McVeigh, Timothy - "The Meaning of Timothy McVe...
By Gore Vidal
Subject No. 2.The day after the bombing, two police sketches were faxed to media organizations and law-enforcement offices across the country. They depicted two men who were believed to have detonated the bomb, John Doe No. 1 and John Doe No. 2. McVeigh, taken into custody 90 minutes after the bombing for driving without a license plate and carrying a concealed weapon, was quickly identified as John Doe No 1. John Doe No. 2 has never been identified by the F.B.I.
Shawnee County, Kansas, sheriff’s deputy Jake Mauck says he nearly fell out of his chair when, shortly after the bombing, he compared the John Doe No. 2 sketch to the photo of a known anti-government activist in his area. Shawnee County is about 50 miles east of Junction City, where the Ryder truck was rented and where McVeigh stayed overnight at the Dreamland Motel with another man, who has never been identified. Mauck says he quickly alerted the F.B.I. about his suspicions concerning Subject No. 2. For reasons that will likely never be known, the F.B.I. apparently failed to respond to Mauck’s information. Nor did it heed similar tips from Suzanne James, an employee of the Shawnee County D.A.’s office. The F.B.I. told her that agents had already investigated Mauck’s John Doe look-alike. So had they? Apparently not. One person who did investigate the man Mauck and James suspected is Mike Tharp, a reporter forU.S. News & World Report.Mauck talked to Tharp after his frustration with the Feds became unbearable. Tharp obtained a photo of Subject No. 2 and started showing it to people known to have seen a man other than Terry Nichols with McVeigh in the days leading up to the bombing. When he showed the photo to Barbara Whittenberg, the owner of the Santa Fe Trail Diner in Herington, who claims she saw John Doe No. 2 with McVeigh, she said, “I’d almost swear that was the guy.” Others to whom Tharp showed the photo believed it was the man they had seen with McVeigh. When Tharp inquired to the F.B.I. about the individual, he was given the line that is becoming all too familiar: “We’ll follow any lead.” There is no evidence the F.B.I. has even bothered to follow a lead regarding Subject No. 2.
Subject No. 3 was also named in a document pertaining to a federal bank-fraud investigation in Texas. The Texas case resulted in federal fraud charges’ being filed against several anti-government Republic of Texas (R.O.T.) members, including the group’s leader, Richard McLaren. As part of its evidence against R.O.T., the government entered videotapes of the group preparing the fraudulent bank warrants. The videos also revealed a surprise. They clearly showed that the person teaching the R.O.T. how to create the bogus documents was none other than Subject No. 3. What McLaren’s defense team couldn’t understand was why their client and virtually every other person on the tape was arrested and charged, whereas Subject No. 3 was never charged in this investigation. The defense team began to suspect a sting operation. According to court documents in the McLaren case, Tom Mills, McLaren’s attorney, asked the government for all of its files pertaining to Subject No. 3. The prosecutors, in a move explained only to the judge, filed a motion to keep Subject No. 3’s files from the McLaren defense team. The government would turn over the files only if they would be held “in camera.” In other words, the F.B.I. would make them available to the judge but not to the defense.
Undaunted by the “in camera” setback, McLaren’s defense team tried a new approach. If they couldn’t see the files, they would subpoena the man. Mills hired an investigator, who quickly located Subject No. 3 in Oregon. Mills asked the court for money to fly the investigator to Oregon to serve the subpoena. The judge agreed, but then the government did something even more unusual than suppressing files. It arrested Subject No. 3 in the middle of the night, just five hours before the subpoena would have been served. Mills spent several hours interviewing Subject No. 3 in a Dallas jail. Afterward, Mills filed yet another motion, which stated that he was more convinced than ever that the man had cooperated with authorities on some level in the past, and therefore the attorney should be allowed to view the “in camera” files. His request was again denied. Subject No. 3 eventually took the stand while the jury was sequestered. The conventional wisdom said that if he was a government agent or informer he would have to take the Fifth. But he didn’t. When asked by the judge if he was the man named in the subpoena, the subject gave a standard Freemen defense. He asked the judge to spell his name and confirm which letters were capitalized. The judge did so and the man said that the judge had spelled his name incorrectly. At that point, the government prosecutors, who had worked so hard to keep Subject No. 3 from testifying, told the judge that the man was in need of psychiatric evaluation. The judge agreed, and Subject No. 3 was never forced to explain his apparent immunity to prosecution. In April 1998, McLaren was found guilty on 27 federal counts. His defense team was never allowed access to Subject No. 3’s files.
Despite the F.B.I.’s continuing denial, what we do know is that the government inexplicably failed to investigate solid leads pertaining to Subjects No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and, I suspect, still others in their organization.
It will be interesting to see if the F.B.I. is sufficiently intrigued by what Joel Dyer has written to pursue the leads that he has so generously given them.
Thus far, David Hoffman’s The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror is the most thorough of a dozen or two accounts of what did and did not happen on that day in April. Hoffman begins his investigation with retired air-force brigadier general Benton K. Partin’s May 17, 1995, letter delivered to each member of the Senate and House of Representatives: “When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases.… For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out in the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity.” In separate agreement was Samuel Cohen, father of the neutron bomb and formerly of the Manhattan Project, who wrote an Oklahoma state legislator, “It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil … no matter how much was used … to bring the building down.” One would think that McVeigh’s defense lawyer, restlessly looking for a Middle East connection, could certainly have called these acknowledged experts to testify, but a search of Jones’s account of the case,Others Unknown,reveals neither name.
In the March 20, 1996, issue of Strategic Investment newsletter, it was reported that Pentagon analysts tended to agree with General Partin. “A classified report prepared by two independent Pentagon experts has concluded that the destruction of the Federal building in Oklahoma City last April was caused by five separate bombs.… Sources close to the study say Timothy McVeigh did play a role in the bombing but ‘peripherally,’ as a ‘useful idiot.’” Finally, inevitably—this is wartime, after all—“the multiple bombings have a Middle Eastern ‘signature,’ pointing to either Iraqi or Syrian involvement.”
As it turned out, Partin’s and Cohen’s pro bono efforts to examine the ruins were in vain. Sixteen days after the bombing, the search for victims stopped. In another letter to Congress, Partin stated that the building should not be destroyed until an independent forensic team was brought in to investigate the damage. “It is also easy to cover up crucial evidence as was apparently done in Waco.… Why rush to destroy the evidence?” Trigger words: the Feds demolished the ruins six days later. They offered the same excuse that they had used at Waco, “health hazards.” Partin: “It’s a classic cover-up.”
Partin suspected a Communist plot. Well, nobody’s perfect.
“So what’s the take-away?” was the question often asked by TV producers in the so-called golden age of live television plays. This meant: what is the audience supposed to think when the play is over? The McVeigh story presents us with several take-aways. If McVeigh is simply a “useful idiot,” a tool of what might be a very large conspiracy, involving various homegrown militias working, some think, with Middle Eastern helpers, then the F.B.I.’s refusal to follow up so many promising leads goes quite beyond its ordinary incompetence and smacks of treason. If McVeigh was the unlikely sole mover and begetter of the bombing, then his “inhumane” (the Unabomber’s adjective) destruction of so many lives will have served no purpose at all unless we take it seriously as what it is, a wake-up call to a federal government deeply hated, it would seem, by millions. (Remember that the popular Ronald Reagan always ran against the federal government, though often for the wrong reasons.) Final far-fetched take-away: McVeigh did not make nor deliver nor detonate the bomb but, once arrested on another charge, seized all “glory” for himself and so gave up his life. That’s not a story for W. E. Henley so much as for one of his young men, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Man Who Would Be King.
Finally, the fact that the McVeigh-Nichols scenario makes no sense at all suggests that yet again, we are confronted with a “perfect” crime—thus far.
One of America’s pre-eminent historians and novelists, Gore Vidal is the author of Lincoln: A Novel,among many other titles.