America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (44 page)

Formed in 1993, in response to the same types of government raids that dismayed McVeigh, the ARA modeled itself on Robert Mathews's Silent Brotherhood. An eclectic group of seven core members based out of Ohio, its numbers included Christian Identity preacher and East Coast Aryan Nations leader Mark Thomas; transgendered hillbilly Peter Langan, who preferred to be called Commander Pedro; skinhead musician Scott Stedeford; a would-be Navy Seal with demolitions training, Richard “Wild Bill” Guthrie; tenth-grade dropout Kevin McCarthy; and former Eagle Scout Michael Brescia. Committed, like Mathews, to raising money for a revolution, the ARA robbed no fewer than twenty-two banks in the Midwest and the Great Plains in 1994 and 1995. The robberies were as idiosyncratic as the group itself, with members disguising themselves as U.S. presidents, Santa Claus, FBI agents, and construction workers. The robberies followed the same general pattern, as described by terrorism expert Friedrich Seiltgen:

A robbery would begin with Langan running in first, with the others following behind. Langan would take a running leap and jump over the counter, brandishing his rifle, and yell, “No alarms, no hostages” twice. The robbers used two-way radios to communicate with one another and with gang members outside. All sometimes dressed in camouflage and combat boots. When not
wearing ski masks, they often wore Halloween masks of American presidents.

While Langan cleaned out the teller drawers, a teammate would guard the lobby, yelling foreign-sounding gibberish. They never went to the vault because they believed that would take too much time. When they were finished, they would often toss a smoke grenade behind them, leaving the bank in a cloud. After racing away in a cheap “drop car,” they would transfer to another, more reliable car to complete their getaway, monitoring police radio frequencies as they went.
²⁴

The robberies were always a means to an end: to obtain enough money to help white supremacists finance a holy race war. The ARA eluded federal law enforcement until FBI agents turned Shawn Kenny, an ARA associate, into an informant. Members of the group went to prison in 1997.
²⁵

Hamm established that McVeigh and Nichols were in the vicinity of several of the ARA robberies at the time of the offenses. “It is highly improbable—if not statistically impossible,” Hamm insisted, “for nine men with such violent predispositions and such deep connections within the white power movement, all of whom needed money desperately . . . to randomly come together at the same time in the same geographic location.”
²⁶
Based on letters from and interactions with her brother, McVeigh's sister Jennifer provided vague but corroborating evidence in a December 1994 affidavit:

He (Timothy McVeigh) had been involved in a bank robbery but did not provide any further details concerning the robbery. He advised me that he had not actually participated in the robbery itself, but was somehow involved in the planning or setting up of this robbery. Although he did not identify the participants by name, he stated that “they” had committed the robbery. His purpose for relating this information to me was to request that I exchange some of my own money for what I recall to be approximately three $100.00 bills. . . .

It is my belief that this bank robbery had occurred within the recent past. I was not made aware of the details or if there were
any additional robberies involving my brother or any of his associates. I do recall that my brother remarked that the money he had in his possession represented his share of the bank robbery proceeds.
²⁷

Hamm developed additional circumstantial evidence supporting a far-right conspiracy involving the ARA in the bombing of the Murrah Building. Hamm established that Guthrie and McVeigh both belonged to the same KKK group, the Arkansas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, run by Christian Identity eminence Thomas Robb. Hamm also found evidence suggesting that McVeigh and Robb may have met as early as 1992. In examining early reports about the Roger Moore robbery, Hamm noticed that descriptions of the assailants, per Moore, matched members of the ARA, and not McVeigh and Nichols. (Although Hamm speculates that the two men provided targeting information to the ARA.) This is odd, since Moore was well acquainted with McVeigh from the gun-show circuit. Hamm even managed to get Langan on record confirming that Guthrie knew McVeigh. He also found records showing that Langan had told an undercover police officer in 1993 that the ARA intended to bomb a federal building. This potential connection between McVeigh, Nichols, and the ARA represents the third line of evidence pointing to an Identity conspiracy in the Oklahoma City Bombing.

More than anything, Cash and Hamm developed leads indicating that one ARA member, Michael Brescia, directly interacted with McVeigh and aided him in the bombing.
²⁸
This information relates to the fourth line of evidence suggesting a Christian Identity–backed conspiracy in the April 19 attack in Oklahoma City: the twenty-four witness sightings of McVeigh and/or Nichols in the presence of a stocky, olive-complexioned man commonly referred in official reports as John Doe #2. Witnesses described a man fitting that description in the presence of McVeigh days before, during, and immediately after the terrorist bombing. The Justice Department concluded that these witnesses had confused a completely innocent army soldier, Todd Bunting, for an accomplice to Tim McVeigh. A witness positively identified Bunting as accompanying McVeigh when he rented the Ryder truck in Kansas, but hard evidence clearly established that
Bunting, who looked like the sketch of John Doe #2, had visited the rental agency the day
before
McVeigh and that he had no connection to McVeigh. In other words, at least one of the witnesses confabulated two different events when implying that McVeigh had an accomplice; skeptics of a conspiracy argue that such mistakes are not uncommon. Other sightings of John Doe #2 may simply be the result of similar confabulations and the cognitive distortions generally associated with eyewitness descriptions and memories of crimes. But this explanation goes only so far. Stress can play games with perceptions, and the brain can force sudden and unexpected events into a false or distorted narrative. But many of the eyewitness accounts occurred days and even weeks before the actual bombing, and others include hallmarks of the ring of truth.

The best compendium of these accounts by witnesses comes from Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles in
Oklahoma City
,
²⁹
their excellent 2012 treatise on the bombing. They identified a number of witnesses whose encounters with McVeigh (or Nichols) and John Doe #2 coincided with unique or memorable events, which, knitted together, form a consistent narrative. This group includes Leonard Long, a black Oklahoma City commuter who nearly collided with a brown van on the morning of April 19; Long positively identified McVeigh (wearing a baseball cap) as the driver but was equally convinced that McVeigh traveled with a “stocky, dark-complexioned” passenger who “spewed racial insults” at Long. Not long after Long's encounter, and not far from the location of his encounter, another witness described two men—a stocky, olive-complexioned man and a tall white man in a baseball cap—walking toward a yellow van. Just twenty minutes before the bombing, Mike Moroz, a mechanic, told investigators about an incident involving occupants of a yellow Ryder truck; the driver, whom Moroz later identified as Tim McVeigh, was wearing a baseball cap and asked for directions to the Murrah Federal Building. Moroz also stated that there was a passenger in the vehicle. Moroz recalled the incident well, because the Ryder truck nearly hit a display when it first peeled into Johnny's Tire Company, where he was an employee, located only blocks from the explosion site.
³⁰

Similar accounts place McVeigh in the company of an unknown accomplice fitting the John Doe #2 profile days and weeks before
April 19, notably in Kansas when the bomb was allegedly being constructed. But perhaps the most intriguing account of a John Doe #2 comes from a group of go-go dancers at the Lady Godiva Nightclub in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The women recalled seeing McVeigh with two other men, one of whom matched the John Doe #2 description. McVeigh, perhaps drunk, broadcast his upcoming plans, quipping to the dancers, “On April 19, you'll remember me for the rest of my life.” Security-camera footage from the nightclub, obtained by investigative journalist J.D. Cash, appears to corroborate the account, but the footage is too grainy for a positive identification of McVeigh or his associates, and the sound is of poor quality. At first blush, the date of the visit, April 8, appears to exclude McVeigh as the boastful customer, because McVeigh is supposed to have been registered then at a motel in Kingman, Arizona, where he had just prepaid for an extra five-day stay. But Hamm established that McVeigh did not receive or make any phone calls from Kingman from April 8 to April 11, and the manager of the motel did not recall seeing McVeigh's car. In fact, the manager said that McVeigh's room looked all but unoccupied during the relevant period.
³¹

As for the other two men the dancers saw in McVeigh's company at the Tulsa club, the women managed to identify two individuals from photographs who definitely knew each other and who stayed together during the relevant time: Michael Brescia and Andreas Strassmeir. Brescia, an ARA member, bears a strong resemblance to police sketches of John Doe #2. In April 1995 Brescia roomed with Strassmeir at Elohim City, the Christian Identity compound in Oklahoma City. Strassmeir, a native of Germany, had come to the United States in the mid-1980s in search of government work. Failing to find employment, he found himself ensconced in the world of the American ultra-right. One person he definitely admits having met—only once, at a Texas gun show—is Timothy McVeigh. At the time, Strassmeir belonged to the Texas Light Infantry Brigade, a new militia group formed by Louis Beam. Strassmeir insists that he never met or talked with McVeigh again. But curiously, McVeigh admitted (to Michel and Herbeck) making at least one call to the Elohim City compound in the days leading up to the Oklahoma City attack. He wanted to talk with “Andy the German,” McVeigh said. When Joan
Millar, Richard's wife, told McVeigh that Strassmeir was not around, McVeigh responded, “Tell Andy I'll be coming through.”
³²

It is the curious circumstances surrounding Elohim City, including suspicions about Strassmeir, that present the fifth line of evidence suggesting a Christian Identity conspiracy in the Oklahoma City bombing. Hamm and Cash have developed a suggestive array of evidence connecting Elohim City to McVeigh and the ARA. It begins with Strassmeir, who admitted meeting McVeigh one time and whom McVeigh called (but never supposedly spoke with) shortly before April 19. Some witnesses contradict Strassmeir. A government informant, John Shults, told the FBI that he had attended a 1994 meeting at Elohim City that had included Christian Identity radical Chevy Kehoe and two Germans. One was named Andy, and Shults was “sure beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the other was Tim McVeigh. Shults remembered the discussion turning toward a bombing and a Ryder truck.
³³
Another government informant, Carol Howe, who lived for a time at Elohim City, insisted that McVeigh had visited Elohim City on repeated occasions, using the fake name Tim Tuttle. Howe, a one-time beauty pageant contestant, became close to Dennis Mahon, a major figure in white supremacist circles; she claimed that he had referred to the bombing of the Murrah Building prior to April 19. Mahon and Strassmeir were close associates, and Howe insists that McVeigh stayed in the company of Strassmeir at the compound. Others, including J.D. Cash and Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, claimed to have informants inside Elohim City who asserted that McVeigh had visited the compound. These informants were never named, and therefore their credibility cannot be adequately evaluated. What is clear is that a speeding ticket places McVeigh in the immediate vicinity of Elohim City in September 1994 and that McVeigh called the compound looking for Strassmeir two weeks before the bombing.
³⁴

Some argue that Elohim City closes the circle between McVeigh's chosen date of April 19, his ultimate motivation, and the attack on the Murrah Building. Prosecutors from the Fort Smith sedition trial developed evidence that Richard Wayne Snell, executed on April 19, had targeted the Murrah Building for a bombing attack in 1984. There is no evidence that McVeigh ever had anything to do with
Snell, who responded with glee at the reports of the Oklahoma City Bombing on TV while awaiting execution. But Snell did have a very close connection to Elohim City. The Reverend Millar was Snell's personal spiritual advisor, and Snell's body was taken to Elohim City for burial following his execution. Carol Howe also reported that Millar and his Identity followers spoke frequently about an imminent holy race war and about the likelihood that Elohim City would be subject to a similar federal raid. Many former CSA members, including founder Jim Ellison (who was married to Millar's daughter), had moved to Elohim City after the 1985 raid on Ellison's CSA compound in Elijah, Missouri. Howe claimed that residents of Elohim City often spoke about “striking first.”

The federal government dismissed the evidence of a conspiracy, and not without cause. The evidence that McVeigh executed the Oklahoma City attack with others as part of a Christian Identity cabal was intriguing but circumstantial. The Waco siege on April 19, 1993, remains the simplest explanation for McVeigh's choice of date for the Murrah bombing. McVeigh definitely visited Waco on the eve of the 1993 raid and definitely became infuriated with the outcome. He never referred to Snell in any letter or correspondence. Howe's account of seeing McVeigh at Elohim City changed more than once, including under oath. Shults's sighting lacks independent corroboration and, coming two years after the Oklahoma City attack, could easily have been colored by revelations in the media. Most importantly, McVeigh himself never conceded to any conspiracy.