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