The FBI received a warning about the Oklahoma City bombing seven months before the 1995 attack took place, but failed to act on the tip-off, a new book reveals.
Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were told by an informant that an attack was coming and that the Oklahoma City federal building was among the targets.
The source, Carol Howe, had impeccable credentials and had infiltrated a white supremacist compound which had ties to Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the deadly truck bombing, which killed 168 people and injured around 700.
But according to Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, by journalist Margaret Roberts, the federal government ignored the intel, allowing McVeigh to carry out his evil plot.
She says the FBI hushed up Howe’s story after the bombing because it contradicted their own narrative that McVeigh was a ‘lone wolf’.
In fact he had significant links to white supremacist groups who could have been to blame, writes Roberts, a former news director of the true crime TV series America’s Most Wanted.
The bombing was, at the time, the deadliest terrorist attack on US oil and remains the third most serious by loss of life.
On April 19, 1995, McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City.
It was packed with fertilizer, diesel fuel and other chemicals and exploded just after 9am, carving out a massive chunk out of the building.
Among the dead were 19 children.
McVeigh, a former Army soldier, was arrested days later with prosecutors arguing he acted alone.
But Roberts claims that this was not the case and in fact a witness could point to disturbing links to a group of white supremacists.
In her book she said Howe had infiltrated a white-supremacist enclave called Elohim City, on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border, after being taken there by Dennis Mahon, a member of a group called the White Aryan Resistance.
She was undercover in Elohim City for eight months leading up to the bombing and after falling out with Mahon – she claims he sexually assaulted her – the ATF offered her $120 a week to spy for them.
Howe became known as CI-183 and spied on Mahon and others who were suspected of illegal firearms and explosives crimes.
Known as ‘The Blonde Nazi’, Howe later said she filed between 50 and 150 written reports to her ATF handler, Angela Finny, in exchange for cash payments and expenses.
Rather than McVeigh acting alone, the plot Howe uncovered involved what she called ‘The Big Three’ white supremacists in Elohim City: Mahon, who is currently in federal prison for another bombing, convicted bank robber Michael Brescia and his roommate Andreas Strassmeir, a German national who DoJ tried to interview about the bombing, but found he had returned to his homeland. German authorities refused to make him available without a guarantee he would not face the death penalty.
In September or October 1994 Howe told her handlers that the three men wanted to ‘blow up federal buildings’
Roberts writes: ‘The bomb plot was already entering its decisive phase. According to Howe, the terrorists had developed a list of three potential bombing targets including Oklahoma City’s Murrah Building.
‘Howe said the conspirators made three separate scouting missions there in 1994 and 1995 including one accompanied by Mahon and Strassmeir in December 1994’.
Howe knew of McVeigh by his alias ‘Tim Tuttle’ and that he operated a ‘satellite cell’ outside of Elohim, which he had visited more than once in 1994 including at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
In yet another twist, McVeigh called Elohim City asking for Strassmeir on April 17, 1995, the day the bomb truck was rented in Kansas.
The FBI is said to have been given another warning about the bombing five days before it happened but again did not act, Roberts writes.
The Oklahoma City Fire Department’s dispatch chief received a phone call from the FBI on the Friday before the bombing, warning of a possible terrorist threat.
Roberts calls Howe’s testimony ‘astonishing’ and points to the involvement of up to 20 domestic terrorists in the bombing.
But all of these lines of inquiry were shut down as McVeigh was portrayed as the sole suspect.
Rather than being the ‘mastermind’, McVeigh could have been a ‘satellite figure who followed orders as a good soldier’, Roberts writes.
Howe’s story was due to be reported by ABC News but the TV network allegedly worked in ‘cooperation’ with the Justice Department and ‘suppressed the biggest news story of that year’.
‘The fix (was) in’, Roberts writes.
Howe had been prepared to testify at McVeigh’s trial but Judge Richard Matsch of Federal District Court in Denver refused to let her do so.
Instead she was put on trial on charges she threatened to blow up buildings in 15 cities: she was acquitted.
McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in June 2001 at the age of 33.
Two of his accomplices, Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols, were charged and jailed over the bombing but Roberts argues that the plot went far beyond them.