Oklahoma City Was An Inside Job

The Feds have always been like this

Sep 11, 2024

Recently,

published a fantastically detailed article outlining the Managerial elites ongoing quest to turn the apparatus of the Security State against its own citizens. It was focused specifically on the Nuclear Energy sector, but obviously, this trend is taking place across the breadth of the federal government. However, one minor point stuck out in my autistic brain and so I felt compelled to write a whole article on it.

The Oklahoma City bombing, which, fair enough, this was actual, unambiguously confirmed (and devastatingly effective) right wing terrorism ... although this notably leaves out the inciting role played by Ruby Ridge and Waco, without which it’s unlikely that McVeigh would have blown up the FBI’s Murrah Building. That isn’t to defend McVeigh, just to point out that the heavy-handed actions of the Federal government played the crucial inciting role.

Nowadays, Right-Wingers are familiar with the role the FBI played in organizing and facilitating things like the Gretchen Whitmer “kidnapping plot,” and the degree to which federal agents have infiltrated organizations like the “Patriot Front,” to the degree that it’s debatable whether its even a real organization or just a government psyop. But many people don’t realize that the Feds have always been like this. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US Security State made a concerted effort to fabricate a new threat (ie. “Muh Racists”), and thereby justify its continued existence in the post Cold War era. They did this throughout the ‘90s until 9/11 presented them with the opportunity to confront an actual (if much overblown), external threat. But now that the Global War on Terror is winding down, we are seeing a return to a policy that had begun in the 90’s. As a case in point, I would like to present the surprisingly compelling case that Oklahoma City was an inside job. But, first, a little context on what the FBI was up to during this period:

Operation Patriot Conspiracy (PATCON)

Beginning in 1991, the FBI began a large-scale infiltration of various right-coded organizations, including White Nationalist and Patriot Movement militias. Operation “Patriot Conspiracy”, or PATCON, began in Austin, TX with the infiltration of the Texas Light Infantry (TLI). To justify the operation, the FBI alleged that an informant had revealed a plot to murder two Austin-based FBI agents. Although it soon became clear that the threat was “not as imminent as originally feared,” with the suspects telling undercover agents that the killings would only take place “after the US government had been overthrown” at some unspecified date, the funding and scope of PATCON continued to grow, expanding into other states and targeting additional organizations. From J.M. Berger’s paper PATCON: The FBI’s Secret War Against the ‘Patriot’ Movement:

In April 1991, FBI headquarters gave the San Antonio field office its blessing to launch the PATCON Group I undercover operation in support of [Victor] Reed’s efforts. Group I undercover operations are better-funded and more ambitious than routine undercover investigations and are reserved for special circumstances in which a specific potential crime is suspected.
On paper, the predicate for PATCON was the verbal threat against two Austin-based FBI agents (who answered to the San Antonio field office), but in practice, its goals were strengthening Reed’s cover by showing he had useful allies and collecting information about rumored efforts to recreate The Order […]
By November, an FBI headquarters review of PATCON found that the threats against the agents that justified the undercover operation were “not as imminent as originally feared” and had been referenced only in “vague fashion” since the original report. […]
Despite all this, the review concluded that PATCON was “well focused” and said it had “not expanded beyond the intent of the authorization.”
But the operation was about to expand, dramatically. PATCON would would serve as a “vehicle to collect evidence of the criminal activity of suspected domestic terrorism organizations such as ‘The Order,’” an FBI memorandum explained. The PATCON investigation would quickly cross state and organizational lines.

So, essentially what happened was an FBI informant (Victor Reed, to be precise - who would go on to become second in command of the Aryan Nations), overheard some guys in a militia talking shit about killing Feds, and it was used as justification to spin up a country-wide infiltration operation of right-wing organizations. Note also that the FBI would continuously bring up “The Order” in these early documents, despite the fact that the organization Reed had actually infiltrated was the Texas Light Infantry (TLI). The TLI was a bunch of “survivalist” types who liked to go out and LARP as paramilitary on the weekends with their buddies. The Order, on the other hand, was a White Supremacist group (consisting of a total of 17 members) who robbed a couple of armored cars in the early ‘80s, and set off a firebomb in a movie theatre, which caused no deaths or injuries. The Order, such as they were, were all arrested in 1984 after one of their members turned informant for the FBI. Conflating the TLI and The Order in 1991 was akin to conflating The Oathkeepers with the Atomwaffen today (not that anybody would do that).

At any rate, the Feds expanded PATCON to the point where they were infiltrating groups all across the country, sometimes running them (in the case of Reed), and sometimes even creating them, such as the so-called “Veterans Aryan Movement,” which was 100% composed of undercover agents who would try to form “alliances” with other groups. We can get a sense of what the scene was like from an interview given by Johnny Bangerter, who was a prominent member of the AN:

It was well known that at any Aryan Nations event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants. Another handful were sent by watchdog groups such as the SPLC to infiltrate us. It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD. It was just a big mess […]
We quickly came to learn, first hand, the tactics used in a sting operation. It was always the same thing. They would come up to you and say “Nigger this” or “Jew that,” talk about automatic weapons and suggest you join them in criminal actions, sometimes violent criminal actions like leveling a courthouse or killing a federal judge. We knew those kinds of conversations were entrapment and conspiracy. And we would tell people, “if someone comes up to you and starts talking like that, PLEASE don’t engage them in conversation.” If they brought up automatic weapons or if they wanted us to mess with explosives or commit any crimes that would result in a prison sentence, they were probably federal agents, informants, or operatives of some sort and working against us. It was a dead giveaway. That’s just not how we talked. That’s how they thought we talked. That’s how they wanted us to talk.

Bangerter is an interesting character, and one that features in the Oklahoma City story (as we’ll see). As the official spokesman for the AN, Bangerter was a fairly prominent far-right figure, and would frequently appear on television shows like Geraldo or The Montel Williams Show. He was sort of like a less retarded Nick Fuentes, always saying very incendiary things and was one of the corporate medias favorite boogeymen. He was also related by marriage to Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge, and was, obviously, very vocal in his criticism of how that went down. But one thing is clear, whatever you think about Bangerter’s politics, he was clearly not a terrorist. Yet, the FBI would continue to attempt to set him up. Take for example, later in that same interview:

I became so paranoid and brushed up against so many sting operations. I just wanted it to go away … it was like a scene out of the most horrible nightmare you can imagine. One agent tried to get my brother and I to go get on a plane under fictitious names and fly to San Diego, drive and pick up 500 M1 Garand Rifles to take them to the mine in Las Vegas, where 300 Las Vegas skinheads (who were supposed to rally there) would then use the guns to take the city of Las Vegas hostage and demand the release of The Order from prison. These were the kind of stings that were proposed.

Again with “The Order.” Why are the Feds so obsessed with this insignificant criminal gang from the previous decade? It’s almost like that’s all they’ve got. But anyway, you may be asking yourself at this point, what does all this have to do with Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing? Well, as former FBI informant turned whistleblower John Matthews would later explain, and as Bangerter could obviously attest, the PATCON objectives would quickly change from “infiltrate and monitor” to “infiltrate and incite.” And, as Berger notes in his paper:

Its unclear what value the collected intelligence held in the final analysis. The only PATCON targets ever prosecuted were already under investigation by the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, and none of the specific terrorist plots alleged in the FBI’s records ever came to fruition. […]
Meanwhile, Timothy McVeigh literally drove through the middle of PATCON’s investigative landscape without attracting notice. McVeigh interacted with members and associates of the targeted groups, but there is no evidence that the intelligence collected by PATCON ever came into play during the investigation of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

Berger presents this as an intelligence failure on the part of the FBI, but there is, of course, an alternative interpretation: McVeigh was not identified by PATCON because he was in fact an FBI asset, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Or, as Wendy Painting puts it in her book Aberration in the Heartland of the Real:

Immediately after leaving Buffalo and up until the morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh made connections with a number of individuals either targeted or operating under PATCON, or both. More than one informant has come forward to say that his handlers knew about McVeigh’s (and friends’) terroristic escapades prior to the bombing. Certainly, in a way that can only be described as uncanny, his geographic meanderings line up, from Texas to Tennessee to Utah to New Jersey to Arizona and so on; as do his actions and the specific relationships he sought. The question is begged: Was McVeigh the Forrest Gump of right-wing domestic terrorism, always in the right place at the right time, or was he working for somebody? If he wasn’t, he probably should have been.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that after leaving active duty, McVeigh returned to his hometown of Buffalo, NY, where he joined the National Guard. One of the alleged plots PATCON was attempting to uncover was plans by nebulous anti-government forces to steal small arms and ammunition from National Guard depots. As part of their efforts to thwart such “threats,” the FBI began working closely with a number of National Guard units, including, notably, the New York National Guard.

McVeigh saw heavy action in the first Gulf War, including being a turret gunner on a Bradley IFV during the infamous Bulldozer Assault. Testimony of family and friends indicate that he was certainly not in a good place psychologically after he returned home. But, the question remains: would McVeigh have been simply another unfortunate war veteran, sleeping on his fathers couch and working his dead-end job as a security guard, if he had not been recruited and radicalized by the FBI’s PATCON initiative? His situation brings to mind that of Adam Fox, the unemployed autistic “mastermind” of the Whitmer kidnapping plot, who lived in the basement of a Michigan vacuum shop before being radicalized by undercover FBI agents.

After the Ruby Ridge incident in August 1992, PATCON reports warned (of course) of immanent reprisals. This required (of course) more funding for PATCON. Five months later, McVeigh would pack up his meagre belongings and head out on the road, selling military surplus gear and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows across the country, where he made contacts with members of various militias. Although he gave conflicting reasons to various acquaintances for leaving New York, it’s notable that he told several people, including his sister and the original public defenders assigned to his case that he left as a “military consultant working hand in hand with civilian police agencies,” and that he had been “recruited by the government while serving a four to five month period in the National guard,” and tasked with ferreting out “Neo-Nazis and other problem troops.” From Painting:

McVeigh made a very strange confession. He told Coyle and Otto [his defense team at the time] that, while in the National Guard (which he had joined after leaving active duty army service), he had been recruited to work undercover as part of a domestic security operation. McVeigh said his mission was to infiltrate and report on Neo-Nazi’s and other domestic terrorism threats. McVeigh then said that after having discovered the bombing plot, he reported it to his handlers but was instructed to continue in his role, remain embedded within the conspiracy and even go so far as to participate in the bombing; but ensure that only a couple of windows were blown out of the Murrah building. McVeigh expressed his shock that the Ryder could have caused as much damage as it did and wondered out loud if someone may have switched the truck at the last minute without his knowledge.

These claims may have simply been the delusional fantasies of a schizophrenic, and McVeigh would later retract this claim and take full credit for the attack. But it is notable that he would often maintain, even to the end of his life, that he would be “rescued” by his government handlers before his execution. In any case, even if McVeigh himself was not officially affiliated with the government, many of his co-conspirators certainly were. Oh, that’s right, there were co-conspirators.

The Co-Conspirators

If you are not well-versed in the intricacies of a thirty year old terror attack, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by a “Lone Wolf.” That’s certainly the way its been portrayed and remembered in the corporate media, but that’s most certainly not how it was understood at the time. Every single eyewitness at the scene reported seeing at least two suspects, sometimes three. The FBI immediately put out an APB for two suspects, labelled John Doe #1 and #2. McVeigh roughly matches the description of John Doe #1, but John Doe #2 has never been found.

A few months after the bombing, the FBI quietly shut down their search for John Doe #2, and the prosecution focused their case on McVeigh, painting him as a Lone Wolf. During his trial, the prosecution never even established that McVeigh had been at the scene, because they couldn’t find a single eyewitness to testify that they saw him alone. Instead, they relied solely on McVeigh’s own confession in which he claimed full responsibility for the attack.

So who were these Others Unknown?

Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols: Old Army Buddies

The only two suspects besides McVeigh to be implicated by the DOJ were two of his old Army buddies, Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols. Fortier’s involvement seems to be limited to attending some gun shows with McVeigh, and having “limited prior knowledge” of the attack. He received a 12 year sentence after taking a plea deal in which he testified to being present during the planning of the Oklahoma City bombing, and selling weapons for McVeigh that he knew to be stolen. Nichols received life in prison for his role in acquiring ammonium nitrate and aiding McVeigh in the construction of the bomb.

It’s notable that neither of these men had any known ties to any of the militia groups McVeigh was associated with, and neither were in Oklahoma during the bombing, so could not possibly have been John Doe #2. Additionally, some have even called into question whether the bomb materials acquired by Nichols would have been sufficient to cause the level of damage seen at the Murrah building. This would fit with McVeigh’s original statement, that he had only planned to “blow out a few windows,” and that the bomb he and Nichols built was not the bomb that went off on April 19th. Or not the only bomb. Especially when you consider Stephen Colbern.

Colburn was a former chemist and bomb-making enthusiast associated with the Arizona Patriots, an anti-tax militia located in Kingman, Arizona (Fortier’s hometown). In 1994, Colbern was arrested for possession of illegal firearms, skipped bail, and hid out in a trailer in Bullhead City. Colbern was given McVeigh’s contact information by Roger Moore, but claimed he never actually him in person.

This seems unlikely though, as Colbern was discovered by the US Marshalls, during a fugitive investigation, to be sharing a P.O. Box with McVeigh at the Kingman post office, where he would frequently pick up mail on McVeigh’s behalf. Colbern’s roommate would later identify McVeigh to investigators as someone who visited Colbern in their trailer, and the two would discuss building ammonium nitrate bombs. From Painting:

When the FBI arrived to search his trailer in Bullhead City, Colbern was not there, but agents found bags of ammonium nitrate inside a truck parked in the back yard. It took about a week for the FBI to locate Colbern in Oatmen, about twenty minutes from Kingman and forty from Bullhead City. Colbern was working as a dishwasher at a local restaurant but, according to his boss, about three weeks before the bombing he had taken off, saying he had to attend to his mother who had a stroke. Colbern did not come back to work until the weekend after the bombing.

It’s currently unclear why the FBI chose not to pursue the investigation of Colbern.

Roger Moore

Roger Moore is the most likely candidate for the role of Timothy McVeigh’s government “handler.” Moore worked for the Civilian Materiel Assistance (CMA) group in the 1980s, a civilian enterprise ostensibly providing humanitarian aid to anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua. However, the CMA appears to have mainly been a CIA front organization, used to illegally ship weapons and other military equipment to the Contra’s in the infamous Iran-Contra affair. According to Berger’s PATCON paper:

After the Iran-Contra program was exposed to the public and closed down amid Congressional investigation, Posey [head of the CMA] reconfigured the CMA as a “survivalist-type group” opposed to the US government and aimed to make friends with a constellation of white supremacist and survivalist organizations across the country.

Given it’s history of collaboration with government intelligence, it’s unclear to what extent the CMA was a target of the PATCON operation, versus being in collaboration with it; but Moore himself seems to have been pretty unquestionably affiliated with the FBI. From 1989 to 1993, Moore would become the subject of criminal investigations from law enforcement agencies as disparate as the Arkansas State Police, the Oregon State Police, the ATF, and the Defense Department, for crimes ranging from the distribution of C4 explosives, stealing government property from military installations, selling illegal firearms, and bootlegging pornography. In each case, the investigations were soon halted at the behest of the FBI, and Moore was never charged.

Moore met McVeigh at a gun show soon after the latter had left New York, and the pair set off on the road, manning a booth together at gun shows all across the country. It was Moore who connected McVeigh to the various important contacts which would help him to carry out his “mission,” including Stephen Colbern, a meth-addled professional chemist with a penchant for bomb-making, and Andreas Strassmeir, a German-born white separatist known to have been casing the Murrah building in the months prior to the bombing. Moore also furnished McVeigh with a batch of flare guns illegally modified into improvised grenade launchers, which the pair sold to militia members at a TLI training camp. In addition, Moore enlisted McVeigh’s help in staging a “robbery” of his Arkansas home, which seems to have mostly been an operation to move a number of Moore’s legally owned firearms “off the books,” for use in illegal operations. Indeed, a number of Moore’s “stolen” firearms were recovered at an ARA safe house a few months after the bombing.

Moore would later claim to be merely an FBI “informant,” and insist that he had no prior knowledge of the attack. But FBI internal documents obtained by Jesse Trentadue in 2005 show references to an Arkansas-based operative who had infiltrated patriot groups around the country, and provided explosives to McVeigh. Of course, given his connections, Moore was never charged with anything related to the attack, or the other criminal activities he engaged in with McVeigh.

Andreas Strassmeir and the Elohim City Separatists

Andreas Strassmeir was a German ex-pat who rose to prominence within a group of “Christian Identity” separatists located in the small town of Elohim in eastern Oklahoma. In his book Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed - And Why It Still Matters, investigative reported Roger Charles makes the case, based on sources within the CIA, that Strassmeir was a known German intelligence operative, and was almost certainly working with the FBI.

Strassmeir maintained that he didn’t know McVeigh, and had only met him “once, briefly, at a gun show,” but evidence collected after the bombing shows McVeigh stayed at a motel on the outskirts of Elohim City multiple times, and his phone records show him making calls to Strassmeir’s compound. Additionally, FBI informant John Matthews would later recount to his handlers seeing McVeigh and Strassmeir traveling together at a weekend training session for the TLI.

A few months before the Oklahoma City bombing, another informant (they’re all over the place), Carol Howe, who was embedded within the Elohim City community, told her ATF handlers that Strassmeir and two other men associated with the ARA had travelled to Oklahoma City in order to case three potential bombing targets, including the Murrah federal building. She warned that the attack was being planned for April 19th, the anniversary of Waco. After Howe passed multiple polygraph tests to verify her information, the ATF, in conjunction with the INI (since Strassmeir was on an expired visa), began gearing up for a Waco-style raid on Elohim City. These plans were then called off when the FBI declared that they had an operation ongoing in Elohim City. ATF agent David Roberts would later tell 60 Minutes that the FBI had an informant in the middle of the bombing conspiracy, and he believes they took over the Elohim City investigation to protect their asset.

Despite the intel provided by Howe, and their clear knowledge of an ongoing threat from Elohim City, after the bombing, the FBI declined to investigate Strassmeir, and would instead allow him to return to Germany. From Charles:

Elohim City is only 170 miles from Oklahoma City, so one might think that after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, with the above information in FBI files, Strassmeir would be, if not first, at least in the top-most group of the FBI’s list of persons of interest. In fact, reasonable minds might expect that Strassmeir qualified as a full-fledged “suspect.”
But that is not how the FBI saw it. There is compelling evidence the FBI actually aided and abetted Strassmeir’s return to Germany (in January 1996), without his having been even informally questioned, much less officially interviewed.

Strassmeir would later, once safely back in Germany, give interviews with the press, where he would insinuate (while of course denying personal involvement) that the Oklahoma City bombing was a sting operation gone awry:

STRASSMEIR: What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur? What if he talked and manipulated the others into it? What then? The country couldn’t handle it. The relatives of the victims are going to go crazy, and he’s going to be responsible for the murder of 168 people? Of course, the informant can’t come forward. He’s scared shitless right now.

What if, indeed, Andreas.

Aryan Republican Army

The Aryan Republican Army (ARA) was a small group of “ideologically motivated” bank robbers operating in the Midwest during the early ‘90s. While McVeigh would tell investigators that he had never had any contact with the group, he told his sister in a letter prior to the bombing, that he had in fact joined up with a group of bank robbers, who he claimed were “at war with the system.” McVeigh’s phone records place him in many of the same cities, at the same time, as known ARA bank robberies. Many of the guns McVeigh “stole” from Moore ended up in an ARA safe house. And, of course, Strassmeir’s connection to the ARA was well established by multiple government informants.

It’s very likely that the unidentified operatives during the bombing, including the so-called John Doe #2, were ARA members. One member, Richard Guthrie, former resident of Elohim City, is of particular interest. Guthrie was arrested in 1996 for the role he played in the ARA bank robberies, and subsequently Epstein’d himself in his jail cell. While it is impossible to prove his death was not suicide, the timing is extremely suspicious, as it occurred the day before he was scheduled to give a television interview regarding his role in the white supremacist movement, where he had promised to reveal “explosive” information.

Even more importantly, there was the case of Kenneth Trentadue, who was picked up a few months prior to Guthrie on a minor parole violation, and subsequently “committed suicide” in his cell. The warden of the transfer center where Trentadue was being held contacted the family to inform them of the tragedy, and offered to have his body cremated at the State’s expense. Unfortunately for the Justice Department, Kenneth’s brother, Jesse Trentadue, was a tenacious lawyer, smelled bullshit, and demanded his brothers body be returned to the family. Upon receiving Kenneth’s body, it was immediately apparent why law enforcement had been so eager to cremate him; he had clearly been beaten, tortured, and had his throat slit. Although the Bureau of Prisons had originally claimed that Kenneth had hung himself, after the Trentadue family received the body they changed their story to claim that he had slit his own throat with a tube of toothpaste.

Jesse Trentadue launched a long and difficult legal battle against the government for damages. The extents to which the DOJ went to cover up Kenneth’s murder was astounding. Interestingly, the so-called “Trentadue Mission” was headed up by Deputy Acting Attorney General Eric Holder (yes, that Eric Holder). During the course of the investigation, the DOJ practiced all the same tactics we’ve come to expect from them. Crime scene photos went missing, prison logbooks were destroyed, the video tapes of Kenneth’s cell from the morning of his “suicide” were erased, ect. The Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner, Fred Jordan, who had performed the autopsy and refused to rule the death a suicide, was harassed and pressured into changing his assessment. The inmate in the cell next to Kenneth claimed to have witnessed the murder, and offered to testify in the wrongful death suit, but never got the chance because he, for some reason, hung himself in his cell before trial. Eventually, the Trentadue family would be awarded $1.1 million in damages, although the DOJ maintained that Kenneth’s death had been a suicide and the money was simply for emotional distress caused by the subsequent handling of the suicide.

The story may have ended there, but then Trentadue was contacted by Timothy McVeigh himself, who informed him, from death row, that his brothers murder at the hands of the government was most likely due to a case of mistaken identity. McVeigh conjectured that the FBI had wrongly believed Kenneth Trentadue to be Richard Guthrie. And indeed, the two looked remarkably similar, even sharing a similar dragon tattoo on their forearm (a tattoo that many eyewitnesses to the bombing had attributed to John Doe #2). Trentadue then launched a decades long legal inquiry into the handling of the Oklahoma City bombing, and much of the information we have today regarding the subsequent coverup was made available thanks to his tireless efforts.

The Cover-Up

The first thing to remember about the Oklahoma City bombing, is that no actual FBI agents died during the attack. Yes, there was an FBI field office in the Murrah Federal Building, but all the agents who worked there had apparently been out on an all-night surveillance mission the previous evening, so none of them came into work that morning. Because they were tired. Lucky them.

One thing the FBI did set about doing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, was removing all of the surveillance cameras from the scene, a fact which first responder Don Browning testified to in one of Trentadue’s many lawsuits against the government. The FBI, of course, denied this claim, but Trentadue brought receipts. He submitted for evidence a photograph of the building in question from before the bombing, with the surveillance camera clearly visible, and another photo taken afterwards, with the camera missing and the ladder which Browning claimed the FBI agent had used to remove it still leaning against the wall. The judge ordered the FBI to produce the footage from the camera, but they just claimed to have “lost it.” Whoopsie.

From the beginning, the FBI and federal prosecutors denied the existence of any usable video surveillance footage from the morning of the attack. The first evidence that this was a lie was discovered in 2004 by investigative reporter John Solomon, who uncovered an FBI internal memo stating “security video tapes from the area show the truck detonation three minutes and six seconds after the suspects [plural] exited the truck.” This means that, not only did video footage of the bombing exist at some point, but the footage showed multiple perpetrators. In 2009, Jesse Trentadue succeeded in forcing the FBI to turn over four of the existing surveillance tapes from the morning of the bombing (the existence of which they had denied for 14 years). Unfortunately, all the cameras mysteriously “malfunctioned” at the exact same time - right before the Ryder truck pulls up to the building - and were therefore useless. One wonders why we even bother to have surveillance cameras, since they always seem to break right when something interesting is happening.

One piece of evidence the FBI did not seem to lose was Johnny Bangerter’s phone records. That’s right, the same Johnny Bangerter mentioned above, who the FBI had been trying to set up for years. During the discovery process, McVeigh’s attorney Richard Reyna received a copy of Bangerter’s phone records, which showed that he had made several calls back and forth with McVeigh in the weeks leading up to the attack. Now, McVeigh had attempted to contact Bangerter, as he had attempted to contact many high-profile characters in the militia or white nationalist movements, but Bangerter had never met him or had contact with him. Certainly had never called him. When Bangerter told Reyna this, Reyna went to the phone company and pulled Bangerter’s phone records himself. Sure enough, the calls were not there. Somebody had submitted doctored phone records as evidence, assumedly to attempt to tie Bangerter to the bombing. Reyna informed the court of his discovery, and while the incident was quickly memory-holed, it was at this time the FBI called off their search for John Doe #2, and began promoting the “Lone Wolf” narrative regarding the bombing.

There are a few other glaring inconsistencies in the way the investigation was handled, such as an FBI crime lab scandal where physical evidence from the bombing was lost or destroyed. But this post is getting pretty long and I want to end with the tragic tale of Terry Yeakey, an Oklahoma City Police Officer, and one of the first emergency responders to arrive on the scene the morning of April 19th. Yeakey personally saved the lives of at least 4 people, carrying them out of the burning building, and becoming injured himself in the process. He was treated like a hero at first, but what he saw inside the Murrah building didn’t sit right with him. It’s hard to piece together exactly what Yeakey saw on site, what he knew, and what he merely suspected. He filed a lengthy after-action report with the Oklahoma City PD, but it “went missing.” He was chastised for not sticking to the official story, and told to resubmit his report, which he refused to do. But, based on conversations he had with his ex-wife, sister, and other family members, as well as a letter he wrote to friend and survivor of the bombing, Ramona McDonald, we can more or less piece together Yeakey’s claims.

Yeakey believed the ATF and FBI had advanced knowledge of the attack (a belief that seems warranted based on all the other evidence we have so far seen). He claimed to have witnessed federal agents pretending to have been in the building when the explosion went off, when they had actually not arrived until after. Some even went as far as to bandage their arms to present fake injuries. He also claimed that there had been an extra set of explosives inside the Murrah building, which had caused the majority of the damage. In other words, Yeakey believed the Oklahoma City Bombing was an inside job.

On May 8th, 1996, a little less than a year after the bombing, Terry Yeakey Epstein’d himself. The circumstances surrounding his “suicide” were so unbelievably absurd that even a CNN "journalist" cast doubts on the official narrative. According to McDonald, who had coffee with Yeakey the day of his death, he was on his way to meet with two men who he believed were Federal agents. He was nervous, because it could be a “setup,” but, the men seemed sincere in wanting to get at the truth of the bombing, and wanted to see what he had uncovered. Yeakey would be found dead later that day.

Yeakey’s car was found on the side of a country road a few miles outside of Oklahoma City. Yeakey had supposedly slit his wrists and neck with a razor blade 11 times. He then left the bloody razor blade on the dashboard, got out of his car, locked it, and walked half a mile out into an open field (climbing over a barbed wire fence to do so). He then lay down in a ditch, and shot himself in the side of the head, angled down so that the bullet passed from the top of his right temple down through his left jaw. His death was immediately ruled a suicide, and no autopsy was ever performed.

It’s unclear exactly what happened during the Oklahoma City bombing. It seems pretty clear that Timothy McVeigh was not a “lone wolf,” but he was certainly involved in the attack. Was he, as he would sometimes claim, an FBI asset? Or was he himself radicalized by agent provocateurs? What, exactly, was his actual role in the bombing? It’s possible, but unconfirmed, that he physically drove the Ryder truck up to the building. But, according to witnesses, he doesn’t seem to have been the one who rented it. It’s possible that he was simply a getaway driver - that seems to have been his role in the ARA bank robberies. Was there a second bomb? That seems a bit maximalist to my thinking, to be honest, but it does look likely that McVeigh and Nichols at least had help making it. There also appears to be some evidence that a second bomb was built in a nearby warehouse and switched at the last minute. Either way, the involvement of the Feds seems clear cut, if by nothing else than the extreme lengths (including straight up murder) that they went to in order to stifle enquiry into the affair.

Thank you for coming to my FedTalk.

The Post-Bourgeois Proletarian

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