America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (45 page)

That is where the controversy stood at the time of McVeigh's execution, with some suggestions of a conspiracy but with no solid evidence to bring doubt to McVeigh's confession. But soon the government began releasing evidence that raised serious questions about the competence of its investigation. Many see in the subsequent revelations signs that the government hid and possibly even provoked, unwittingly, a conspiracy in the April 19, 1995, bombing. The truth, as it always appears to be in the thorny world of domestic counterterrorism, may be far more nuanced.

The new revelations included a provocative FBI report. “It is suspected that members of Elohim City are involved [in the bombing] either directly or indirectly through conspiracy.” So reported an FBI
document released in 2003 (that is still heavily redacted) that was written just days after the Oklahoma City bombing. The document came as part of many shocking new files released under the Freedom of Information Act three years after McVeigh's execution. The new information had not been provided to McVeigh's and Nichols's defense attorneys or, for that matter, to the government's own lead investigators in the Oklahoma bombing. The new data lent a measure of additional credibility to Cash and Hamm's theories of a Christian Identity plot involving residents of Elohim City, members of the ARA, and Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Among other things, the newly released files report that the FBI found blasting caps in the possession of the ARA that closely resembled blasting caps that McVeigh and Nichols stole from a quarry and used for their ANFO bomb; investigators recovered only a portion of the caps that should have been in McVeigh's or Nichol's possession following the attack. Additionally, among materials found in possession of the ARA, federal investigators found a driver's license with the name Robert Miller—an alias used by Roger Moore. Apparently, the FBI agents who had investigated the Midwest bank robberies took seriously allegations (popularized by Cash) that the ARA had helped McVeigh, but they did not provide that information to their counterparts in the Oklahoma bombing investigation. When he learned of this material in 2004, retired agent Dan Defenbaugh, who headed the FBI unit that handled the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, called for a new investigation. (His call was not heeded.) He expressed shock and exasperation when it became clear that the FBI had destroyed the blasting caps and the driver's license without subjecting them to forensic analysis.
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The overall performance of the FBI in its investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing brings to mind the type of behavior seen during its 1963 BAPBOMB and 1968 MURKIN inquiries. Investigators quashed leads too quickly, failed to draw logical connections in developing new leads, left gaps in the basic explanation for the crime, and withheld key pieces of information—even from their own people—at relevant stages of the inquiry. To some, the level of incompetence cannot easily be explained as merely due to chance; to them, the incompetence suggests that the government might be
hiding some darker secret about the Oklahoma City Bombing. The more radical segments of American society suggest that this secret involves a “false-flag operation,” whereby the government actually encouraged the Oklahoma City Bombing to create a pretext for increased government intervention—ironically, the kind of government intervention fictionalized at the beginning of
The Turner Diaries.
Others postulate a more rational alternative explanation for the FBI's incompetence—that the reticence to explore a wider conspiracy and the willingness to stonewall the McVeigh–Nichols defense team paralleled similar cover-ups in the past. Specifically, some say, the incompetence was the result of the FBI's need to hide deep-cover operations from the public (and would-be terrorists) and to avoid revealing embarrassing connections between the government and the very subversives that law enforcement feared. Materials obtained by terrorism scholar J.M. Berger and an investigation by a subcommittee of the U.S. Congress imply that, once again, federal law enforcement agencies would have had to expose their sources and methods—and perhaps their own negligence—had they conducted a comprehensive investigation of the April 1995 attack. Berger in particular exposed a government operation that could have, and perhaps should have, brought McVeigh and any potential accomplices into the crosshairs of federal law enforcement months before the Oklahoma City Bombing.

In 2012, using FOIA, J.M. Berger obtained records describing an undercover operation known as Patriot Conspiracy, or PATCON.
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As the name implies, the operation targeted the small-scale patriot or militia groups proliferating in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Given Americans' First Amendment rights to assemble and Second Amendment rights to bear arms, the government could do little to temper the expansion of these openly antigovernment groups. Indeed, most militia groups, then and now, lack any aspiration to terrorism, even if many prepare for a day when they will have to take up arms against a tyrannical U.S. government. But federal law enforcement remained bothered by the prospect of any of these groups becoming radicalized and taking a proactive stance along the lines of the Order. Indeed, law enforcement recovered only a small fraction of the millions of dollars stolen by Mathews's group,
and rumors persisted that the Silent Brotherhood remained active and underground, even after law enforcement had imprisoned or killed its core members.

The FBI specifically worried about Louis Beam, one of the men Mathews had provided with booty from the Order's armored-car heists. Beam, an Odinist, assumed the role of Sun-tzu to white supremacists, elaborating on concepts like leaderless resistance, which in a landscape of the growing militia movement presented a nightmare scenario for law enforcement, one where any one of a hundred antigovernment groups could, in response to some signal event, radicalize and morph into a terrorist cell. Faced with this kind of unpredictable, needle-in-the-haystack scenario, the FBI resorted to a practice that would become rampant after 9/11—that is, engaging militia groups in hopes of flushing out would-be terrorists.

To do this, the feds created their own bogus patriot group: the Veterans Aryan Movement (VAM). These undercover agents visited gun shows and antigovernment rallies, posturing as malcontented radicals, offering themselves as bait to individuals and groups that spoke about or hinted at future terrorist activity. According to Berger: “PATCON agents roved the country for more than two years collecting intelligence on . . . patriot organizations and on dozens of individuals, investigating leads on plots from the planned murder of federal agents to armed raids on nuclear power plants to a new American Revolution.” In one instance, members of VAM entangled themselves in a proposed plan, by the leader of a right-wing organization, to sell Stinger missiles (surface-to-air projectiles that can be fired with rocket launchers) to antigovernment groups. Such devices could be used to take down a passenger jet near any airport. In another instance, VAM members learned about the potential sale of night-vision goggles to ultra-right radicals and offered themselves as potential buyers.

Those in VAM navigated a narrow space between serving as deep-cover spies and acting as agent provocateurs (those who provoke, rather than monitor, criminal activity). As Berger noted, the VAM only responded to rumors of potential plots; it appears never to have initiated such plots in hopes of luring out reticent terrorists. But Berger documents a number of instances where impatient
PATCON agents pressed their targets for bolder or more aggressive action on such plots. At one point, a PATCON agent hassled a targeted radical for swifter action by accusing the genuine militant of luring the PATCON agent into a government sting. The secret government agent hoped that by falsely accusing a real radical of working for federal law enforcement, he would scare the real radical into accelerating and actualizing the missile sale.
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This practice created the same problems as similar sting operations in the past: the specter of unconstitutional entrapment. If a defense attorney can show that the government instigated criminal activity—that agents did not simply respond to or prevent a dangerous plot but actually encouraged or initiated said plot—a judge can toss out the entire case. Law enforcement is not supposed to create criminal activity to provoke would-be felons, and prosecution cases built on such tactics are effectively poisonous once they reach a courtroom.

This issue becomes even more problematic for an ongoing undercover operation, as a criminal prosecution invariably would require that an informant present himself or herself at a trial as a witness, ending his or her tenure as a potential source on future criminal activity and probably terminating the overall surveillance project. A prosecutor faces the possible embarrassment of an acquittal, one that literally and figuratively would endanger government operatives and operations. Such a calculus allowed J.B. Stoner to escape a trial for a conspiracy that ultimately led to the attempted bombing of civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth's church in 1958. In initiating the 1958 bombing conspiracy by offering Stoner money for attacks on civil rights targets, the undercover Alabama law enforcement operatives ruined their own hopes for a prosecution. Stoner may have elaborated on the proposal, but because he did not originate the bombing plan, Alabama prosecutors would not risk a trial. Similar thinking stopped the FBI from helping Alabama prosecutors subdue the Cahaba River Group for plotting the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Not surprisingly, despite two years of ongoing operations, PATCON yielded only one prosecution. Law enforcement was nonetheless happy with the results, as the operation created the type of dissension and paranoia amid the ranks
of militia groups that COINTELPRO had helped encourage within KKK groups in the 1960s.

Berger's revelations regarding the PATCON operation present students of the Oklahoma City Bombing with an alarming possibility: the chance that the government could have (or should have) known about McVeigh prior to the bombing. As Berger notes, from 1991 to 1993, “Timothy McVeigh literally drove through the middle of PATCON's investigative landscape. . . . McVeigh interacted with members and associates of the targeted groups.”
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Berger specifically documents McVeigh's interactions with members or close associates of two patriot groups: the Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) and the Texas Light Infantry Brigade (TLIB). The former group, run by Tom Posey, “started out as an anti-communist group supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, but . . . turned into a racist right-wing white supremacist group,” according to government reports.
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Posey's group lay behind the missile plot described above. The TLIB was formed and run by Louis Beam, one of PATCON's chief targets.

As McVeigh submerged himself more and more into the mind-set and lifestyle of the antigovernment racist right, he traveled the nation's gun-show circuit and met the likes of Roger Moore and Andreas Streissmeir. Moore enjoyed a close relationship with Tom Posey; Streissmeir consulted with Beam's TLIB. McVeigh made no effort to hide his radicalism, selling
The Turner Diaries
at gun shows and openly speaking about his antigovernment philosophy. It stands to reason that such activity could have attracted the interest of PATCON agents, but no evidence suggests that PATCON identified McVeigh or, for that matter, individuals like Moore and Streissmeir.

The FBI ended its PATCON operations by 1993 at approximately the same time McVeigh shifted from a revolutionary mind-set to a revolutionary plan of action. What remains unknown is how federal law enforcement evolved at this time, what operations and countermeasures followed PATCON. Clearly, militia groups and leaders such as Beam remained targets of interest to law enforcement. The use of Carol Howe as an informant suggests that federal agencies continued to monitor groups and individuals who came into contact with McVeigh.

Related and more disturbing revelations come from a little-known government investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing by a congressional subcommittee led by Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California. Following the 2004 document dump by the FBI, Rohrabacher, already suspicious of a potential conspiracy in the attack, pursued various leads in the case, among them the possible involvement of the ARA in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Every one of the living ARA members denied a connection to either McVeigh or the bombing, although the report characterized their stories as “murky, if not contradictory.” But more alarmingly, the committee could not even find one of the bombers, despite its best efforts. The committee's final report noted that Kevin McCarthy, one of the ARA members who had stayed with Strassmeir (and Michael Brescia) at Elohim City, for reasons unknown had entered the Federal Witness Protection Program. The report noted,

Continuing the attempt to locate McCarthy, the subcommittee chairman contacted the head of the Department of Justice's federal witness protection program. The official confirmed that in the past McCarthy had been in the program but had no information on his current status. Similarly, the subcommittee also discovered, through a private source, that McCarthy is no longer attached to the Social Security Number he had at the time of entry into the federal prison system. These facts raise questions about whether McCarthy is, in fact, still under some sort of federal protection as well as why the Department of Justice was unable or unwilling to help find him. It is astonishing that officials from the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies were unwilling to permit congressional investigators to question a former bank robber with a possible connection to a large-scale terrorist attack.
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