The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh (original) (raw)

There were many outraged press notes and letters when I said that McVeigh suffered from “an exaggerated sense of justice.” I did not really need the adjective except that I knew that few Americans seriously believe that anyone is capable of doing anything except out of personal self-interest, while anyone who deliberately risks—and gives—his life to alert his fellow citizens to an onerous government is truly crazy. But the good Dr. Smith put that one in perspective: McVeigh is not deranged. He is serious.

It is June 16. It seems like five years rather than five days since the execution. The day before the execution, June 10, The New York Times discussed “The Future of American Terrorism.” Apparently, terrorism has a real future; hence we must beware Nazi skinheads in the boondocks. The Times is, occasionally, right for the usual wrong reasons. For instance, their current wisdom is to dispel the illusion that “McVeigh is merely a pawn in an expansive conspiracy led by a group of John Does that may even have had government involvement. But only a small fringe will cling to this theory for long.” Thank God: one had feared that rumors of a greater conspiracy would linger on and Old Glory herself would turn to fringe before our eyes. The Times, more in anger than in sorrow, feels that McVeigh blew martyrdom by first pleading not guilty and then by not using his trial to “make a political statement about Ruby Ridge and Waco.” McVeigh agreed with the Times, and blamed his first lawyer, Stephen Jones, in unholy tandem with the judge, for selling him out. During his appeal, his new attorneys claimed that the serious sale took place when Jones, eager for publicity, met with the *Times’*s Pam Belluck. McVeigh’s guilt was quietly conceded, thus explaining why the defense was so feeble. (Jones claims he did nothing improper.)

Actually, in the immediate wake of the bombing, the Times concedes, the militia movement skyrocketed from 220 anti-government groups in 1995 to more than 850 by the end of ’96. A factor in this growth was the belief circulating among militia groups “that government agents had planted the bomb as a way to justify anti-terrorism legislation. No less than a retired Air Force general has promoted the theory that in addition to Mr. McVeigh’s truck bomb, there were bombs inside the building.” Although the Times likes analogies to Nazi Germany, they are curiously reluctant to draw one between, let’s say, the firing of the Reichstag in 1933 (Göring later took credit for this creative crime), which then allowed Hitler to invoke an Enabling Act that provided him with all sorts of dictatorial powers “for protection of the people and the state” and so on to Auschwitz.

The canny Portland Free Press editor, Ace Hayes, noted that the one absolutely necessary dog in every terrorism case has yet to bark. The point to any terrorist act is that credit must be claimed so that fear will spread throughout the land. But no one took credit until McVeigh did, after the trial, in which he was condemned to death as a result of circumstantial evidence produced by the prosecution. Ace Hayes wrote, “If the bombing was not terrorism then what was it? It was pseudo terrorism, perpetrated by compartmentalized covert operators for the purposes of state police power.” Apropos Hayes’s conclusion, Adam Parfrey wrote in Cult Rapture, “[The bombing] is not different from the bogus Viet Cong units that were sent out to rape and murder Vietnamese to discredit the National Liberation Front. It is not different from the bogus ‘finds’ of Commie weapons in El Salvador. It is not different from the bogus Symbionese Liberation Army created by the CIA/FBI to discredit the real revolutionaries.” Evidence of a conspiracy? Edye Smith was interviewed by Gary Tuchman, May 23, 1995, on CNN. She duly noted that the A.T.F. bureau, about 17 people on the ninth floor, suffered no casualities. Indeed they seemed not to have come to work that day. Jim Keith gives details in OKBOMB!, while Smith observed on TV, “Did the A.T.F. have a warning sign? I mean, did they think it might be a bad day to go into the office? They had an option not to go to work that day, and my kids didn’t get that option.” She lost two children in the bombing. A.T.F. has a number of explanations. The latest: five employees were in the offices, unhurt.

Another lead not followed up: McVeigh’s sister read a letter he wrote her to the grand jury stating that he had become a member of a “Special Forces Group involved in criminal activity.”

In the end, McVeigh, already condemned to death, decided to take full credit for the bombing. Was he being a good professional soldier, covering up for others? Or did he, perhaps, now see himself in a historic role with his own private Harper’s Ferry, and though his ashes molder in the grave, his spirit is marching on? We may know—one day.

As for “the purposes of state police power,” after the bombing, Clinton signed into law orders allowing the police to commit all sorts of crimes against the Constitution in the interest of combating terrorism. On April 20, 1996 (Hitler’s birthday of golden memory, at least for the producers of The Producers), President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Act (“for the protection of the people and the state”—the emphasis, of course, is on the second noun), while, a month earlier, the mysterious Louis Freeh had informed Congress of his plans for expanded wiretapping by his secret police. Clinton described his Anti-Terrorism Act in familiar language (March 1, 1993, USA Today): “We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.” A year later (April 19, 1994, on MTV): “A lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.” On that plangent note he graduated cum laude from the Newt Gingrich Academy.

In essence, Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders. Details are supplied by H.R. 97, a chimera born of Clinton, Reno, and the mysterious Mr. Freeh. A 2,500-man Rapid Deployment Strike Force would be organized, under the attorney general, with dictatorial powers. The chief of police of Windsor, Missouri, Joe Hendricks, spoke out against this supra-Constitutional police force. Under this legislation, Hendricks said, “an agent of the F.B.I. could walk into my office and commandeer this police department. If you don’t believe that, read the crime bill that Clinton signed into law in 1995. There is talk of the Feds taking over the Washington, D.C., police department. To me this sets a dangerous precedent.” But after a half-century of the Russians are coming, followed by terrorists from proliferating rogue states as well as the ongoing horrors of drug-related crime, there is little respite for a people so routinely—so fiercely—disinformed. Yet there is a native suspicion that seems to be a part of the individual American psyche—as demonstrated in polls, anyway. According to a Scripps Howard News Service poll, 40 percent of Americans think it quite likely that the F.B.I. set the fires at Waco. Fifty-one percent believe federal officials killed Jack Kennedy (Oh, Oliver what hast thou wrought!). Eighty percent believe that the military is withholding evidence that Iraq used nerve gas or something as deadly in the Gulf. Unfortunately, the other side of this coin is troubling. After Oklahoma City, 58 percent of Americans, according to the L.A. Times, were willing to surrender some of their liberties to stop terrorism—including, one wonders, the sacred right to be misinformed by government?

Shortly after McVeigh’s conviction, Director Freeh soothed the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Most of the militia organizations around the country are not, in our view, threatening or dangerous.” But earlier, before the Senate Appropriations Committee, he had “confessed” that his bureau was troubled by “various individuals, as well as organizations, some having an ideology which suspects government of world-order conspiracies—individuals who have organized themselves against the United States.” In sum, this bureaucrat who does God’s Work regards as a threat those “individuals who espouse ideologies inconsistent with principles of Federal Government.” Oddly, for a former judge, Freeh seems not to recognize how chilling this last phrase is.

The C.I.A.’s former director William Colby is also made nervous by the disaffected. In a chat with Nebraska state senator John DeCamp (shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing), he mused, “I watched as the Anti-War movement rendered it impossible for this country to conduct or win the Viet Nam War.… This Militia and Patriot movement … is far more significant and far more dangerous for Americans than the Anti-War movement ever was, if it is not intelligently dealt with. . . . It is not because these people are armed that America need be concerned.” Colby continues, “They are dangerous because there are so many of them. It is one thing to have a few nuts or dissidents. They can be dealt with, justly or otherwise [my emphasis] so that they do not pose a danger to the system. It is quite another situation when you have a true movement—millions of citizens believing something, particularly when the movement is made up of society’s average, successful citizens.” Presumably one “otherwise” way of handling such a movement is—when it elects a president by a half-million votes—to call in a like-minded Supreme Court majority to stop a state’s recounts, create arbitrary deadlines, and invent delays until our ancient electoral system, by default, must give the presidency to the “system’s” candidate as opposed to the one the people voted for.

Many an “expert” and many an expert believe that McVeigh neither built nor detonated the bomb that blew up a large part of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. To start backward—rather the way the F.B.I. conducted this case—if McVeigh was not guilty, why did he confess to the murderous deed? I am convinced from his correspondence and what one has learned about him in an ever lengthening row of books that, once found guilty due to what he felt was the slovenly defense of his principal lawyer, Stephen Jones, so unlike the brilliant defense of his “co-conspirator” Terry Nichols’s lawyer Michael Tigar, McVeigh believed that the only alternative to death by injection was a half-century or more of life in a box. There is another aspect of our prison system (considered one of the most barbaric in the First World) which was alluded to by the British writer John Sutherland in The Guardian. He quoted California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, on the subject of the C.E.O. of an electric utility, currently battening on California’s failing energy supply. “‘I would love to personally escort this CEO to an 8 by 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says—“Hi, my name is Spike, Honey.”’ . . . The senior law official in the state was confirming (what we all suspected) that rape is penal policy. Go to prison and serving as a Hell’s Angel sex slave is judged part of your sentence.” A couple of decades fending off Spike is not a Henley hero’s idea of a good time. Better dead than Spiked. Hence, “I bombed the Murrah building.”

Evidence, however, is overwhelming that there was a plot involving militia types and government infiltrators—who knows?—as prime movers to create panic in order to get Clinton to sign that infamous Anti-Terrorism Act. But if, as it now appears, there were many interested parties involved, a sort of unified-field theory is never apt to be found, but should there be one, Joel Dyer may be its Einstein. (Einstein, of course, never got his field quite together, either.) In 1998, I discussed Dyer’s Harvest of Rage in these pages. Dyer was editor of the Boulder Weekly. He writes on the crisis of rural America due to the decline of the family farm, which also coincided with the formation of various militias and religious cults, some dangerous, some merely sad. In Harvest of Rage, Dyer made the case that McVeigh and Terry Nichols could not have acted alone in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now he has, after long investigation, written an epilogue to the trials of the two co-conspirators. Herewith, some of his startling findings.

In the end, on June 2, 1997, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on 11 counts, including conspiracy and eight murder charges pertaining to what the F.B.I. called the “OKBOMB.”

The prosecution did a good job of skirting some of its case’s weaker points, such as the fact that some explosive experts questioned whether a single fertilizer bomb could account for the extensive damage done to the Murrah building, and that no fewer than 10 witnesses claimed to have seen a Ryder truck parked at Geary Lake in Kansas—the location where, the goverment argued, the bomb was assembled—prior to the time McVeigh actually rented the truck used in the bombing. The most damaging testimony against McVeigh came from a former army buddy and his wife, Michael and Lori Fortier. The Fortiers turned State’s evidence, Michael testifying that McVeigh had planned to destroy the Murrah building because he believed that the orders to raid the Branch Davidian compound had originated there. Michael also told the jury that he had helped McVeigh case the Murrah building before the bombing. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the Fortiers claimed that they had not been involved in the bombing plot. Michael was sentenced to 12 years.

Stephen Jones continually pointed out that the Fortiers were liars and methamphetamine users, and so not reliable. But the jury was unmoved. The presentation of McVeigh’s defense was scarcely a week long. Jones often left the jury more confused and bored than convinced of his client’s innocence. Even when he succeeded in his attempts to demonstrate that a large conspiracy was behind the bombing, he did little to show that McVeigh was not at the center of the conspiracy. Jones’s case led some reporters to speculate that McVeigh himself was limiting his own defense in order to prevent evidence that might implicate others in the bombing from entering the record.

Both Playboy and The Dallas Morning News published what they purported to be confessions by McVeigh to his defense team. In both articles, McVeigh admitted to the bombing. In many circles, the confessions have been viewed as proof that only McVeigh and Nichols were directly involved in the bombing. After all, that’s what McVeigh was reported to have claimed. But there is reason for skepticism. I believe that by confessing McVeigh was, once again, playing the soldier, attempting to protect his co-conspirators.

Did the government blow it? Terry Nichols was tried in the fall of 1997. From the beginning, the government’s case against Nichols was more difficult to prove than that against McVeigh. Biggest difference: Nichols was in Kansas at the time of the bombing. Also, Nichols had a good lawyer in Michael Tigar. The jury found Nichols innocent of murder but guilty of planning to bomb the Murrah building and guilty of eight counts of involuntary manslaughter. Next, the jury deadlocked during sentencing, which ruled out the death penalty. After two days of deliberation, the forewoman, Niki Deutchman, informed Judge Richard P. Matsch that the jury was hung. On June 4, 1998, Matsch stepped in and sentenced Terry Nichols to life, but the judge’s decision was not without controversy. Deutchman told the press, “Decisions were probably made very early on that McVeigh and Nichols were who they were looking for, and the same sort of resources were not used to try to find out who else might be involved. . . . The government really dropped the ball.” Some of the jurors thought that there may have been others involved who are still at large. Shortly after her news conference, Deutchman reportedly received bomb threats.

And then the government responded.

Attorney General Janet Reno blasted Deutchman’s criticism. Reno assured the nation that the F.B.I. had followed every lead in its effort to find those responsible for the blast. She denied a larger conspiracy and said that McVeigh and Nichols were the sole perpetrators of the crime.

Unfortunately, Janet Reno is likely wrong. During my investigation, which included an examination of all the McVeigh discovery materials, I unearthed evidence that the F.B.I. did not follow up on solid leads, or, if they did, failed to turn those over to the defense. I uncovered information provided to the F.B.I. by Kansas law enforcement, and by very reliable eyewitnesses who were apparently disregarded. More important, I found evidence that the F.B.I. may have withheld certain information from the defense teams during discovery, potentially tainting the verdicts against both McVeigh and Nichols.

Subject No. 1. The first time Charles Farley was shown a picture of the man he repeatedly tried to get the F.B.I. to investigate was December 10, 1997. Farley was seated on the witness stand in a federal courtroom in Denver, and the man showing him the photo did not work for the government. He worked for Terry Nichols. “Mr. Farley, . . . do you recognize the individual depicted in this picture?” asked Adam Thurschwell, one of Nichols’s defense attorneys. “Yes, sir,” answered Farley. “That was the individual that was standing at the door of the truck, the individual that gave me a dirty look,” he said.

Farley was testifying for the defense about his experience a few days before the bombing. Farley, an employee of the Fort Riley Outdoor Recreation Center, near Geary Lake, had already told the F.B.I. that on April 17 or 18, 1995, he had gone to the lake to scout out the fishing potential. After inspecting the lake, Farley drove down the road that led back to the highway, but his departure was slowed by a number of vehicles parked close to the exit—a pickup, a large stakebed truck, a brown car, and a Ryder truck—and standing near the vehicles were several men. The large truck was burdened with what he believed were bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. “It looked like it was completely weighted down,” Farley told the jury. He thought the truck was stuck due to the weight of the fertilizer, and decided to offer assistance. He quickly changed his mind when one of the men—the same man, he believed, he was identifying more than two and a half years later in court—shot him a nasty glare. The man was standing practically next to Farley’s car, and he had a number of distinguishing features, including a beard with no mustache. A few days later, after the bombing, Farley claims, he saw the man again. This time on TV, being interviewed about militia issues. By then it was known that the bomb had been detonated in the back of a Ryder truck that had allegedly been rented in Junction City, Kansas, close to Geary Lake. The bomb was said to have been made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Thinking that he may have had eyewitness information about the men who built the bomb, Farley called an F.B.I. tip line. Two weeks later an agent appeared at his workplace for an interview, but apparently that visit was as far as the government went in following this important lead, despite the fact that Farley’s information seemed to confirm the government’s suspicions regarding the location where the bomb was constructed. The F.B.I. apparently did not try to identify the individual Farley had seen up close. According to sources close to the defense, Nichols’s attorneys, believing they had learned the identity of the man Farley had seen, asked the F.B.I. during the trial for all of its information on the individual. They were given a file containing nothing more than newspaper clippings. There was nothing in the file to indicate that the F.B.I. had ever attempted to contact the man or to place him in a lineup for Farley to identify. They hadn’t even bothered to contact the Topeka television station to review the footage of Farley’s suspect.

I found this lack of investigation curious. In mid-1997, I decided to attempt to identify the mystery man, based solely on Farley’s description. Within 20 minutes of placing the first phone call to my militia contacts in Kansas, I was able to identify the man in the photo Farley had been shown in the courtroom. Subject No. 1 was hardly low-profile within the anti-government movement.

In addition to appearing on television, the man was quoted in a Kansas City newspaper article after the bombing, bragging that he was using Freemen tactics to pass off bogus liens and checks in Kansas. Several Kansas law-enforcement sources told me that, at the time these quotes were published, there was a massive federal investigation into Freemen-sponsored bank fraud in Kansas—an investigation that included Farley’s man. I have confirmed the existence of this investigation through several sources. Since Subject No. 1 was under investigation, there should have been more in his file than newspaper clippings. Information, it appears, was withheld from the defense team. Why didn’t the F.B.I. pursue Farley’s lead? The best explanation is that it posed a serious problem to the government’s cases against McVeigh and Nichols. You see, Farley saw five people, not two, with ammonium nitrate and a Ryder truck.