The Oklahoma conspiracy - Part 2

On June 11, one man will be executed for carrying out America's worst peacetime atrocity. Timothy McVeigh claims to have acted alone, but new evidence reveals he was part of an undergound network of white supremacists. ANDREW GUMBEL reports.

According to the official version of the bombing, the major source of funding was a November 1994 robbery at the Arkansas home of Roger Moore, a gun collector and self-made businessman who knew McVeigh from the gun-show circuit. Although McVeigh did not commit the robbery himself ­ who did is a source of some mystery ­ he has admitted being behind it, netting $US8,700 in cash and an estimated $US60,000 in silver bars, gold bullion, jewellery and firearms.

It is not clear, however, how much of this loot was put to use. Some of the weapons were later sold, but much of the rest was recovered untouched from a storage locker in Las Vegas where it had been stashed by Nichols.

The Moore robbery only helps to account for one of several plane trips Nichols made to his mail-order bride's home in the Philippines, for which he paid cash every time. And it does not begin to explain how McVeigh ­ to take one example of many ­ repaid a $4,000 debt to his father in $100 bills a full year before the robbery.

From the start, there has been no lack of conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing, many of them absurd and many displaying the same government-hating bias that drove McVeigh. There was one claim that the bombing was a federal sting operation gone horribly wrong; another that there were explosive packs strapped to the internal pillars of the Murrah building, timed to go off at the same time as the fertiliser bomb. There is no credible evidence for either claim.

Much serious inquiry focused instead on Elohim City, a heavily armed religious compound in a remote part of eastern Oklahoma with strong links to a group of Aryan supremacists who had previously plotted to blow up the Murrah building in the 1980s.

By macabre coincidence, one of those original conspirators, Richard Wayne Snell, was executed in Arkansas on the day of the bombing ­ for the murder of a state trooper and a pawnbroker whose name sounded Jewish ­ and his body brought to Elohim City the next day for burial.

It emerged that a secret informant for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), reporting from inside Elohim City, told her handlers in late 1994 that at least two residents, a formidable White Aryan Resistance leader called Dennis Mahon and a German ex-serviceman called Andreas Strassmeir, had talked about blowing up a government installation and mentioned the Murrah building as a possible target.

She accompanied members of the commune on one of three field trips to Oklahoma City in late 1994 and early 1995. She also reported sightings of McVeigh at the compound under the pseudonym Tim Tuttle.

To many people, the link seemed irresistible, not least because one Elohim City resident, Michael Brescia, bore a striking resemblance to the composite sketch of John Doe 2, right down to the tattoo on his upper left arm. But nobody ­ not the few journalists who got into Elohim City and not, one presumes, the FBI ­ could quite join all the dots.

McVeigh admitted having met Andreas Strassmeir at a gun show in Tulsa in March 1993, and is on record as having made a brief phone call to Elohim City two weeks before the bombing, a call he now says was a part of an unsuccessful attempt to find a place to hide after 19 April. That, on its own, didn't prove much. There were reports of many other contacts and visits, but even these did not establish, without further corroboration, more than an association between like-minded people.

The ATF informant, Carol Howe, had her credibility hammered as the FBI accused her of mental instability and put her on trial for harbouring her own bomb plots. Many of the accusations against her were grossly unfair, seemingly the result of attempts ahead of the McVeigh trial to pour cold water on the whole Elohim City connection; she was acquitted of the charges against her in less than a week.

Still, there are grounds for thinking she embroidered some of the reports she filed after the bombing to justify her hastily increased government pay cheque. Those who have met her in recent years have described her as "a walking crackpipe" ­ armed, paranoid, and living under a variety of aliases in ever-changing locations for fear of reprisals from the people she snitched on.

In short, after a burst of investigative energy in the first couple of years after the bombing, the conspiracy trail appeared to go cold. But that was before people had heard of the Aryan Republican Army.

Over a two-year period, from late 1993 until the end of 1995, a small band of robbers managed to hold up 22 banks across the American Midwest. It was an unfailingly colourful affair. The ringleader, Pete Langan, would shout "No alarms, no hostages!" as he leapfrogged over the tellers' desks and emptied their cash drawers. His main associate, Richard "Wild Bill" Guthrie, would yell phrases in Arabic, or Spanish, or Serbo-Croat, just to rattle everyone.

The team would snatch and run, making sure they were in and out in under 60 seconds. To sow confusion, they liked to leave a hoax explosive device on the scene, using real gunpowder and plenty of scary-looking wires to divert police attention. If possible, they used two getaway vehicles ­ the "drop car" they would abandon, plus their own Ford van they nicknamed "the Blitzenvagon." Sometimes, a fake bomb would be left in the drop car, too.

They liked to wear toyshop masks of politicians, a touch straight out of the 1991 Hollywood heist movie Point Break. They frequently donned costumes, wigs and make-up. They never failed to display a humorous sense of occasion. One Christmas, Langan dressed up as Santa and announced: "Ho ho ho, get down on the floor." One Easter, the fake explosive came in a little basket with Easter treats in it. Whenever they took off from an establishment, they would shout out: "Bank you very much!"

Before they were caught, the bankrobbers netted about $US250,000 and, perhaps more remarkably, gave away almost nothing about their identities or their safe house in Pittsburg. Guthrie proved to be the weak link in the chain, first being cut out of new jobs because he was deemed too wild ­ he thought, for example, it was great fun to taunt law enforcement officials with announcements of the gang's exploits ­ and then betrayed to the police by a friend turned informer. Guthrie, in turn, squealed on the others.

When the FBI came for Langan, they opened fire on him in his truck (they thought, wrongly, that he had fired first), spraying him with more than 50 bullets but miraculously missing every time. They later discovered that he had shaved his pubic hair and painted his toenails pink. Yes, the ringleaders of the Midwest bank robbery gang were closet transvestites ­ and that was only the first of many secrets to be learned about them.

They were also virulent anti-government white supremacists, for whom bank robbery was merely a means to a much more ambitious end. "Make the land ungovernable ­ that's what we want to do," Langan, aka Commander Pedro, had said in an extraordinary recruitment video made at the height of the gang's success in early 1995.

Both Langan and Guthrie had frequented the Aryan Nations and other right-wing hate groups. They modelled themselves on the Order, the underground guerrilla movement that stole $US3.8m from an armoured truck in California and killed the Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver in the early 1980s before going out in a blaze of gunfire in an FBI siege on Whidbey Island, near Seattle. They were fond of a propaganda novel called The Turner Diaries, written by the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, in which a gang of revolutionaries blows up the FBI's Washington headquarters with a truck bomb. (The Turner Diaries was Tim McVeigh's favourite book, too.)

They had also read an influential neo-Nazi essay espousing the notion of "leaderless resistance" ­ developing a guerrilla-style cell structure in which nobody knew more than was strictly necessary and each element worked as independently as possible of the others.

Part 3

- INDEPENDENT