, they didnt. People argued with me for 17 years that i didnt hear two explosions. I know what i heard. Right. Number two, theres been a rumor since day one almost that that bomb was not made at the lake. It was made in southwest Oklahoma City. I finally got to go to the warehouse where the bomb was supposedly made. It was not made by Timothy Mcveigh. Mcveigh was in the army shore. He and my second son were stationed together at fort riley, kansas. They did not make bombs. They also went to the persian gulf together. Terry nichols wrote me and told me that bomb that he and tim made did not blow up the Federal Building because they didnt know how to make bombs. That bomb they made was no good. It was real lumpy. Theres a lot of things that seem like nobody wants to talk about. Well let me address one or two of those things. I think a lot of rumors have been circulated. I think a lot of troubling hints of information are out there. I think its very important to try and distinguish fact from fiction. Its absolutely true that Terry Nichols has written he wrote this to us as well, he wants to believe the bomb he built with mcveigh was not the one that blew up the murrah building. I dont believe him. He built the bomb. He described it in great detail. He drew a picture of it. Its absolutely compatible with what exploded. The issue of feeling two detonations i addressed. I didnt feel it. I heard it. Feel, heard, both. The negative blast wave makes a tremendous amount of noise. Sheering of the columns and the building pack ca ining pancakin. I can tell you, i have talked to people who are experts 17 years i have, too. All over this country and some places overseas. By all means, read the book. See who i have spoken to. Challenge the credibility if you want. Its there for you to look at. I offer it to you and take it for what it is. Remind me, what was the other point . About them not building bombs in the army. I think theres genuinely a question of how mcveigh and nichols learned how to build a bomb that was this effective. If you talk to people in federal Law Enforcement, they say its not that hard to build. As i say, the record shows that to the extent that we know about mcveigh and or Nichols Building devices, we have evidence of pipe bombs blown up in arizona, fooling around with small bottle bombs on the nichols farm in michigan. Nothing on the scale of the bomb that was detonated on the day. I think its a real question of how they built it with the confidence to know that it was going to blow as devastatingly as it did. It is one of the genuine unanswered questions. Does anybody else have a question who hasnt asked one yet before we come back okay. Go ahead. Could you talk a little about your interview with strasmauer . Sure. There are many there are a number of interesting, troubling, fascinating figures in this story. One of them is a German National who was living at elohim city for four years, from 1991 until the summer after the bombing. Its a real mystery to figure out who he is. Over the years, there have been suggestions that he was some kind of intelligence agent, either working for the germans or that he might have been working for some u. S. Intelligence or Law Enforcement agency. There have been suggestions he was a true believing nazi. His grandfather was one of the earliest members of the nazi party. Maybe he went to he will meeloh wage war. I talked to him for four days straight. It was absolutely fascinating. The reason he became involved in the investigation was primarily because he had met mcveigh at a gun show in 1993. He had given mcveigh his business card. Two weeks before the bombing, it emerged he was asking for andy and said he would be coming through shortly. Did mcveigh go to elohim city in the days before the bombing . In the book i found no conclusive evidence but a lot of evidence to suggest he might very well have done in search of other help. Another lead in the investigation that was completely ignored. It also raises the question, what does he know . Was he involved in the plot . Just to give you the short version, because some of it is supposition, some guess work. The impression i got of him from meeting him and talking to him about these things is i dont think he would have spoken to me if he had been involved in thed. Having said that, i think he knows a lot. He didnt tell me what he knows. I think he and mcveigh were extremely good friends. He talked fondly about mcveigh. He had this incredible memory of their every interaction which suggests he wasnt just ten minutes at a gun show in 1993 but was a relationship that went on longer than that. The impression i got is here he was, his father was a prominent politician in germany, he had a fascinating background which i dug into which hasnt been previously known that he spent time in israel. He was put on patrolling duty near the Golan Heights with the israeli army. He met general aton who was the architect of the 1982 invasion of lebanon. He had remarkable access to all kinds of high level people. He goes back to germany, in the german army and going to intelligence work. He confirmed this to me. It seems that he had some kind of intelligence related connection going. He comes to the United States. One of the first people he con ve contacts is a cia operative who was interested in hiring him to do black ops operation on Drug Trafficking on the u. S. mexico border. He couldnt go and work for him because it fell through. Everything i found out suggests he fell apart at that point. He became listless. He didnt know what to do. No interest in getting a job, in leaving the United States. He fell in with a lawyer whose job is to represent members of the radical far right. He preyed on his hospitality for a while, on the hospitality of his sidekick. They decided to send him to elohim city and marry a young woman and get a green card and get a life and get out of their hair. His response when he got there was to start arming the place to go around gun shows, buy up cheap weaponry, rifles and talk about a showdown with the fbi that they expected to happen after waco. He was he became soassociate with criminals that passed through elohim city. I think he and mcveigh had an association. I think he knows who else is involved in the bombing. He would not go there with me. After the bombing when his name started circulating and the head of the fbi investigation wanted to go after him, he left the country in a hurry. He wanted to go and grill him in berlin and find out everything he knew. He was overruled. Two u. S. Attorneys and an fbi agent got on the phone with him, labb lobbed softball questions and moved on. The mystery was left hanging. He reminds me of the broader Osama Bin Laden family. They should have been the first people the fbi talked to and instead because they had connections, because george bush was friendly with members of the family, they were flown out of the country. Something similar happened. He had political connections. He was allowed to leave. That was the end of that. Another huge missed opportunity in the investigation in my opinion. Lets do one more question. I can we have been going for a while. One more. Keep it brief. Thank you. Operation patriot conspiracy. The failure to investigate the right wing extremists was partially responsible and the unsatisfactory resolving those issues of waco and ruby ridge was partly responsible for the bombing. I was surprised and i was expecting an investigation into Operation Patriot conspiracy which has been run by the fbi. The papers have come out where they were infiltrating every a lot of right wing groups. Let me stop you there. I know the question. I did investigate it. It was an operation the fbi one of the few domestic terrorist investigations the fbi got through. It started in 1991 because an informant told the fbi that he had heard among a group of texas militia people that they were plotting to assassinate fbi agents. The informant had health problems. He wanted money. Everything he said turned tout be pretty unreliable. The story about attempting to assassinate fbi agents turned out not to be true. He kept coming up with new stories. He knew how to play the fbi. He came out with a story about someone trying to sell Stinger Missiles on the bloack market. That turned out not to be true. My investigation of what happened, including talking to the people who started it, is that it was a total wash. The informant was not reliable. It gave them nothing of any substance. There are people who believe that somehow it was this all encompassing investigation by the fbi into the radical far right and points to some kind of secret knowledge that they had of the bombing before it occurred. I found no evidence to suggest that whatsoever. If theres no more questions, i thank you very much. Im going to be signing books. Appreciate you listening. Thank you. All the best. [ applause ] you are watching a special edition of American History tv during the week wh. Tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, we will tour an exhibit of the u. S. Holocaust memorial museum. American history tv, now and over the weekend on cspan3. Every saturday night, American History tv takes you to College Classrooms around the country for lectures in history. Why do you know who lizzy boa borden and raise your hand if you heard the jean harris murder trial before this class. The true meaning of the revolution was in this transformation that took place in the minds of the american people. Were going to talk about both of these sides of the story here. The tools, the techniques of slave owner power. We will talk about the tools and techniques of power that were practiced by enslaved people. Watch history professors lead discussions on top ikz ranics f American Revolution to 9 11. Lectures in history is available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. 25 years ago, on the morning of april 19, 1995, a massive truck bomb exploded outside the alfred p. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people. At 5 30 p. M. That day, president clinton and attorney general janet reno addressed the press and nation from the White House Briefing room. The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens. It was an act of cowardice and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it