The search for John Doe No. 2 took a farcical turn last week. Outside a Holiday Inn in Bloomington, Minn.. four TV cameras joined a stakeout for another possible John Doe No. 2. Busy negotiating with camera crews to move back, the FBI agents on the scene failed to notice that the suspect had emerged from the hotel and driven off in his car. A clumsy chase, involving two dozen law-enforcement vehicles, ensued through the rush-hour traffic, until the man was finally flushed from his car at gunpoint. The “suspect” turned out to he a law-abiding inspector for the gas company.
In J. Edgar Hoover’s day, FBI agents who violated the director’s cardinal rule"Never embarrass the bureau"–were transferred to the Butte, Mont., field office. The FBI’s current director, Louis Freeh, reacted to the embarrassing headlines with indifference. According to participants at the “leads” meeting held each afternoon at FBI headquarters to track the progress of the ease known as OKBomb, Freeh’s attitude was simply: Next?
The search for bodies is over; the bomb-gutted Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building will be torn down. The death tell stands at 167, including two bodies still missing. The OKBomb investigation may drag on for weeks and months, unless there is another lucky break. Last week, in recognition of the long haul ahead, the Justice Department announced that the investigation will be “reorganized” into a single task force run by a yet-to-be-named prosecutor. Thousands of tips continue to pour in, including one from a man who insisted his ex-wife was John Doe No. 2, and most are about as useful. But few law-enforcement insiders doubt that, sooner or later, Freeh and his team will catch the bombers.
A senator who knows Freeh describes him as “grimly determined” to solve the case. On the other hand, says this senator, Freeh is “always grimly determined.” Less than two years after taking the FBI’s top job, Freeh, 45, has attained a reverent following in Washington. Within the FBI, which he is methodically shaking up, he is sometimes called “The Boy Director” or “Hoover with kids.” A former FBI street agent, prosecutor and federal judge, he is the most intensely hands-on boss since the FBI’s founder. Unlike his infamous predecessor, however, he is a family man who is regarded as so incorruptible that he once officially censured himself for losing a cellular telephone.
“He is the most powerful FBI director since Hoover,” says Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A White House official gushes that Freeh is a “genuine American hero.” The politicians seem to want to believe in Freeh. Congress has promised by Memorial Day to send President Clinton a bill giving Freeh and the FBI new license and new resources – including 1,000 new agents – to combat domestic terrorism.
Freeh is being given special powers because, for the first time since the days of J. Edgar, Americans are frightened of the enemy within. In Hoover’s day, it was leftists and Klansmen and black militants. In the nervous ’90s, it’s right-wing militia groups and foreign terrorists. Hoover used every trick he knew, from blackmail to illegal bugging, to penetrate subversive groups. By the late ’60s, FBI agents joked that half the Klan and all of the American Communist Party were on the federal payroll as informants. Freeh starts out at a distinct disadvantage in his new mission. Precisely because Hoover routinely violated the civil rights of his targets, Freeh must operate under restrictive guidelines adopted in the wake of FBI scandals in the 1960s and ’70s. Agents now protest that they are handcuffed from infiltrating militant groups.
In fact, as Freeh acknowledged last week in congressional testimony, federal agents already have enough legal authority to investigate and penetrate potentially violent fringe groups. But agents out in the field are afraid to use it. Tarred by scandals and lawsuits in the past, the Feds are worried that if they take any risks at all, they stand to wind up before a congressional investigating committee. The bureaucratic hesitancy is revealed in an order sent out to the FBI’s 57 field offices on March 10, six weeks before the Oklahoma bombing. The directive, NEWSWEEK has learned, instructs the agents to begin gathering intelligence on right-wing militia groups in their area. But it goes on to bar the agents from recruiting any new informants or even from retaining newspaper clips in FBI files without sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation. In the field, most agents just went through the motions. “People here were gun-shy,” says a West Coast field agent. “They don’t want to get burned.” At Freeh’s behest, the Justice Department plans to reinterpret the rules to give FBI agents more latitude.
Local law-enforcement officers complain that the Feds suffer from “Weaver fever.” The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms do not want to provoke a repeat of the Randy Weaver siege in Idaho, during which federal agents shot the son and wife of a white supremacist who was wanted on a minor gun violation. The flaps over the Weaver case and the more catastrophic burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, have made agents at the FBI and the ATF exceedingly cautious, say local and federal authorities. As a result, rural “militiamen” are free to threaten prosecutors and judges with impunity. In the Montana hamlet of Roundup, for instance, an extremist named Rodney O. Skurdal has issued his own “citizens declaration of war” against the state and federal governments. Skurdal is wanted by the state for fomenting terrorism, and a sidekick who is holed up with him, Leroy schweitzer, is wanted by the Feds for tax evasion. But the local police told NEWSWEEK that they don’t dare go up the mountain road to his cabin to root them out for fear of being outgunned. When the local authorities asked the Montana office of the ATF for help, the answer came back, “absolutely not.” The ATF agents indicated that they wanted no more Randy Weavers.
When the Feds do investigate extremist groups, turf struggles sometimes get in the way. There are more than a half-dozen federal law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and Customs, and they are notorious for petty feuding. The rivalry between the FBI and the less prestigious ATF, which is part of the Treasury Department, has been particularly egregious. Agents laugh about “the battle of the field jackets”: wherever a press photographer might appear, agents make sure to wear their jackets emblazoned with the initials of their agency in large block letters. Already, NEWSWEEK has learned, some FBI agents are complaining to the White House that the ATF had information on two of the figures in the Oklahoma bombing–James and Terry Nichols-but failed to follow up or share the intelligence with the FBI. ATF officials acknowledge that they had received a report from the local sheriff’s office about the Nicholses’ peculiar interest in bomb-making, but scoff that it was “nonspecific, low-level information.”
So far the ATF and the FBI are cooperating reasonably well in the field investigation, say other officials. Freeh is determined to keep it that way. He has no patience with turf battles; “Share your toys,” he instructs his minions. Freeh is not without a sense of humor. Asked about the comparisons to J. Edgar Hoover, Freeh said that he “doesn’t have Clyde,” a sardonic reference to Hoover’s live-in aide, Clyde Tolson. But Freeh has a no-nonsense style of leadership. A year ago, when James Ahearn, head of the FBI’s Phoenix, Ariz., office, publicly referred to Attorney General Janet Reno as a “social worker,” Freeh told him to gather his belongings and had him escorted out of the building. Ahearn was only a week away from retirement. Old hands in the bureau now grumble about “Freeh speech.”
With his deep-set eyes and taut expression, Freeh can seem messianic. After becoming FBI director, he traveled to Sicily to give a fiery speech vowing to avenge the mafia assassinations of two Italian jurists who had worked with him to break the Pizza Connection heroin ring in the late 1980s. “We do not fear you any-more,” Freeh proclaimed, standing in an ancient church in Palermo. “We will root you out from under every rock. From the dark places where you hide!” But he also knows the value of patience. In 1990, he was sent by the Justice Department as a special prosecutor to Atlanta to build the case in another bombing–of a federal judge and a civil-rights worker. The investigation was in chaos; the various FBI field offices were fighting with each other, and the trail was growing cold. Freeh requested a wiretap put on a small-time seam artist already in custody named Walter Leroy Moody. Moody had an unfortunate habit of talking to himself, and the FBI’s microphone recorded him muttering, “Kill those damn judges . . . I shouldn’t have done it, idiot.” Moody was sentenced to prison for more than 400 years.
Freeh is bringing the same slow-and-steady approach to OKBomb. Agents assigned to the task force are being told to expect to stay in Oklahoma “for at least a year.” At Fort Riley, Kans., the locals are referring to the FBI’s barracks compound, shielded by flatbed trucks and concertina wire, as “Camp FBI.” Last week a private investigator who works near Fort Riley thought he had worked out a deal with a onetime girlfriend of prime suspect Tim McVeigh to sell her story to his client–a tabloid TV show. Within a half hour of his phone call to the tabloid show, the FBI swept in and seized the woman for questioning. The private dick says he hasn’t seen her since. Investigators around Fort Riley are looking for evidence that McVeigh and his confederates were engaging in gunrunning schemes off the array base, possibly to finance the bomb plot. Soldiers who served at Fort Riley say that the base is notoriously “leaky”: night-vision goggles, grenades and rifles, even rocket launchers have mysteriously disappeared. Last week gumshoes found traces of explosive and detonator cord in a state park near the military base. Witnesses had seen a suspicious-looking Ryder truck in the park before the blast; it was reportedly Louis Freeh who suggested that divers search the lake where evidence was found.
Meanwhile, down in Kingman, FBI agents were picking over McVeigh’s trail. Last March, McVeigh was reported to have rented a video of a Jeff Bridges/Tommy Lee Jones movie about mad bombers called “Blown Away.” Last week the FBI collected all 28 copies of the movie and dusted them for fingerprints. Other agents knocked on doors, showing residents about 10 photographs of possible new suspects, one of them a dark-haired woman.
Speculation about the origins of the plot has been all over the place. One theory held that MeVeigh was a mere “mule” for a cabal of embittered Special Forces commandos. Lately, however, investigators have been theorizing that McVeigh was the ringleader after all. He may have been stupid about his cover, registering in motels under his own name. But investigators believe he was smart enough to have built the simple bomb that destroyed the Murrah building. “He has a very high IQ,” said a federal source familiar with the suspect’s military record. Other agents are beginning to wonder if MeVeigh’s army buddy, Terry Nichols, is not the elusive John Doe No. 2. Though he looks nothing like the FBI’s description of a swarthy, beefy man with a tattoo, the bureau’s sketch of JD2 was based on the memory of a clerk at the truck-rental agency who didn’t get much of a look at the suspect. After three weeks, say these investigators, what emerges is a portrait of a pair of very angry white men who hated the government- but were not really aligned with an organized group. “Wherever we look,” said one, “it’s Terry and Timmy, Terry and Timmy–and nobody else.” Last week investigators found a September 1994 receipt from a store in Kansas for a ton of ammonium nitrate, an ingredient in the Oklahoma bomb. The receipt had MeVeigh’s fingerprints on it–and it was found in Terry Nichols’s home. It is still quite possible, of course, that MeVeigh was part of a larger conspiracy. The only question is how long it will take to crack.
Federal agents are eavesdropping more than ever– but new figures show they rarely target suspected bombers or other domestic terrorists:
Wiretaps have risen sharply, from 106 in 1981 to 554 in 1994.
But the vast majority are for suspected drug crimes; federal agents have not wiretapped for arson, weapons or explosives since 1988.
Federal judges have not refused a wiretap for six years.
Only 17 percent of all conversations recorded yield incriminating evidence.
Average cost per wiretap: $66,783.
SOURCE: ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER
After leads turned up only a series of innocent men, the FBI refocused its search last week, building on personal connections to its lone suspect, Timothy McVeigh.
Federal agents find traces of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil at Geary Lake, a Kansas state park near Junction City, where McVeigh rented his Ryder truck. Witnesses say they saw a similar truck at the lake days before the bombing; others say they also saw a blue pickup mating Terry Nichols’s at the site.
An APB goes out for Robert Jacks and Gary Land, two drifters who raised suspicion by leaving a trail of motel registrations overlapping McVeigh’s trek from King-man, Ariz., to Perry, Okla.
At about 6 a.m., heavily armed FBI agents wake Jacks and Land at the Kel Lake Motel in Carthage, Mo., and take them into custody, questioning them for the next 18 hours. In King-man, investigators return for a second day to the mobile home of Michael Fortier, an army friend of McVeigh’s, to search for clues.
Land and Jacks, freed at midnight, declare their innocence: “I’m a drunk,” says Jacks. Agents in Blooming-ton, Minn., pursue another possible John Doe No. 2 after an eight-hour stakeout, but release him three hours later. At a Kingman video store, the FBI confiscates 23 copies of a psyche-bomber movie, “Blown Away,” that McVeigh rented in March.
Agents investigate reports that MeVeigh bought ammonium nitrate at the True Value hardware in Kingman last year. A video of McVeigh’s arrest, shot by a patrol-car camera, may show a vehicle pulling over, too, but fails to yield a plate number.
After 16 days of harrowing work, the rescue teams in Oklahoma City call off their search and hold a mass memorial service. The final death toll stops at 167, including 19 children. The bodies of two women remain unfound.
