The Guardian, UK Conspirators On May 16, Timothy McVeigh is due to be executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing. He claims the blast was all his own work. But, Jon Ronson discovers, there were probably others, government agents even, who knew what was afoot Jon Ronson Guardian Saturday May 5, 2001 Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is a conspiracy theorist. He believes that a shadowy elite of bankers and industrialists and politicians are plotting in secret to take over the world, disarm gun enthusiasts and implement a sinister New World Order - a world government that will destroy anyone who disobeys. McVeigh considered the Murrah building in Oklahoma City to be the local headquarters of the New World Order. Sure, McVeigh was fully aware that innocent secretaries and receptionists would be killed as a result of the massive truck bomb he detonated on April 19, 1995. But he was a keen Star Wars fan and he compared those innocents to the "space-age clerical workers inside the Death Star. Those people weren't storm troopers. But they were vital to the operations of the Evil Empire. And when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, the movie audiences cheered. The bad guys were beaten. That was all that really mattered." It is, therefore, churlish of McVeigh to scornfully dismiss - as crazy paranoid nuts - the legions of conspiracy theorists who believe that the truth of the Oklahoma City bombing has yet to be officially recognised. McVeigh is seething about this inside his death row cell. He is due to be executed on May 16. He feels the conspiracy theories are tainting his impending martyrdom. "You can't handle the truth," he has said. "And the truth is that it is pretty scary that one guy can do this all alone." The conspiracy theories centre on a bizarre white separatist encampment on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border called Elohim City and two of its regular visitors: a flamboyant neo-Nazi called Dennis Mahon and an extraordinary German called Andy Strassmeir. McVeigh says the Elohim City conspiracy theories are nonsense, a red herring. But I didn't know what to think. They seemed pretty convincing to me. Perhaps I am becoming a conspiracy nut. Whatever, I wanted to meet the alleged co-conspirators. It would, at least, be interesting to ask them how it felt to be widely considered, by conspiracy theorists, to be the hidden hands behind the Oklahoma City bombing. It was a Monday morning in early April. Dennis Mahon was jumpy and on the run in Arizona. "It drives you crazy," he said. "Thousands think I was involved. I've started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotised and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me." This is true. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, many passers-by claimed to have seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City with unknown others. One witness drew a sketch of a John Doe who looked remarkably like how Dennis Mahon might look in dark glasses and a pencil moustache. "Maybe there's somebody out there who looks like me," said Dennis. "I'm just about ready to turn myself in and tell them, 'Okay motherfuckers, I did it'. But I didn't." Then Dennis showed me his scar - the result, he said, of a stress-related intestinal infection. But for all of this Dennis Mahon seemed secretly thrilled to be a central player in the alternative history of the Oklahoma bombing. Columbia Pictures is even considering making a movie of the story I am about to tell. "It'll be a hell of a good movie," he said. "I hope Tom Berenger plays me. But one guy said Danny DeVito's going to play me. That'll devastate me. I'll leave the country." Dennis peered through the curtains of our secret rendezvous location: Room 315 of the Hampton Inn near Phoenix airport. "The Feds are on my tail!" he stammered. "The bastard sons of the FBI followed me here. See that white car?" "Why are they following you?" I asked. "Well, Tim McVeigh did all his training over there," he said, pointing west to Kingman, Arizona. "And he's going to be executed. And they're afraid there might be retaliation for that. And there very well might be. There very, very, very well might be." Dennis Mahon is a veteran neo-Nazi. He was famous before the Oklahoma bombing conspiracy theories. When you see him in old Ku Klux Klan recruitment videos from the 80s , he looks striking and quick-witted. Now he is jowly, the spitting image of the actor John Goodman. "Yeah, I'm an old guy now," says Dennis. "I'm an old comrade. I've seen changes. More lone wolfism. One man one act. These stupid Klan guys want to be circus clowns. And the Klan's targets are just little negroes. And then they get drunk in a pub and talk about it. You've got to raise your sights a little bit. If you're going to get 10 years for calling somebody a nigger, or throwing a rock through a synagogue window, you might as well go and do a McVeigh. And I think the kids are learning that." Dennis Mahon glanced out of the window at the white car. "I don't believe they can hear us because . . ." He paused. "Did you get the room at the last minute?" "Yes," I said. "Well, I think we're okay," he said. Dennis sat on the bed. "I'd never heard of a Tim McVeigh," he said. "I'd heard of a Tim Tuttle. Tim Tuttle was a real good patriot. Tim Tuttle was a highly decorated army guy from the Gulf War and he was travelling through the area and people wanted me to meet him." "Did you meet Tim Tuttle?" I asked. "Yes," said Dennis. "I met Tim Tuttle, but I didn't know he was alias Tim McVeigh. I met him at gun shows. He sold military stuff, knives, gun parts, camouflage uniforms. I remember he had real short hair and real intense eyes and the real long narrow nose like yours." Dennis scrutinised, and misinterpreted, my Jewish nose. "It's a good nose," said Dennis. "Don't get me wrong. Better than mine. Mine's been broke. And we talked about Waco. And I said, 'What comes around goes around. If they keep doing this terrorism on our people, terrorism's going to happen to them.' " "That's what you said?" "That's what I said to him. He said, 'Probably. Probably so.' " "Carol Howe testified that she was at your house when Tim Tuttle telephoned you shortly before the Oklahoma bomb," I said. "Yeah, well," said Dennis, sharply. "That was another Tim. Okay? Another Tim. His name was Tim Buttle." We talked about Carol Howe - about the strange love affair at the heart of the conspiracy theories. Carol was a Tulsa society girl and a champion horse rider. She attended private schools and won some local beauty contests. Her father Bob was an oil executive. Her mother Aubyn was a charity hostess. But Carol got in with a druggy crowd and she ended up jumping off a roof and breaking her feet. While she was convalescing from her injuries, she began to idly telephone the local "Dial-A-Racist" hotline and listen to the recorded messages: "The international corporations and Jews and banks control America, and they're out to enslave and destroy the white race." She fell in love with the voice as she lay in her sick bed. The voice belonged to Dennis Mahon. She sought him out. "I met her in a restaurant in Tulsa," said Dennis, "and she comes on crutches. Here's a beautiful young woman who's really in bad shape - you know, physically - hobbling round on crutches trying to fight for her race. And my heart went out to her. She was strikingly beautiful and highly intelligent. Super high IQ. I think she had an IQ of 130. Way up there. She was a lot smarter than I was. She was a very rich girl, a debutante. I saw her house. Six bedrooms. Five car garage. Very wealthy." Within minutes of meeting Carol, Dennis had formulated some big plans for her. "I was going to get her on Oprah. Most of our women are not very intelligent. All they can say is 'nigger this' and 'nigger that'. She could have been our Aryan spokeswoman." "Did you fall in love with her?" I asked. "I tried not to, I really did," said Dennis. "I tried to keep it on a professional level. But it was very hard. She was 23 years old. And she had a big swastika tattoo on her arm. I got a bit weak. I did fawn over her. And, yes, I had an intimate relationship with her. I finally said, 'Let's just forget about this whole thing and get married and have children.' " "Would you have given up neo-Nazism for her?" "Oh yes," said Dennis. "In order to raise a family you have to make pretty good money. But no. She was like a Patty Hearst. She wanted to get into the guns and the explosives." So Dennis made Carol some bombs. "We let them off out in the woods," said Dennis. "And she was . . ." He broke off. His face flushed red. "She couldn't make love to me fast enough after that. She loved the bombs." "She testified that you raped her," I said, "and that's why you split up." "Well, she's a lying little snitch," said Dennis. "What really happened was that I finally got so tired. I knew that eventually she was going to make a bomb and hurt herself real bad and I'd be drawn into it. And I would have gone to jail." Dennis said it was an amicable split. (Carol testified that he threatened to kill her.) Dennis said he wanted to see her happy. He wanted to introduce her to eligible boys. So he took her to a place called Elohim City. "It's a white separatist community," said Dennis. "They're fundamentalists, but it's really nice. Lots of good single men out there." Elohim City is, for conspiracy theorists, the linchpin of the story. I have been told many times - by conspiracy-minded relatives of bombing victims, by local journalists and Oklahoma City councillors - that Elohim City is a terrorist training camp. It was certainly the hideout of the Aryan Republican Army, who committed a two-year spree of bank robberies using explosives. And it was home, for a year and a half, to a man called Andy Strassmeir. "He was this tall, tough-looking guy," said Dennis. "A deep German accent. They called him Andy the German. I learned that his visa had run out and he was head of security out at Elohim City. I got to be pretty good friends with him. He told me he was very highly trained. Like our Green Berets. Or your SAS. He really knew his stuff. And he had trained a lot of good people at Elohim City. One time he had almost 30 young men, and women too, drilling them in full soldier drill. And they did just as good as any highly trained army unit in this country." "That makes Elohim City sound like a training camp," I said. "Well," he said, "after Waco they were very fearful they could be next." So Dennis took Carol to Elohim City to meet boys. But there was something that he didn't know. After Dennis had threatened to kill Carol, she reported him to the police. Then the local Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - the ATF, the same government agency that raided Waco - approached Carol and asked her to become an undercover informant, and spy for them on Dennis and Elohim City. She agreed. In the months leading up to the Oklahoma bombing, Carol filed a series of reports to the ATF. In one, she reported that Andy Strassmeir had declared, "It's time to go to war," and, "It's time to start bombing federal buildings." In another, she reported that Strassmeir had travelled to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah building as a potential target. In a third, she reported that Elohim City's patriarch, Reverend Robert Millar, preached a Holy War against the Federal Government, and suggested that April 19 might be a good day to start that war. Immediately after the bombing, Carol Howe identified Timothy McVeigh as someone she saw walking through the Elohim City forests with Andy Strassmeir. She also testified that she overheard Dennis Mahon take a telephone call from "Tim Tuttle" - the alias McVeigh used. "Carol had a lot of boyfriends at Elohim City," said Dennis. "But she'd scare them off. You know. 'Hey! Let's make a bomb!' That kind of talk tends to scare guys away." Dennis paused. "Especially when they may actually be planning something." "I'm sorry?" I said. This was an extraordinary thing for Dennis to say. Dennis remains to this day a close friend of the people at Elohim City. Until now, he has always denied that the community had anything to do with the Oklahoma City bombing. Was he now implying that they may have actually been involved? "Before that bomb went off in Oklahoma City," said Dennis, "they got rid of her. They told Carol to go back home. They said, 'We need to be by ourselves for a while.'" "Who said that to her?" I asked. "Her last boyfriend broke up with her and said, 'Maybe you ought to go to Tulsa. Stay away for a while.' She was away from Elohim City for almost two months before the bomb went off. Which is probably a good thing." Dennis is a conspiracy theorist, but he said he doesn't believe the conspiracy theory that he was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. "I think Andy Strassmeir was," he said. "Or at least he knew about it. I've been trying to contact him for years. I've always defended him. And now he won't return my phone calls. And I've been banned from Germany. Why is that? So I'm taking all the heat and he's run off to Germany." Dennis said that if Andy Strassmeir wasn't involved, perhaps a crack team of Iraqi Republican Guards were, acting under the orders of Saddam Hussein. "There's quite a few Iraqis in Oklahoma," he said. "Those guys are highly trained in improvised munitions and explosives. Whereas Tim was not. Certainly one of them could have trained Tim. There are 600 Iraqi Republican Guards in the Oklahoma City area." The conspiracy theories were getting crazier. I wanted to get back to the facts. And this is a fact: on the morning of April 19, 1995 - just as Timothy McVeigh's yellow Ryder truck packed with three 55-gallon drums of liquid nitromethane pulled up outside the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City - a death row prisoner in Arkansas called Richard Wayne Snell asked his guard if he could watch the TV news. The guard agreed. Snell was to be executed within hours. Getting to watch CNN was just about his final request. Snell had murdered a black state trooper called Louis Bryant and a pawn shop owner called William Stumpp, whom Snell had mistakenly believed to be Jewish. Snell had also plotted, in 1983, to blow up the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. He only abandoned the plan when the rocket-launcher he'd been practising with exploded in his hands. He took this as a sign that God didn't want him to go ahead with the plan. Snell's co-conspirator in the 1983 plot was a neo-Nazi called James Ellison, who lived at Elohim City and was, in fact, married to Reverend Millar's granddaughter. Within the more hard-core factions of the American militia movement, Snell was a hero and a martyr: a respected preacher and political prisoner. His supporters were outraged that the Arkansas governor had chosen April 19 for the execution date. They considered it a deliberate kick in the teeth. April 19 is holy day for anti-government activists and conspiracy theorists. On April 19, 1993, Federal agents ended the siege at Waco. David Koresh's Branch Davidian church went up in flames. On April 19, 1775, 400 British government troops attempted to disarm the citizens of Lexington, Massachusetts. A hundred colonists shot back, the first shots of the American Revolution, the "shots heard around the world". (When I visit American militias and patriots and neo-Nazis, they often ask me what I, a Brit, thinks of the Lexington uprising. I explain that I'm not au fait with the ins and outs. They are scandalised that our syllabus doesn't teach this pivotal moment in British history.) So executing Snell on April 19 was perceived to be an insult levelled at the American militia movement. The guard on death watch duty agreed to Snell's request. He turned on CNN, just as news was breaking of the bombing of the Murrah building. Snell had already warned his prison guards that his death would be avenged. And now, the penitentiary's death watch log noted, Richard Wayne Snell watched the breaking news and he "smiled and chuckled and nodded". Shortly afterwards, he was executed by lethal injection. His good friend and spiritual advisor, the Reverend Robert Millar, transported
