The Oklahoma conspiracy - Part 3

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.

The Aryan Republican Army (ARA) was born when Langan and Guthrie, after their first few successful robberies, went to see Mark Thomas, a Ku-Klux-Klan leader in western Pennsylvania, in search of new recruits. Thomas, in turn, put them in touch with Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy, two young Philadelphia skinheads who had played together in a Nazi punk band called Cyanide.

Soon, with HK-91 assault weapons packed into their old guitar cases, they formed a revolutionary cell whose aims stretched far beyond bank robbery.

"Mark... believed that if the Company [a nickname for the ARA inspired by the CIA] attacked various places like utilities, railways, communications and even government installations, [then] ARA would become a force that the government would have to reckon with," Guthrie wrote in a 300-page handwritten memoir that he completed in prison before hanging himself with a bedsheet in July 1996. Bob Mathews, the inspirational leader of the Order, had advocated something very similar a decade earlier.

The members of the ARA knew each other only by their first names, or by noms de guerre like Pedro (Langan), Pavell (Guthrie), Tuco (Stedeford) and Newt (McCarthy). They gathered at the safe house in Kansas, and later at a second one in Columbus, Ohio, discussing the coming revolution as they divided up the bank spoils between themselves and a Company fund set aside to finance other guerrilla cells.

In the recruitment video, a weird Pythonesque assemblage of goose-stepping, semi-humorous drunken rants, spoof commercial breaks and racist invective entitled "The Aryan Republican Army Presents: The Armed Struggle Underground," a masked Commander Pedro shows off his arsenal of weaponry and pulls wads of banknotes out of pickle jars on his desk, all the while declaring war on the "federal whores."

"Linger on this continent at your own peril," he says. "We have endeavoured to keep collateral damage and civilian casualties to a minimum... but, as in all wars, some innocents shall suffer. So be it."

The full significance of these words did not become clear for several years. The leading academic researcher on the ARA, an Indiana State University criminologist called Mark Hamm, failed to see any meaningful link to McVeigh when he began writing about the group in 1997, even though his previous book had been about the Oklahoma City bomb and its roots in far-right political ideology.

"I thought I was done with the bombing and was now writing about a gang of bank robbers," Hamm said. But then something decidedly odd happened. In August last year, shortly before his book on the ARA was due to go to press, he sent the manuscript to Pete Langan at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he is serving life without parole.

Langan, who has consistently denied all involvement in the Oklahoma bomb and denounced the killing of innocent civilians, phoned him to say the book was fine as far as it went but was missing a crucial element the work of an Oklahoma journalist called JD Cash.

Cash is a name that anybody who looks into the Oklahoma City bombing runs into sooner or later. A former banker and property manager, he was inspired to go into journalism by a friend who was killed in the Murrah building and has devoted the last six years to a single subject, the bombing and the possible conspiracy behind it. His newspaper, the McCurtain Gazette, serves a tiny town in south-eastern Oklahoma called Idabel (pop: 6,500) and yet has somehow managed to break story after story on the bombing. ("Where the hell's Idabel?" one Justice Department official was overheard exclaiming after one spectacular leak of FBI documents in 1996.)

Despite mutterings about some kind of political agenda, Cash's information has proved unnervingly correct on numerous occasions. He got out in front of the story by forming a strategic alliance with McVeigh's defence team: he broke the ice for Stephen Jones's investigators with a number of key witnesses who were otherwise reluctant to talk to representatives of an indicted killer, and in return he got to see several confidential trial documents. He found out about McVeigh's 5 April phone call to Elohim City. He discovered Carol Howe and revealed that she had been a government informer. He was also convinced ­ and this is why Langan's tip was important ­ that the ARA was deeply involved in the bombing.

"Like many people, I had been a bit sceptical about Cash's work," Hamm explained. "But when the main character you're writing about tells you to go look somewhere, you go look." One of the first things Hamm did was to take the detailed timeline he had developed of the ARA's activities and overlay it with an equally detailed timeline on McVeigh, adding bits of Cash's research as he went.

The result was akin to placing layers of the same film animation frame on top of each other ­ a remarkable series of concurrent and complementary events that fit so snugly together it became hard, if not impossible, to regard them as simple coincidence. Much of the activity centred on the four-state area comprising Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, an area known historically as a hotbed of tax revolts, white supremacist Christian sects, Ku-Klux-Klan chapters and overt hostility to the federal government.

On 11-12 October 1993, McVeigh, Nichols and the ARA were all in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The ARA was there on an unsuccessful mission to rob an armoured truck in Springdale, 20 miles to the north; Guthrie wrote in his memoir that the job needed "at least one additional participant" and McVeigh had worked as an armoured truck driver. Fayetteville was close to Elohim City (McVeigh received a speeding ticket just four miles from the compound), and also to the home of the leader of the Arkansas Knights of the Ku-Klux-Klan who had met and possibly inducted both McVeigh and Guthrie a year earlier.

On 20 October, McVeigh wrote to his sister Jennifer saying he had met "a network of friends who share [my] beliefs". At the time of 9 out of the ARA's first 10 bank jobs, which began around this time, McVeigh's whereabouts are unaccounted for. (The one exception was a robbery in Missouri in July 1994, when McVeigh was with his ailing grandfather in New York state.)

On Christmas Eve, 1993, McVeigh alluded to bank robberies in another letter to his sister: "The Federal Reserve and the banks are the real criminals, so where is the crime in getting even? I guess if I reflect, it's sort of a Robin Hood thing..."

About a year later, according to Jennifer's testimony to the FBI, McVeigh produced a wad of $US100 notes he claimed to have received as payment for helping to organise a bank robbery; he gave her three of them, asking her to exchange them for clean money. Shortly afterwards, Jennifer paid $US25,000 in cash for a spanking new Jeep Cherokee.

On 12 September 1994, McVeigh checked into a hotel in Vian, Oklahoma, a 20-minute drive from Elohim City. He was later seen on the compound's gun range with Dennis Mahon, a close friend of Mark Thomas. Elohim City's residents at that time included two of the newer ARA members, Kevin McCarthy and Michael Brescia, the man later suspected of being John Doe 2, who also happened to be another Cyanide band member.

On 10-11 December 1994, McVeigh, McCarthy and Stedeford all attended the same gun show in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb where Langan kept a residence for his cross-dressing escapades. At around this time, McVeigh wrote to his sister about "something big" that he was planning and added: "I have also been working and establishing a network of friends so that if someone does start looking for me, I will know ahead of time and be warned. If that tip ever comes (I have 'ears' all over the country) that's when I disappear or go completely underground." Langan and Guthrie, both wanted for a long catalogue of past crimes, had been successfully living beyond the reach of the law for two years.

At the beginning of February 1995, there was another startling series of coincidences. McVeigh broke off a gunshow tour of Kansas with Nichols and headed for Arizona. The ARA, who had been in Kansas at their safe house, also dropped everything and went to Arizona ­ the first time they had ever left the Midwest. Ostensibly, according to Guthrie's memoir, the idea was to find an armoured truck to rob in a Phoenix suburb, although no such robbery ever took place.

The record of McVeigh's telephone card shows he called a few armoured truck companies in Arizona before starting his journey west. Both McVeigh and the ARA spent much of the next month and a half in Arizona.

When criminologist Mark Hamm saw the pattern, he was flabbergasted. "Are we to assume that these people came together by happenstance?" he said. "So many random coincidences have to be statistically impossible. There must have been some larger card at play."

The pattern only grew stronger once he added in the extraordinary legwork put in by the journalist JD Cash and a handful of other dogged reporters and investigators. These people had followed McVeigh's every step, quizzing anyone who might have seen him or had dealings with him, and painstakingly matched one eyewitness account against another to build up a fuller picture.

Cash even passed himself off as a far-right activist for a while, accepting an invitation to speak at a neo-Nazi rally and allowing his work to appear on websites operated by militia groups. The purpose of this subterfuge was to gain access to individuals like informant Carol Howe, Dennis Mahon and the patriarch of Elohim City.

It was an investigative strategy fraught with personal risk, particularly after Cash told his extremist contacts in 1997 that he was not one of them after all. But it also paid off handsomely, netting Cash a trove of valuable new information that Hamm now considers to be at least 90 per cent reliable. For the past six months, the two men have pooled their information and found agreement on almost every key point.

The more Hamm looked at it, the involvement of the ARA was the only plausible explanation for the bombing. Looking to Elohim City for the key to the mystery had been only half-right, because these people were not based in any one place, did not communicate anything except on a strict "need-to-know" basis, and barely knew each others' names. They moved constantly across the country under a variety of aliases, operating entirely in cash.

According to the scheme laid out above, McVeigh and the ARA had time to develop a history together. They had money to fund their ambitions. They also had the skills necessary to carry out the bombing ­ skills that McVeigh lacked on his own. Guthrie, for example, had been trained in explosives handling during his time as a Navy Seal (he was expelled for painting a swastika on a ship). Langan was a master of decoy, disguise and complex planning.

McVeigh, by contrast, knew about weapons and armoured cars and trucks but little else. The notion, put forward in the book American Terrorist, that he taught himself bomb-making out of books does not pass muster with military experts.

"In criminology, there is a theory that the two elements you need to pull off a major crime are ideology and skill. I'd add to that and say you also need organisation and fanatical dedication," Hamm said.

Ideology was something shared by everyone, their anti-government rage sharpened by the deaths of more than 80 residents at the Branch Davidian religious compound near Waco, Texas, at the apocalyptic climax to a 51-day law enforcement siege that took place two years to the day before the Oklahoma bombing.

The other three elements, however, were not apparent in McVeigh's official co-conspirators. Neither Nichols nor Fortier, the drug-addicted friend from Arizona whose trial testimony, following a plea bargain, proved crucial in securing McVeigh's conviction, had the necessary skills or experience. Both wavered in their commitment to the bombing several times, prompting McVeigh, according to Fortier's account, to storm off at one point in search of "some manly friends." A rich irony this: could he possibly have meant the transvestite Pete Langan?

The ARA, on the other hand, experienced no wavering, at least during the period in question. Hamm now believes the ARA financed several cells, some or all of which could have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing: McVeigh's operational cell, including Nichols and Fortier, whose key role was not so much to carry out the bombing as to take the fall for it if necessary; a security and fund-raising cell, essentially the hard core of the ARA; a training cell, led by Andreas Strassmeir, whose "platoon-sized groups" of militia trainees were noted in a May 1995 FBI report and prompted the federal authorities to think about a Waco-stye raid on Elohim City on two separate occasions; a bomb-building cell, and possibly a leadership cell, co-ordinated by people such as Mark Thomas and Dennis Mahon who had direct links to the elder statesmen of the far-right movement.

Why did none of this come out at the ARA trials? Why didn't the FBI, which had access to all the information, actively pursue the links to the Oklahoma bombing? The answer, as in the McVeigh trial, was largely to do with courtroom strategy. To be sure of convicting the surviving defendants ­Langan, Stedeford, McCarthy, Brescia and Thomas ­they persuaded two of them, McCarthy and Thomas, to testify against the others in exchange for reduced sentences.

That, in turn, left them with a dilemma. If they introduced the idea of complicity in the bombing, they risked tainting the credibility of the two witnesses to such a degree that the prosecution might end up with no convictions for the bank robberies at all. And that, in turn, might jeopardise the prospects of pressing bomb conspiracy charges in the future. Was the risk worth it?

According to a confidential source who was involved, the FBI was initially very active in pursuing the bombing angle but then dropped all mention of it once the two witnesses entered the government protection programme. One can only speculate exactly why the feds made that decision, but embarrassment must have played some role. Embarrassment to admit they had some idea about McVeigh's possible accomplices after all. Embarrassment, too, over the fact that in 1992 the Secret Service let Langan out of prison following a Pizza Hut robbery in Georgia and paid for him to go home to Cincinnati on the understanding he would lead the authorities to Guthrie, who had been overheard threatening to assassinate President Bush.

Langan strung the government along for six weeks before vanishing, with Guthrie, to begin a new underground life of anti-government subversion.

In his memoir, Guthrie dismisses Cash's early allegations of a link between McVeigh and the ARA as "flambéed gobbledygook", but he also describes the Oklahoma bombing as "the beginning of what lies [ahead]." He wrote: "Simply put, within 10 years it's my opinion that this country will resemble Sarajevo."

Here's one more intriguing titbit. In his witness statement to the FBI, Guthrie named one of the ARA bank robbery gang as an individual named "Tim". The FBI insists that "Tim" is a nickname for Brescia. (He wasn't arrested until six months after the others.) But isn't the FBI avoiding the more obvious conclusion ­ that "Tim" refers to McVeigh?

Part 4

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