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[suspenseful music playing]

[car radio flipping stations]

[William Pierce over radio] It's frighteningly clear now

that there is no way to win the struggle

in which we are engaged

without shedding torrents, veritable rivers of blood.

[thunder crashing]

[radio flipping stations]

[Rush Limbaugh over radio] It's an endless parade

of the dregs of our society.

This is your country.

These are the people that live next door to you.

This is what's become of your country.

[radio flipping stations]

[G. Gordon Liddy] Neutering the Second Amendment

with the assault weapons ban,

violating the 10th Amendment with the Brady Bill,

and slaughtering citizens

using the ATF and the FBI Schutzstaffel

is shredding the Constitution.

[radio flipping stations]

[thunder crashing]

[static over radio]

[Mark Koernke] The enemy has many assets at their disposal.

The best one we have here is you.

[thunder rumbling]

- [man] Yeah, now you're on it. - I don't think so.

[man] Yeah, the red light's on.

Does it say "recording" there?

[woman] Every April 19th is bittersweet.

I remember exactly what I was doing that morning.

- [child giggling] - [Sanders] Who's in that cave?

[dramatic music plays]

[Sanders] What's on my back?

Uh, a raccoon.

[child laughs]

[Sanders] My grandchildren, Chase and Colton,

I went in and flipped the light on in their bedroom,

and I sang, "Good morning to you. Good morning to you.

We're all in our places with sunshine-y faces.

What a nice way to start a new Wednesday."

And Chase begins to giggle.

- [giggles] - [Sanders] Those are so cute.

- What are you eating, Chase? - [Colton babbling]

[man] Bye-bye.

[Sanders] I remember when I left them at the daycare...

- [man] Look at his teefers. - [Sanders] I love you.

Are we on our way to school?

[Sanders] ...there in the Federal Building.

The little donut crumbs that were on their faces.

Then, at 9:02...

[explosion]

[glass and metal rattling]

[reporter 1] It looks like part of the building

has been blown away.

We'll have to bank around the other side

so I can get a better view of it.

[reporter 2] As the chopper goes around the Federal Building...

- [reporter 3] Wow. - [reporter 2] Look at that shot.

- [reporter 3] Holy cow. - [reporter 2] Incredible.

The side of the Federal Building

has been blown off.

[people clamoring]

[man] Get back!

Get 'em back! Get 'em back!

[yelling indistinctly]

[sirens wailing]

[man over radio] We got damage and injuries

- all up and down Broadway. - [man] Get them back!

[man over radio] We need all fire, ambulances

you can get.

[ominous music playing]

[woman] It felt to me like my skin was burning off.

It was very hot,

and it was a wind so powerful

that it felt like it pinned my hair back.

[woman] I heard a very loud explosion,

and I noticed a plume of smoke

coming up from downtown Oklahoma City.

So I ran back in the house and turned on the TV.

That's where my daughter, Frankie, works.

And as we made our way closer to the building...

I said, "My daughter is dead."

[man] I had little hope.

Because Julie worked on the first floor.

And of course the first floor had more deaths

than any other floor.

[sirens wailing]

April 19th, my dad had an appointment

to go down to the Social Security building that morning.

I knew my mom went down with him.

The news starts to come in, "There's been a bomb."

When they said the Social Security building,

I mean...

everything at that moment just stopped.

[man over radio] Got two down.

They're unconscious and not moving.

I need ambulances.

[Tom Brokaw] In the heart of Oklahoma,

in the heart of the capital city,

a terrible bomb has been exploded.

The governor has had a report that six children were killed

in a daycare center.

[man] Got one here!

[man over radio] In the basement of the Federal Building,

there's a children's center.

We need to get fire department officials here

as quick as we can.

I said to my daughter, I said, "Edye, the babies."

And we take off running to the north side of the building,

and the building's gone.

[somber music playing]

[Edye sobbing]

[Sanders] My son was an off-duty police officer.

He saw his mom and his sister on TV,

he knew something was wrong.

[man] I looked up at the TV,

and I saw my mom and my sister clutching each other,

and my sister was screaming, "Where's my babies?

Where's my babies? Where's my babies?"

[sobbing] My babies were in there!

[man over radio] Have we got information

on where they have taken the children from the daycare?

[dispatcher] I have not been advised.

[siren whoops]

[Coss] Upon arrival at the site,

my partner and I went into the rubble.

I went to the back side of the building,

which would be on the side of the daycare center.

They had about 10 to 12 children laid out

on a piece of concrete slab.

They were laid one next to the other,

and at the very end to the right, I found Colton.

I knew that would be the last time I saw my nephew.

I asked a state law enforcement officer that was there

if I could reach down, hug him, and kiss him goodbye.

And he told me, "This is a crime scene.

Do not touch the evidence."

[somber music playing]

[Katie Couric] Of all the sad stories in Oklahoma City today,

the most heartbreaking may be the stories of the children

who were in the daycare center when the bomb exploded.

What is your overwhelming emotion

as you face this horrendous tragedy in your family?

Those babies were just like mine, and I loved them.

And anybody could understand the loss of a child,

but to then have to watch your child grieve

over the loss of those children,

it's devastating.

[Couric] Edye, are you confident

that the people behind this will be caught?

I don't know. I hope so.

I-- I don't know.

As a young reporter,

I used to cover Oklahoma City streets.

Usually nothing more exciting than a car crash.

You know, everyone at NBC News knew I was an Okie

because I always bragged about the fact that I was an Okie.

So there was no doubt who they were gonna send.

When I got to the site of the Federal Building,

I thought, "This can't be the place where I lived,

Oklahoma City."

It reminded me of Beirut.

[siren wailing]

It brought back memories of the Marine barracks,

and the embassy bombing,

and other terrorist attacks that I covered.

And I said, "This is Oklahoma, this can't happen here."

[siren wailing in distance]

A U.S. government source has told CBS News

it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.

[Boettcher] Everyone was thinking Arab terrorism

because there'd been an attempt

to bomb the World Trade Center...

and the bombers, they were from the Middle East.

But I went to NBC and said,

"Let me put together a team to investigate this."

The first person I thought of was Bob Sands.

I have this friend, and he had done some work

for some far right-wing people in Duncan, Oklahoma.

So I said, "Just check the boards

and see what the chatter is."

- [dial-up modem screeching] - [keyboard clacking]

[Sands] About an hour later he called and said,

"You're not gonna believe this. You need to come here."

People were just going ape over it

in the far right, the militia movement,

saying, "Who did this? What's that all about?

That's awesome."

I would just ask that you and the American people

not rush to any conclusions

unsupported by known evidence

and that we give investigators the space they need

to do their job.

[Clinton] My initial reaction was, first of all,

to try to get everybody to calm down

and not react with their words.

I didn't want to stir whatever was going on up any more.

And everyone immediately assumed

that it was a Muslim extremist attack,

and I wasn't so sure.

- [gunshots in distance] - Shoot from the waist...

[Clinton] My native state was almost like honey for bees

to attract a lot of these extremist groups,

and they moved in and out of there.

When Oklahoma City happened...

my life and experience told me

there was a very good chance that this was a homegrown plot.

On the drive up there, there's a lot going through your head.

You've got to command a major bombing investigation,

and you're thinking of all the things you have to do.

And I am thinking, "April 19th, April 19th, okay."

I just file it away.

I get a call from a nationally known reporter,

and she said, "Is this Middle Eastern?"

I said, "No, it's Bubbas. April 19th."

Two years earlier,

April 19th was the siege in Waco.

And I thought we were seeing the results of that anger

against actions on the part of the government.

My thought is it's going to be Bubbas.

[reporter] Emergency crews try to assist the injured.

[man] That day, it was overwhelming

to first go to the crime scene.

Secret Service, IRS, ATF,

multiple federal agencies were housed in that building.

I was walking approximately a block and a half

from the bomb scene.

There were two FBI agents and a sheriff

looking at this rear axle of a truck.

They believed it had come from the truck

responsible for the bombing,

and they were removing the VIN number

from the rear axle.

And I told them to, "Guard that with your life.

That's probably gonna be

the most important piece of evidence we have

in this entire investigation."

[suspenseful music playing]

We learned that particular truck had been rented

three or four days before in Junction City, Kansas.

The person who rented it went by the name of Robert Kling,

and he used a birth date of April 19th.

The mechanic that was working there

probably had the best recollection

of what he looked like.

Also he had a recollection of a person

he thought had been with him,

commonly called John Doe Number 2.

[Coulson] We sent agents all over the country,

primarily on I-35,

going north and south on the interstates.

They went to a place called the Dreamland Hotel.

They interview the owner, show her pictures.

"Yeah, he was here. His name's Tim McVeigh."

He was a very nice young man basically.

It's very shocking to think

somebody has such a deprived mind.

[Ricks] We got the registration information.

His name was Timothy McVeigh.

So an agent runs the name of Timothy McVeigh

and he gets a hit,

and says, "Boss, you're not gonna believe this bullshit,

but Timothy McVeigh is-- is in custody."

He had been arrested

an hour and a half after the bombing

in Perry, Oklahoma.

[man] Here he is in his junker getaway car

driving away from the scene of the crime.

And he gets on the thruway and he--

He thinks he's gotten away with it.

It turns out that McVeigh was missing a license plate

from his vehicle.

When the trooper starts questioning McVeigh,

he ascertains that McVeigh is carrying

an unregistered handgun.

He arrests McVeigh.

McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt

celebrating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

And it always has astonished me that...

nobody put these two things together at the time.

But for two full days, they had no idea

that he was involved with the bombing.

And they were getting close to letting him go.

It's just hard to believe.

You think it's going to be a nationwide search,

and now you're told that he's roughly 70 miles away.

[Coulson] I said, "Call them and tell them,

'Don't let that boy out.'"

You can imagine my phone ringing off my belt.

I mean, the-- the Attorney General's calling,

the director of the FBI's calling me,

"Get him out of there."

Well, I was concerned about a rescue

or attempt to kill him.

And I didn't want to be the man

who took McVeigh into custody and got him killed.

Uh, not-- not good.

I'd be working at Dairy Queen if that happened.

[ominous music playing]

[Boettcher] He was captured about 30 miles

from where I grew up.

And I thought it was foreigners.

I didn't want to believe an American could do this.

They marched Timothy McVeigh out of that jail,

and I go, "You know, it wasn't a foreigner.

This is-- this is an American doing this to Americans."

[Coss] I was a little surprised that it was an American.

I drew a conclusion pretty quick that this was payback for Waco

and the kids that were killed there.

"You killed our kids, we're gonna kill your kids."

[Shaw] When I saw him on television,

I felt like I'd seen him in the building before.

I remember being in the elevator...

and two men got on the elevator,

and one of them was McVeigh.

I always wondered if that was real

or if I imagined that, with everything else going on.

[Welch] He had that orange jumpsuit on.

And my thought was, "I hope that somebody has a rifle

and can just pick him off there."

I mean, I was really wishing for that.

[Battle-Leverett] You're looking for the monster,

and you-- and you finally get that day to see him,

and you're thinking like, "Wait a minute, is this him?"

He looked like anyone's kid.

Just your normal average Joe.

[man] He's got this look in his eyes.

I believed that in his mind

he wanted to look out at the crowd,

right straight into the cameras, and go,

"You're goddamn right I did it,

and you're cowards if you don't do the same thing."

[reporter] There goes McVeigh, the first confirmed arrest...

in the Oklahoma bombing case.

After we had McVeigh in custody,

I had McVeigh's father flown to Oklahoma City

to meet with me.

I asked him, "You know your son.

Who would be involved in this?"

And he said, "Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier." Like that.

[Ricks] We learned he had been in basic training

at Fort Benning, Georgia with a couple of guys

named Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier.

Terry Nichols was older,

but they had struck up a friendship

based on-- on their political beliefs.

We then learned Terry Nichols is now living in Kansas.

At his residence, we find the remnants of fertilizer

that was used in the bombing itself.

But one of the biggest

and most important pieces of information

is a telephone card

sold by a right-wing group called Spotlight.

We pretty much were able to trace

where they had been throughout the United States

through that calling card.

We find that Michael Fortier is now living in Arizona.

[Fortier] I think people are looking right now

for somebody to hang.

Now he may feel like there's nobody on this earth

that is in any way supportive of him.

But there is. There is.

Everybody should be supportive of him,

because he is an innocent man.

[Coulson] I interviewed Michael Fortier.

I said to him, "I need your help."

And he said,

"You don't understand. We're at war."

I said, "I'd have killed you today.

I'd have killed you now if we were at war.

I'd have killed your buddies.

We're not. You may be at war with your country.

Your country's not at war with you."

I do not believe that Tim blew up

any building in Oklahoma.

And then he said to me, "It's about the Constitution."

I said, "You're right. It is about the Constitution.

Let me tell you what's going to happen.

I'm going to indict you under the Constitution.

I'm going to convict you under the Constitution.

We'll handle your appeals under the Constitution.

And sooner or later, somebody's going to put you on a gurney

and stick a needle in your arm, and we're going to kill you.

You better decide if you're on my side or their side."

[Boettcher] Later on, after McVeigh had been charged,

his attorneys let reporters meet with McVeigh one-on-one.

The ground rule is this is not an interview,

this is kind of a "get to know you."

I had covered the first Gulf War,

and I knew he had been a veteran of that war.

And we started talking about the Gulf War,

and he kind of lit up because it was something

that he could talk about, that he felt proud of,

that he had participated in.

And then I shifted the conversation

to his feelings about the U.S. government.

And I could see a light switch go off in his eyes.

And he went cold.

And you could see the anger well up.

And I thought at that point, "This guy for sure did it."

[Sands] When Tim was identified,

I just started delving into the far right.

I went to Little Rock, Arkansas and did a lot of research there,

because back in those days,

you had to go actually look at hard paper.

Turns out way back in 1983,

this virulent racist

by the name of Richard Wayne Snell

had decided that he wanted to blow up

the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building

in Oklahoma City.

I was stunned to find out

that the far-right movement

wanted to blow up the Murrah Building.

How come we never heard about that before?

[ominous music playing]

[explosion]

[gunfire]

[man] Stay low! Get down! Whoo!

[gunfire continues]

[reporter 1] Pro-gun patriotism

is becoming more and more popular

among economically hard-pressed farmers.

[reporter 2] Traditionally strong, proud,

independent farmers are losing their farms in record numbers.

We think as many as a million family farms

were foreclosed on

during the late '70s and early '80s.

- [farmers chanting] No sale! - [Wright] There was anger

against the federal government's exploitation of farmers.

Violence starts to occur in the heartland

because they were desperate.

When Mr. Nixon was president,

he encouraged farmers to plant fencerow to fencerow.

And they did.

But then when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,

President Carter put an embargo

on grain sales to the Soviet Union.

And the result was agricultural depression.

[Ronald Reagan] The federal government mustn't shirk

its responsibility to undo some of the damage that it created.

We're doing a great deal to help farmers.

But the federal government will not bail out

every farmer hopelessly in debt.

So today I have vetoed this massive new bailout.

Ronald Reagan basically left the farmers

to-- to, um, just go bankrupt.

[farmers chanting] No sale!

[Wright] Far-right leaders saw a political opportunity.

The first wave of the patriot movement

was able to successfully mobilize farmers

into this far-right movement,

and they were willing to take up arms,

and some of them did.

[Noble] Everybody in the movement

saw the land crisis, farm crisis,

as the government and major corporations

putting farmers into a financial bind.

Where the government is making war with the American people

and selling us out.

I don't want to see our group or any group

forced against their will into a con-- confrontation.

I'm a former extremist from a group known as CSA,

the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

in Northern Arkansas back in the '70s and '80s.

[people singing indistinctly]

[Noble] For me, it was like heaven on earth.

The group was started originally by Jim Ellison

to establish a community based upon the apocalypse.

[all] ♪ Oh, Hallelujah ♪

God began to deal with us about the economic judgment,

collapse, and upheaval

that was coming upon all the world.

And especially on this country.

[Noble] He said, "How are you gonna protect yourself

when it collapses

and bad people want what you have?"

[Noble] Basically the Bible says

we have the right to use whatever the enemy uses,

and the enemy, of course, is gonna have guns.

Fire!

[Noble] We had never talked about guns before.

We had never talked about defense.

- [gunfire] - [mortar whistles]

[Noble] Over the next 18 months,

we started buying guns, buying military equipment,

and we trained so well

that a magazine in those days

called us the number one civilian SWAT team

in the United States.

[gunshots]

The church kind of went to the background.

Guns and warfare went to the forefront.

The first plan that we talked about

was the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Noble] Sort of a quasi-member of the group,

Richard Wayne Snell, he lived in Oklahoma,

was having trouble with the IRS.

Him and Jim went and cased the Murrah Building.

There was a lot of federal offices

in that building, so it seemed like a good target

of various agencies being in that building.

So we had our munitions guy

start to develop a rocket launcher,

and all the rockets would be shot at the same time

toward the Murrah Building.

One of the missiles exploded in the guy's hands

that was building them, scarred his hands real bad.

So we took that as a sign that-- from God that we weren't--

weren't supposed to do that particular plan.

[man] I was surprised as to the extent

of violence of this group,

believing that they were going to cause the collapse

of the United States of America

and that they were going to help create that collapse.

We actually learned that Richard Wayne Snell,

a member of the CSA,

shot and killed a pawn shop owner in Texarkana,

believing he was Jewish,

had killed Louis Bryant, a state police trooper.

Murdered I believe that was in '84.

Got out of my van,

and I shot Officer Bryant twice from the hip.

[reporter] The death of Trooper Louis Bryant

was especially heartbreaking for Bill Clinton.

While the governor was visibly shaken

over the slaying,

he was also angry.

They don't have a right to go around carrying weapons

and taking the law in their hands

and acting as if they're somehow playing God.

[Noble] Snell got the death penalty.

Snell's execution was to be

on the night of April 19th, 1995,

which happened to be the day

the Oklahoma City Federal Building got bombed.

In the movement, April 19th, of course,

is what's called Patriot's Day.

First shot fired during the American Revolution.

Very special for the whole movement.

Jim told me one time, he said, "I will go down in history

in the second American Revolution."

In '84, I told Jim, I said,

"So you really want all this to start?"

He said, "Yes."

I said, "So build a bomb,

and we'll start the war."

So they decided to go to find a good place

to do the bombing.

We found the gay church.

We sorta had this stereotype image in our heads

that there was just going to be this sexual orgy going on,

which of course there wasn't.

[people singing indistinctly]

[Noble] I started seeing people lift their hands up

and lift their eyes up, look up and start worshipping God.

And I identified with them.

So instantly they ceased being homosexuals in my eyes

and became Christians, and I couldn't kill Christians.

Later, I'm trying to talk to God.

And I said, "Lord, I want to-- I want to leave."

You know, "I can't handle this no more."

And the Lord spoke to me and said, "You can't leave."

[dramatic music playing]

[reporter] It looks like a battle zone.

Police and federal agents blockading the roads,

surrounding the heavily armed compound

of a white supremacist sect calling itself

the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.

They want to arrest the leader, James Ellison,

on an illegal weapons charge.

[Clinton] The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord,

they lived in log cabins.

Every log cabin had a trapdoor.

When you dropped through the trapdoor,

you were in a foxhole

with your weapon and ammunition ready.

Federal officials,

they really wanted to storm this compound

just like what later happened at Waco.

[Coulson] We knew that a frontal assault attack

on that entity, a lot of people would die.

And we didn't want that. I do not want that.

My job is not to kill people.

I know how to do it, but I don't want to.

And I didn't want to get into a shootout in the Ozarks.

They had murder on their mind, and they were doing it for God.

I found somebody I could talk to.

Actually, he came to me. Kerry Noble.

He said, "I want to make this plain.

We are not going to shoot first.

We don't want to kill anybody here.

But if y'all shoot first, I've got a Huey helicopter.

It's gonna come up.

It's got a .50-caliber machine gun,

and it's gonna start shooting holes in all of your buildings.

And in 30 seconds, every man, woman, and child

in your compound is gonna be dead."

So for four days, I went back and forth

talking to Jim, talking to Danny.

Finally on the fourth day, Jim got that revelation

that he could justify in his mind

a higher purpose in surrendering.

We get down there, and then Danny looks at Jim

and says, "I'm placing you under arrest,

but I'm not gonna handcuff you right now

because I would not wanna be handcuffed in front of my men."

I'm just bawling.

[reporter] The four-day siege ended as quietly as it began.

The FBI got more than it bargained for.

Other weapons found at the camp read like an arsenal checklist:

hand-grenade casings, blasting caps,

dynamite, and various handguns.

[Coulson] We found cyanide in huge barrels.

They were going to poison the water supplies.

[reporter] In addition to the arrest

of CSA leader James Ellison

by federal and state authorities...

[Noble] Jim ended up taking a plea bargain

on the weapons charges.

I got arrested, ended up plea-bargaining,

five-year sentence.

My dream for moving there

had turned into a nightmare.

But the movement continued to grow.

[ominous music playing]

[woman] The white power movement had come together every summer

at the Aryan Nations World Congress

in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

In 1983, the movement adopted a number of key strategies,

and it decided to declare war on the federal government.

There is nothing more that the white Aryan can do

but obey the commandment of Yahweh, his God,

and separate himself.

Blood, blood.

The Founding Fathers shed their blood

to give you this country.

And if you want to hold on to it,

you're gonna have to shed some of yours!

[Belew] They thought mainstream politics

could never, ever deliver

the kinds of social changes they wanted.

In the '80s, there is a major campaign

of violence and crime

carried out by this movement across the United States.

[man] Right turn!

[Belew] Robbing of armored cars,

bombings of gay theaters, assassinations.

[reporter] Last night, Alan Berg was killed in ambush,

arriving at his Denver home.

Ten .45-caliber shell casings...

[Belew] It's a spree.

By 1987, the government believes it has a case

that all of this activity

represents an organized criminal conspiracy

to overthrow the United States government.

[reporter 1] Charges of sedition are filed

against Reverend Butler and others.

[reporter 2] The government said it intends to prove

that ten of the defendants plotted

to overthrow the government by force.

[Belew] Seditious conspiracy is a hard charge to prove.

Prosecutors have to show

that they intended to overthrow the U.S. government

and had the capacity to do so.

[reporter] What the FBI now sees across the country

is a national network of neo-Nazis

and white supremacist groups

whose goal is to purge this country

of Blacks, Jews, and other minorities.

One, I want to praise Yahweh's holy and precious name.

Two, I want to say to hell with the federal government.

[Belew] Louis Beam is really the intellectual architect

of leaderless resistance.

And I think this has been

the biggest legacy of the white power movement

and the reason it's been with us since 1983.

Activists can work violently in common cause

without direct communication with leaders.

There are still leaders in leaderless resistance,

but they're not culpable because you can't trace them

to the individual violent actions.

I understood that that was their intent.

But I also knew that an Arkansas jury

would have a hard time convicting these folks

of-- of attempted overthrow of the United States government

when they had no capacity, really, to do that.

That's why it's called a conspiracy.

The thought was trying to overthrow the government.

Actually, they couldn't do it.

But they surely tried.

The government had really bet the farm on this trial.

They had used all of these other busts

to kind of amass state's witnesses.

And it fails spectacularly.

[reporter] It was the first serious setback

in the federal government's war

against suspected white supremacist groups.

Thirteen defendants were found not guilty of all charges,

which included murder, robbery,

and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

It was a tremendous defeat for the government.

And it totally enabled the far-right movement.

"We're free to go do whatever we want to do.

They tried. They missed.

We have got them by the short hairs."

[reporter] Sheila Beam passed out

and had to be carried off by her husband,

who now walks free.

[Sands] Leaderless resistance was Louis Beam's idea,

and he passed it along

to everybody else in the movement.

The best way to go after the government

was not to have this organized CSA compound

but to have individuals...

which led, of course, to the term "lone wolves."

[ominous music playing]

[men yelling indistinctly]

[reporter] Iraqi troops have crossed the border

into Kuwait.

[George H.W. Bush] As was the case in the 1930s,

we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator

threatening his neighbors.

[Belew] In our history

of extremist movements in the United States,

the most consistent correlation with spikes in membership

is the aftermath of combat.

Louis Beam understood this veteran connection

very, very well.

He did this very specifically,

going to military bases, recruiting active-duty troops,

recruiting veterans.

These groups move

from, you know, the white robe and hood

to camouflage fatigues,

able to take in a new generation of veterans coming home.

Most notably, Timothy McVeigh.

[country music playing]

[man] Tim McVeigh came from a family

that was literally the salt of the earth.

They had come over in the 19th century

to help with the canal

and earned enough money to buy some farmland.

You had the dawn of the automobile

and Harrison Radiator,

this sprawling plant

where as many as 8,000 people worked at one time.

And that was the world

that Bill McVeigh was offering to his son.

[Bill McVeigh] All four houses we lived in,

we always had a pretty good-sized garden.

We had a pool here.

Sometimes in the summer, I'd come home from work,

there'd be 15 kids in the pool.

Family right next door, the McDermotts,

they had a daughter the same age as Jennifer,

Mollie.

They were good everyday neighbors.

He would play with us, he would babysit us,

he took us trick-or-treating.

And so I've known his family forever.

I'm sure that the divorce of his parents was hard.

When the split occurred, he chose to stay with his dad.

[Herbeck] There was nobody that McVeigh loved or admired more

than his grandfather, Ed McVeigh.

He taught Tim McVeigh

all about proper handling of guns, how to use guns.

I think he equated guns with his beloved grandfather.

[man] Tim McVeigh's father

worked at a G.M. plant for 30 years.

Tim McVeigh's grandfather

worked in the same plant for 30 years.

By the time McVeigh came along,

that plant was shrinking almost to nonexistence.

The industrial decline of the Buffalo area

was a formative influence on McVeigh.

At the same time, Terry Nichols was growing up

on a small struggling farm in the thumb of Michigan.

And the farm crisis was making it harder and harder

for farmers like him to survive.

So McVeigh and Nichols represent

the crisis in American agriculture

and the crisis in American industry

to an almost perfect degree.

[McDermott] I don't know when the idea

to go into the military really came...

but the first time I even sensed Tim seeming different

was after his time over during the Gulf War.

[Brokaw] The bombing in Iraq began 24 hours ago.

It is still going on.

[rapid gunfire]

[soldier] Watch your lane.

[Herbeck] At Fort Benning,

Terry Nichols became one of McVeigh's best friends.

He was very influential on McVeigh's views of politics.

McVeigh became close to Michael Fortier,

who would smoke dope when he was out on patrol.

One of the very first experiences McVeigh had

after joining the Army was these drill sergeants...

they would scream things like, "Kill, kill, kill!"

McVeigh became a very skilled sharpshooter

in the Bradley military vehicle.

[Michel] In one instance, he spotted two Iraqi soldiers,

brought them into his sights.

He said all he saw was a red mist.

He was proud of his kill. He got a Bronze Star for it.

But as this very short war progressed,

he saw the carnage

from all of the bombs that had been dropped.

[explosion]

[Michel] It was overkill to him.

[explosions]

This unit is trying to talk the Iraqis into surrendering.

- [man yelling over speaker] - There are a group of Iraqis

to the right carrying white flags.

Over there, a large number of Iraqi tanks.

[Boettcher] I've been in a lot of wars.

And wars and combat

affect different people different ways.

I think what goes on in a lot of people who leave war

is that they had a purpose.

And the purpose in Desert Storm

was to take back Kuwait

and defeat Saddam Hussein's army.

And that was a huge purpose, a huge global purpose.

Then you come back home, and...

you might have trouble finding a job,

and you start getting discouraged.

Tim McVeigh and myself,

we both have that title, veteran.

We spend four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

ten years of our life serving our nation.

Then when you get out of the military,

you come back to the United States,

and everyone's telling you that you're wrong,

you shouldn't be killing people, we shouldn't be at war.

[crowd chanting] No blood for oil! No blood for oil!

[Welch] My daughter, Julie, demonstrated

with a lot of other students against the Gulf War.

And the results of that war is actually the very thing

that, uh, ended up causing her-- her death.

- [director] How do you mean? - Well, because Tim McVeigh

served in the Gulf War, had PTSD.

Those soldiers saw Iraqis get shot in the back

and saw tanks

that actually buried some Iraqi soldiers alive.

They saw all of that angry stuff and came back angry,

angry young men.

[Herbeck] After the war,

McVeigh went to this Green Beret tryout.

He failed in his tryout to become a Green Beret.

That was a demoralizing thing.

I think if he had succeeded

and been selected as a Green Beret,

he probably would have been a great killing machine

for the U.S. government.

[Michel] He comes home,

and he has a nervous breakdown.

He went over to his grandfather's house

in February a few months after he'd been out of the military

in a pair of sweatpants and just socks, no shirt.

And Ed McVeigh opens the front door

and says, "Tim, Timmy, what's going on here?"

He says, "I don't know, Grandpa."

McVeigh having PTSD, I think, helps to explain

maybe the vulnerability, the fragility of his thinking.

He would live in his car, he would sleep in his car.

He would listen to right-wing radio...

[indistinct radio broadcast]

[Wright] ...and go from gun show to gun show.

He was operating as sort of a straw buyer.

He was buying guns for people

who didn't want any kind of record

or even name associated with buying guns.

And he knew that these people were part of the insurgency.

They're not just selling weapons.

They're selling ideology.

[on recording] I'm William Pierce,

and I'll be reading my book, The Turner Diaries, to you.

Listen carefully.

"How it shamed us,

all that brave talk by patriots.

'The government will never take my guns away.'

And then nothing but meek submission

when it happened."

[man] Timothy McVeigh used this book as a Bible.

Both The Turner Diaries and-- and McVeigh

targeted a federal building

that had federal law enforcement agents in it.

Both used a truck bomb.

Both used a mixture of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

The one that strikes me the most eerie

is the fact that the bomb that explodes

and blows up the FBI building in The Turner Diaries

went off at 9:15 a.m.

The bomb in Oklahoma City went off at 9:02.

He's got The Turner Diaries rolling in the back of his head,

his love of guns,

and he's buying these videos about things like Ruby Ridge.

[indistinct chattering over radio]

[reporter] Randy Weaver, a fugitive

on a federal firearms charge,

has been holed up in a cabin near Naples

for more than a year.

Ruby Ridge came about because of shady dealings

by the federal government.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents

were trying to recruit Randy Weaver

to be an informant on the militia movement

by having another informant sell him a shotgun

that was a quarter of an inch shy of the legal limit.

That looks a lot like entrapment.

[reporter] With the sudden appearance of military hardware,

his one-man stand against the law

is suddenly taking on the appearance

- of a full-blown war. - [gunshot]

[reporter 1] A federal agent has been shot and killed.

[reporter 2] Randy Weaver's 13-year-old son died

during the initial shootout Friday.

His blood is on all your hands! You...

Federal Marshals shot my son, Samuel, in the back

and killed him.

He was running home to me.

His last words were, "I'm coming, Dad."

The FBI adopted military rules of engagement at Ruby Ridge.

The day after Sammy Weaver was shot...

[gunshot]

[Wright] ...a sniper fired at Randy.

[gunshot]

[Wright] The bullet went into the cabin

and hit his wife, Vicki Weaver, in the head and killed her.

Later, an investigation was done,

and the Department of Justice settled for $3.1 million

for unlawful death

of Sammy Weaver and Vicki Weaver.

[reporter] We just got an update from federal authorities.

Randy's in good health.

Unfortunately, Vicki is dead.

[people gasping]

[ominous music playing]

[Beam] This time the federals came for Randy Weaver.

Next time, they may come for you.

[static over radio]

[Herbeck] After Ruby Ridge,

McVeigh was on an odyssey to nowhere for about two years.

These ideas would just be turned over

in his head again and again.

[Michel] His car was an old Chevy.

He nicknamed it the Road Warrior.

He reconnects with his Army buddies,

Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols.

But there's a lot of alone time.

He's manufacturing his arguments

of why he hates the government.

[Clinton] It may not be popular in West Virginia or Arkansas,

where half the people have

a hunting or a fishing license or both,

but I think we ought to pass the Brady Bill

and require a waiting period before people can get a handgun.

I felt that if it was ever gonna be done,

I was in the best position, because I grew up in Arkansas.

I had a .22 when I was 10.

I had a .410 shotgun when I was 14.

I grew up in the culture.

[gunshots]

[Limbaugh] There's only one thing you need to know.

The Democrats want to do away with the Second Amendment.

They want to end up registering every gun

and its owner in this country.

And their ultimate objective

is to see to it that nobody has any.

[birds chirping]

[Wright] Some people forget that Tim McVeigh was at Waco.

He was handing out anti-government pamphlets.

He was carrying copies of The Turner Diaries.

He was talking to people during the standoff.

If you're a true Christian, and you believe the truth,

and you know the truth, the truth will set you free.

[Ricks] A group called the Branch Davidians,

it was an offshoot

of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

About 100 people headed up by a gentleman

by the name of David Koresh.

He predicted the end of the world was near,

that he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ,

the apocalypse was going to happen,

and it was going to start there

with a battle on the plains of Texas.

- [reporter] You have guns? - It makes nobody's business

whether we have a gun or not at this place.

[Ricks] The ATF had information

that there were automatic weapons,

they had grenades there. And as a result,

they were gonna launch an attack on the Branch Davidian compound.

Get my battery, John. Get my battery behind the bus.

[agents chattering indistinctly]

The ATF wanted to conduct a paramilitary raid.

They had multiple opportunities to arrest David Koresh.

He jogged up and down Double EE Ranch Road

right in front of these surveillance houses.

They could've grabbed him then.

They didn't want to arrest him.

They wanted a big show.

And it backfired on them.

[gunfire]

[dogs barking, yelping]

The ATF fired the first shot,

shooting the dogs that were outside guarding the property.

And then it erupted into gunfire.

[gunshots]

[Ricks] ATF was immediately pinned down.

[gunfire continues]

[Ricks] Four of their agents were killed.

Sixteen were wounded.

Five Davidians were killed that day.

The Attorney General says that FBI should take over

and try to get this thing resolved.

I was dispatched down there to do the press conferences.

We're dealing with people who are very committed

to what they're doing.

[Ricks] And we ended up spending 51 days there.

[Wright] I actually came here

about three weeks into the standoff.

They wouldn't let anybody closer than, say,

maybe a mile from here. They had cordoned it off.

A lot of the people who showed up

were far-right patriots.

They weren't aligned with, say,

Davidian religious beliefs or sentiments.

You have attempted to cover up the FBI and ATF crimes here.

[Wright] It was already taking place,

that co-optation of Waco

for the far-right patriot movement.

[Belew] Waco is not a white power community.

It is a multiracial community.

The white power movement

doesn't care about that very much.

And the compound itself,

because this goes on for so long,

becomes a site where white power activists

can organize and talk to each other.

McVeigh travels to the Waco site.

Just, uh... I just arrived today.

Somebody told me a lot of people would be scared

to put something on like this.

[rock music playing]

[Wright] Tim said to me,

"The government is at war with us."

He kept talking about this war.

And I wasn't even privy to-- to this narrative or story.

So I ask him to explain it to me.

And he tells me that in the early '80s,

the Reagan administration pushes for a military role

in drug enforcement.

[Reagan] We waged a good fight.

The military forces

have dramatically reduced drug use by 67 percent.

[Wright] In order for civilian law enforcement

to get military support,

they would have to show what's called a drug nexus at Waco.

The ATF manufactured

a drug nexus that-- that wasn't there.

They claimed that Branch Davidians had a meth lab.

All those helicopters were part of the military support.

[Bryant Gumbel] It's day 33 of that cult standoff

with federal authorities near Waco...

[reporter 1] Discussions about a surrender have slowed.

[reporter 2] All day long, reinforcements were brought in

from as far away as Fort Hood.

[Wright] I think the ATF saw a political opportunity

in the election of Bill Clinton, who ran on gun control,

to expand its operation and expand its reputation.

[Clinton] I was really torn by Waco.

The FBI kept pushing for action.

And they acted like this would be,

you know, not too difficult to do.

And I got it, but I mean, the truth was

they were frustrated by being defied.

Sometimes the right strategy is to wait.

And I told them the story of what we did

with the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

in Arkansas.

But they countered,

and this is what really mattered to Janet Reno,

with the prospect that Koresh and his inner circle

were abusing women and children.

Finally, I told them

they should go look at the record of what we did,

but I would leave the decision up to them,

and if they decided to do it, I would support them.

In Waco, Texas, the FBI has moved

to a new and more active stage.

An armored vehicle began punching holes.

They have been filling the compound with tear gas.

[Ricks] A little bit after noon,

they ended up setting fire to the entire compound.

[reporter] Here's another angle.

You can see the black smoke behind us. This is horrible.

[Ricks] And I was told by headquarters

I had to go back and do a final press conference.

I said, "What am I supposed to say?

There's nobody left."

I have been asked to read a statement

from the director of the FBI.

[Ricks] I was trying to comfort people,

but to see it all collapse was just overwhelming.

[Michel] McVeigh is standing in the parlor

of this old farmhouse that James Nichols owns,

watching this live image of Waco burning,

and tears are running down his eyes,

and he's also thinking about his experience in the U.S. Army.

[Herbeck] It really bothered McVeigh

that the same Bradley fighting vehicles

that he had fought in in the Persian War

were being used against the people at Waco.

That was the turning point for McVeigh.

He said in that very moment he decided

he was going to commit an act of terrorism.

[somber music playing]

[Wright] After Ruby Ridge and Waco,

we had this mass mobilization of militias.

[speaking indistinctly]

[gunshot]

[Wright] This thing just really explodes.

[rapid gunfire]

The critical issue is guns.

He became obsessed with the idea

the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton were scheming

to take away Americans' right to guns.

[Clinton] McVeigh told a lot of people

that he was just furious at me.

He really hated the Assault Weapons Ban.

It was the Assault Weapons Ban,

just as much as Waco and Ruby Ridge,

that motivated McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Building.

We will finally ban these assault weapons

from our street

that have no purpose other than to kill.

[static over radio]

[ominous music playing]

[Michel] McVeigh charged from one end of the country

to the other.

Finally decided to build the bomb

after months of buying

50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate

at weed-and-seed stores across the Midwest...

buying racing-car fuel down in Texas.

[static over radio]

[Michel] He ping-ponged back and forth

from Kingman, Arizona,

to Decker, Michigan, to Buffalo, New York.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Herbeck] McVeigh told us,

"Nichols and Fortier helped me."

He said, "I was the driving force

behind all this.

It was my plan. It was my crime."

He came up with an action plan.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Michel] In Kansas, at the lake,

the day before the bombing,

with some coercion to get Terry Nichols there,

they build the bomb.

[Herbeck] McVeigh said Nichols got cold feet

and McVeigh threatened him.

That's why he went along with it.

[Michel] April 19th, he gets back on the interstate,

traveling alone.

[static over radio]

[Koernke] The enemy has many resources

and assets at their disposal.

The best one we have here is you.

[explosion]

[glass shattering]

[helicopter whirring]

[car alarm blaring]

[sirens wailing]

[Herbeck] McVeigh told us that it was like

the Death Star in Star Wars.

He said, "There were all kinds of people in that Death Star

who were just like secretaries and weren't leaders.

They were killed too.

But people all applauded when the Death Star blew up."

He said, "Yes, innocent people had to die,

but that's the way it goes."

He calls them collateral damage.

[somber music playing]

[man] I walked over and introduced myself.

I said, "Mr. McVeigh,

I've been appointed to represent you."

And I think I said, "I'm from Enid, Oklahoma."

He shook my hand and said, "I heard you were coming."

He explained very candidly

why he did what he was accused of.

He exhibited some pride

in that he had managed to carry it off.

He wanted a defense based on necessity.

Said, "I had to do it

because they were going to kill other American citizens.

They had to be taught a lesson."

And I said, "Well, Tim...

tell me why it was necessary

to kill children under the age of six."

He said, "Well, there were children at Waco."

And I said, "Well, that may be true,

but that's not an explanation of the necessity.

What that is is revenge."

After that wouldn't go anywhere,

what I was trying to do was to raise a reasonable doubt.

We could argue to the jury the government hasn't proven it.

I'm hopeful

that no one will embarrass the state of Oklahoma

by doing anything to any party in this case

which would turn this into a three-ring circus.

It couldn't be seen as a show trial.

It had to be seen as lawyers vigorously representing him.

My opposite number was Merrick Garland.

He's been detained without bond.

[Toobin] It's important to recognize

how Merrick Garland structured

the criminal investigation and trial of McVeigh.

...testified that the cause of the explosion

at the Murrah Building was a bomb

that was placed inside a Ryder Truck.

He had a prosecutor's view in the sense

that he wanted to keep the trial narrow and focused and limited,

uh, to what was needed to make the case

against first McVeigh and then Nichols.

[reporter] Can you give us any estimate

of how many people you still expect

to bring additional charges against in this case?

No, I'm sorry. I really have to limit myself

to what happened in the hearing today.

[man] Merrick always kind of kept his finger

on the pulse of the case.

You know, I'm not religious,

but I did feel during that period of time

like, "Oh, this is why I'm here."

I mean, I really felt like I was doing something

that mattered and that was worth doing.

[woman] On April 19th, 1995, the bomb went off,

I was in the office.

DOJ wanted to show

that the country could give a fair trial and due process

to these individuals.

This was right after the O.J. Simpson case,

where there was such fanfare and media attention.

Merrick wanted this

to be all about the crime that had occurred

and holding the individuals accountable.

[dramatic music playing]

[director] In the original indictment itself, it did say

Tim McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and "others unknown."

[Goelman] Why am I so confident we got--?

[director] Why are you so confident?

Um, the thoroughness of the investigation.

FBI interviewed so many people that we could find.

If you wanted to, you know, find somebody who said that,

you know, Madonna did the bombing,

you could find someone like that.

Both Nichols and McVeigh had big defense teams

at taxpayer expense.

And I think their strategies differed.

Stephen Jones had this whole public relations strategy,

where he, you know, traveled around the world

to try to find these "others unknown."

[Jones] To say that there were others unknown was true.

We were accused of being conspiracy theorists,

but it was the government that alleged there was a conspiracy.

We were just simply arguing over

how large was the conspiracy and who was there.

Tim wanted to be seen as, "This was the perfect mission.

The building was destroyed, people were killed,

there will be a revolution.

I have set the revolution in motion.

Me. No one else, me. Me, myself, and I."

It took probably about...

seven or eight days for me to start realizing

that he was lying.

Repeatedly.

Probably the first one, I said, "Tim, you've told me

that no one else is involved.

So why is the government talking

to Michael and Lori Fortier?

What do they know

that we don't know?"

He didn't want to reveal who others were.

He didn't want to solve the mystery.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Sanders] It was actually my husband, Glenn,

who started asking questions.

It's consumed our life.

Our life took a 180-degree turn that day.

And it probably will never be the same again.

[Sanders] After the bombing, I was so broken.

For the first few weeks,

I probably sat in a chair and cried.

But when I got out of the chair,

we had a dinner at our home

for the families that had lost their children.

[children laughing]

[Sanders] The saddest of times.

You get 19 families that lost their children.

One of the young mothers said

when she dropped her boy off that morning,

that she had seen the bomb squad downtown.

We're going, "How do you know it was the bomb squad?"

Finally, very indignantly,

she said they had big blue letters.

Then we found a newspaper article

from The Panola Watchman.

It was an interview

about this whole office full of people.

They had been watching the bomb squad in the alleyway.

The next day my husband, Glenn, goes to the fire station.

The fire chief said, "Oh, no, sir, we had no idea."

As my husband's leaving, the dispatcher there, he says,

"I'm not going to lie for anybody."

He said, "We got a memo in this office last week

to be on high terrorist alert."

[reporter] The fire department received a call from the FBI

five days before the bombing, warning that

"there were some people coming through town

they should be on the lookout for."

[Sanders] When the fire chief is confronted

with this information, he said,

"You know what, I made a mistake.

It was our bomb squad truck down there."

[reporter] The ATF director told reporters

they had taken some precaution

for the second anniversary of the siege in Waco.

I was very concerned about that.

We did some things here in headquarters

and in all of our field offices throughout the country

to try to be more observant. But it was primarily--

We didn't anticipate something like this.

We were thinking about, you know, demonstrations

and things like that.

I think, yeah, we should have known

that there was some danger in the building that day

due to the fact that April 19th

is such a special day to the right wing.

So you're not somebody that could be characterized

as a conspiracy-theory person,

in the sense that you feel the federal government was,

in some way, part of this explosion?

No. Not at all.

[Sanders] Glenn and I had so many questions.

After the bombing,

they started the biggest manhunt in American history

for John Doe Number 2.

And then they called it off.

[Jones] The government originally described two men.

They had the sketches of them.

And there were numerous credible people

in downtown Oklahoma City just before the bombing

that claimed that they saw McVeigh and someone else.

The government then, about 30 days later,

said there isn't any John Doe 2. It was a mistake.

We had learned enough by then

that we knew there was something wrong.

Twenty-two eyewitnesses told the FBI

they saw McVeigh downtown the morning of the bombing,

and they all saw him with someone else.

This is Michael Moroz's testimony

about McVeigh pulling up at Johnny's Tire Shop.

[Moroz] There was definitely a second person.

He had dark hair, maybe a dark complexion.

He wasn't fair-skinned. I'm fair-skinned.

I can tell the difference between fair and dark skin.

[Sanders] They brought him in.

He picks McVeigh out of the lineup,

and he tells them there was the man in the ball cap

in the passenger side of the truck.

I did get a lot of flak from the families and survivors

when I wanted to find out about the others involved.

To try and point the blame at somebody else

besides the people who parked the truck out front

is irresponsible.

There are unanswered questions that we want answers to.

I know that Melissa and Sharon have expressed views

that they think all the truth will come out in the trial.

What do you think the truth is in all of this?

Do you support your parents

that there are many other people involved?

Definitely. I believe what they're doing

is the right thing, they're gonna find the truth,

and then when they find out the truth

and, um, and everybody knows what's been going on,

then we can put this all behind us.

[dramatic music playing]

[reporter] A federal judge has moved

the Oklahoma bombing trial to Denver,

saying the defendants can't get a fair trial in Oklahoma.

The judge said that outweighs the wishes of victims' families

who wanted the trial in Oklahoma,

making it easier for them to attend.

What happened April 19th, 1995,

I don't want anybody to ever forget.

[Kimble] In the beginning, I started drinking,

and one night walking back to the bedroom,

I passed out and cracked my head open.

And I thought at that time

I'd better find something positive to do

or I'm going to kill myself.

So I started a group called Families and Survivors United.

The pre-trial hearings started.

Judge Matsch said, "Okay, you can be in this courtroom,

but if you want to give an impact statement,

you better leave, because you can't do both."

I said, "Wait a minute.

I have a right to be in that courtroom."

On April the 19th, 1995,

the bomb that shattered the Alfred P. Murrah Building

in Oklahoma City also shattered my life.

The victims' lobby in the Oklahoma City bombing

was so powerful

that they actually got a law passed.

[Kimble] It was a miracle.

It went through the House and Senate

and was signed by Clinton in two days.

[Ann Curry] Prosecutors in the Oklahoma City bombing case

have a valuable new witness, Michael Fortier.

[Ricks] At first,

Michael Fortier refuses to cooperate.

But he's got a wife that's pregnant.

He makes a deal that he will fully cooperate

as long as Lori doesn't go to prison.

[reporter] Fortier said, "McVeigh told me

he wanted to bomb the building on the anniversary of Waco,

April 19th,

and that the bombing would trigger

a second American Revolution."

McVeigh confided everything in him.

And-- and to Lori.

[Toobin] The most memorable moment in the trial to me

was when Lori Fortier talked about Timothy McVeigh

getting Campbell's Soup cans out of the kitchen cabinet

and laying out how he was going to arrange

the barrels of explosives in the truck.

It was so real. It was so vivid.

It was the kind of thing

you couldn't make up if you wanted to.

I sat with Michael Fortier for hundreds of hours.

I know everybody who was called on the Spotlight phone card.

When you ask me why I'm so confident

that we got the right guys

and that there's no one else kind of out there,

it's because of things like Fortier and the phone card.

This was the government's version of the case,

that the Spotlight calling card is the sum and substance

of McVeigh and Nichols' contacts,

and it doesn't disclose any co-conspirators.

[Coulson] I've seen 302s.

302s are a report by the FBI.

Private citizens have said the morning of the bombing

they saw somebody else in that truck with McVeigh.

That's very troubling to me.

And I will tell you why I think that never got followed up.

Had they introduced that

and followed that line of investigation,

that would have diminished his culpability.

The defense didn't bring it up

because it's one more witness that says McVeigh was there.

We didn't call any of the eyewitnesses

because their testimony would have been damaging to McVeigh.

To call them, we're establishing

that McVeigh was in downtown Oklahoma City

when the government's case was largely circumstantial

that he was there.

[reporter] The sister of bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh

says she's sorry she has to cooperate with prosecutors

in the case against her brother.

[Jennifer] I think he's been unfairly demonized.

He's just a normal person. He's...

not this evil thing they're painting him to be.

[reporter] She says FBI agents frightened her into cooperating

by threatening her with prosecution.

[Wilkinson] I was responsible

for trying to prepare Jennifer McVeigh

as a witness.

Jennifer McVeigh's testimony,

I think, was dramatic from beginning to end

because of who she was.

She said when she heard about the bombing,

she immediately had this eerie feeling

that she knew that her brother might have been involved.

We did our best.

We put all of our energy and effort into it,

and we'll wait and see what the jury says.

[O'Donnell] Giving the court case number

for The United States v. Timothy James McVeigh.

Guilty. Guilty on all 11 counts.

[people cheering]

[Jones] It's as though Tim wanted us to fail.

He wanted to say, "I did it."

But first, he wanted the jury trial

just in case he got off.

But then when he didn't get off, then he wanted the fame,

or infamy, that he did it.

I went to Tim, and I said,

"Tim, I need to tell you

that I'm not... the lawyer you need for the appeal.

I'm going to seek to withdraw."

I told him that I had figured out

where he had lied and the proof that he had lied.

And when I finished, he said,

"How would the truth help me?"

And I mistakenly said, "I don't know that it would."

[Wilkinson] People forget that a prosecution is not there

to lay out a historical record of the entire movement

or in everything that McVeigh ever did in his life.

That's what history books are for,

and that's a different-- different goal.

Here, it was to prove the elements of the crime

and hold him accountable.

The criminal law can only do so much.

And we got everybody

who was legally, criminally responsible for the bombing.

There-- there could have been other people who were...

If we had the evidence,

could've been criminally culpable.

But then there's a whole universe of people

who were not criminally culpable

but who bear some measure of moral responsibility.

[Sands] Tim McVeigh was part of the group

that wanted to declare war on America.

The government thought,

"We tried to round them all up once

with this sedition trial in '88,

and we blew it.

We can't do that again.

We have to limit this."

And the American people are none the wiser

about how ugly and how serious some Americans are

about destroying this nation.

[gunshots]

[Boettcher] We always believed

that there had to be more people involved.

We started talking to militia groups,

people who may have supported them.

These extreme beliefs just weren't held by a few people.

Actually, there were a lot of people out there

who felt the way McVeigh did.

So we would go to places like Elohim City

in far eastern Oklahoma,

where we believed that McVeigh had passed through.

[children singing nursery rhyme]

[Boettcher] They were following Christian identity.

Their belief was anything that wasn't white was subhuman.

If you just want to boil down to it,

that's what it was.

[Coulson] Elohim City is key to a lot of things here.

I think McVeigh definitely was at Elohim City.

ATF had an informant that put him there, Carol Howe.

[Boettcher on recording] NBC has learned

that the community was penetrated by this woman,

Carol Howe, a paid government informant,

who was gathering information on possible threats

against the U.S. government.

The government acknowledges in federal documents

that she was their informant.

[Toobin] Carol Howe was an Oklahoma aristocrat.

Her father was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in Tulsa.

But when she was just into her 20s,

she got caught up

with some really crazy right-wing folks.

At the same time, she became an informant

for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

We started following the trail of neo-Nazis,

and she had a neo-Nazi boyfriend,

a guy named Dennis Mahon.

The faster this country falls,

the faster we'll be able to rebuild a nation for ourself.

[Boettcher on recording] Remarkably, Howe and Mahon

appeared together in a 1994 German television interview.

Howe gave the government information before the bombing

on alleged threats by others in Elohim City,

including this man, Andreas Strassmeir.

According to federal documents,

Strassmeir was the military training officer

for Mahon's organization.

Strassmeir was last seen in Germany.

[ominous music playing]

This is one of Carol Howe's reports to her ATF handler.

She's talking about Andreas Strassmeir

at Elohim City.

"Andy leads the young adults in guerrilla warfare

and tactical maneuvers.

His 'plans,' quote,

are to forcibly act to destroy the U.S. government

with direct actions and operations,

assassinations, bombings, mass shootings, et cetera.

He believes we cannot out-breed the enemy

so we must use mass genocide against them.

And of course the biggest enemy--

the U.S. government."

She reported that there was

an increasing discussion of violence

and there was a discussion about blowing up a building,

even to the point that they made a visit

to Oklahoma City and drove around.

There wouldn't have probably been an Oklahoma City bombing,

in my view,

had Elohim City been investigated more diligently.

[Sands] Carol Howe knew what was happening

and she told them she had seen a guy.

They identified him as Tim Tuttle.

At the time, she wouldn't have known anything

about who this guy was.

But after the bombing,

she knew it was Tim McVeigh. She had seen his pictures.

Tim was walking through camp with Andreas Strassmeir,

just some guy named Tim Tuttle walking with Andy the German.

Andy Strassmeir was an important person

that I thought needed to be interviewed.

I was able to meet with Strassmeir.

And I asked a simple question. I said,

"Why is it that there are 302s, FBI 302s, interviews,

with all of these different radical people...

but they don't have you?"

As I expected, you know, he-- he knew nothing.

He might have met Tim at a gun show.

Couldn't remember.

[Strassmeir] I forgot about this person...

One of the things that really concerned me

was when I got a hold of McVeigh's phone records.

He called Elohim City

two minutes after calling the Ryder Truck company,

and he asked to speak to Andreas Strassmeir.

The FBI interviewed thousands of people

regarding Timothy McVeigh,

including his second-grade schoolteacher.

But they didn't think it was important

to talk to Andreas Strassmeir.

He wound up leaving the country and went back to Germany.

It was like more than a year later

that the FBI called and did a telephone interview with him.

[Coulson] Strassmeir, there's controversy about him.

Some people think he's a source of the Israelis,

and some people think

he's a source of the West German government.

At the time,

the German government was very unhappy with the FBI.

Because we have guidelines

on how we investigate domestic terrorism.

They're pretty limiting.

And so they wanted to try to get their own information.

Somebody should have looked at it.

I personally was responsible

for searching the intelligence files

here in the United States,

and there's no evidence there was foreign involvement.

McVeigh had met him at a gun show

and called him, you know, two weeks

before he engaged in the bombing.

That doesn't show there's any connection.

He met lots of people at gun shows.

[Jones] There was certainly evidence

that Tim McVeigh had probably been at Elohim City.

He kept denying that he had been there,

but yet, he was stopped, I believe,

by an Arkansas highway patrolman

on a road that led to Elohim City.

There were people that said he had been there.

[Reyna] I told him, I said, "Tim, you know and I know...

that you were used." He didn't say anything.

He didn't say, "No, that didn't happen."

The way that group was always together,

there's just no way he was not there.

Strassmeir was there, Ellison was there,

Snell was buried there in Elohim City.

[Sanders] On the day Snell was executed,

he asked for the TV to be turned on in his cell,

and the prison watch log notes that,

"Inmate Snell smiled and chuckled

as he watched the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing."

It's just hard for me to believe that it was all coincidence.

[Wright] It's not a coincidence.

Remember, the idea of blowing up the Murrah Building

was hatched ten years earlier among members

of the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord.

This was a plan that not just McVeigh

but others who were at Elohim City

decided to resurrect from the ashes.

[Sands] I came to understand

Elohim City was the training ground.

The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

had moved its operations

to the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma.

And that's where they were gonna train these people

to overthrow the government.

These guys were ready for war.

[reporter] In court, McVeigh watched intently

as the jury filed in.

Judge Richard Matsch asked for their decision.

"The jury recommends the following," said the judge.

"That Timothy James McVeigh be sentenced to death."

[Welch] I went to the bomb site every day after the bombing,

asking myself, "What can I do to feel better?"

And I finally came to the conclusion

that the day we would take Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols

from their cage to kill them

was simply not going to be part of my healing process.

[Sanders] My husband was dying during McVeigh's trial.

The babies are dead, and then Glenn died.

The trials came and went.

There's a lot of unanswered questions.

I believe I owed it to them to continue that journey

to try to get answers to these questions.

Over the years, it's been a balancing act,

almost like a tightrope act for me, to...

to not get lumped in with the crazies.

I needed to just find my truth, not invent it.

I learned about these groups around the country.

[ominous music playing]

[Sanders] They thrive on hate.

And I think it's like a cancer.

I went to the Aryan Nation compound

in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

I'd heard that Timothy McVeigh had been through there,

and that's how-- They helped shape his hateful ideals.

And I said, "I'm here to see Pastor Richard Butler."

For me, he's the head of the snake.

But I've got a desperation to know the truth,

and I'm willing to dance with the devil to get it.

We're talking about creating

a national state for the white Aryan.

[Sanders] He begins his sermon, and he looks at me, and he says,

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,"

and that Timothy McVeigh was a great man

and a martyr for the cause.

And he actually teared up when he said,

"I am so sorry about your little Aryan grandsons."

He said, "I cried when I saw them on TV."

[Couric] Since the tragedy here in Oklahoma City,

some of those who lost loved ones

have found a new purpose in life.

Bud Welch, Kathy Wilburn, good morning.

- So nice to see you both. - [both] Good morning.

I know that both of you call Bill McVeigh,

Timothy McVeigh's father, the forgotten victim.

[Sanders] If I put myself in his shoes,

and I wonder how it must feel to,

you know, to wait to have your child executed,

it's got to be terrifying.

We have to recognize what an execution is.

An execution is an event. It's staged.

We know what time the killing's going to happen.

It's nothing more than a staged political event.

It does nothing more or less for society than that.

[Welch] Tim McVeigh's father was on the news.

I could see this man, a broken man...

with grief in his eyes.

And my thought was,

"I want to go tell that man that I care how he feels,

and I don't blame him

for what his son had done."

When Bill opened the door,

and he introduced me to Jennifer...

and there's a picture kind of behind me of Tim.

I looked at Bill out of the corner of my eye,

and I could see at that moment...

a love that this father had for this son.

And Jennifer just kind of went to sobbing.

And I held her face in my hands,

and I said, "Honey,

I'll do everything I can

to keep your brother from being killed."

All of a sudden, it felt like this tremendous weight

had been removed from my shoulders,

and I never felt closer to God than I did at that moment.

Because what I recognized that...

that Saturday morning was...

the day that we... that our parents die,

we go to the hilltop and we bury them.

The day our children die, we bury them in our heart,

and that never goes away.

[somber music playing]

[reporter] Terry Nichols entered the courthouse

on the first day of his trial.

He will face a crowd of people.

Twelve of those could ultimately decide if he dies.

[Boettcher] If I had the opportunity

to sit down with Terry Nichols,

I would press on who else was involved.

Where did the money come from?

[man 1] Yes! Much to plunder.

[man 2] I see you boys had a good mission.

- Nest egg! - [Boettcher] Did the funding

for the Oklahoma City bombing come from those bank robberies

that were done by radical groups?

[Boettcher on recording] The Midwestern Bank Bandits

are white supremacists

who allegedly robbed 22 banks in seven states.

The take: $250,000.

Law enforcement officials believe

the money was distributed to other white supremacist groups.

Members of the gang were frequent visitors

to Elohim City.

[Sands] Tim had no visible means of support.

You gotta feed yourself, you gotta keep the car going,

you gotta have money for...

just to be able to spend the night someplace.

He was always renting a room.

Where'd the money come from?

And then I read his sister said that he told her in this letter

that he got some money out of robbing banks.

And there were other robberies.

He also robbed a gun dealer named Roger Moore.

[Boettcher on recording] About six months

before the Oklahoma City bombing,

a masked gunman allegedly robbed gun dealer Roger Moore

of gold bullion, coins, and weapons.

[Michel] McVeigh met this fellow, Roger Moore,

at one of the gun shows,

and they become something of business partners.

He and Roger Moore ultimately had a falling out,

and McVeigh is the mastermind behind a robbery

at Roger Moore's house.

And Terry Nichols committed the robbery.

[Wilkinson] Roger Moore was called as a witness

because Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh

stole weapons from him,

and they were used in part to fund the bombing.

[Sanders] At Terry Nichols' trial,

he was not like Timothy McVeigh at all.

He didn't make eye contact with anyone.

He was always looking down.

When the judge had a recess,

I saw this little lady standing out in the hall.

I realized it was Terry Nichols' mother.

I walked up to her. I said, "I'm Kathy Wilburn."

She begins to cry and said, "I know who you are.

I've seen you on TV."

And I put my arms around her, and I said,

"Well, I want you to know how sorry I am for your family."

And then we went back in the courtroom

and I just sat down with her.

It was like Terry Nichols, the bomber,

became my friend Joyce's son.

The jury thought he was guilty,

but they didn't know how guilty.

They had questions just like I did.

[reporter] The jury found Nichols guilty

of only conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter.

Nichols won't get the death penalty

for his federal conspiracy conviction.

There are other people out there,

and decisions were probably made very early on

that Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols

were who they were looking for,

and the same sort of resources were not used

to try to find out who else might be involved.

[Sanders] A few days after the trial, I had a letter.

Return address was Terry Nichols.

And I thought, "Mm, you know, I'm not looking for a pen pal.

And if I was, it wouldn't be the Oklahoma City bomber."

And then it kind of like dawned on me,

"Well, who's going to know more about the bombing

than the bomber himself?"

We started writing back and forth.

[Coss] The Terry Nichols relationship,

I still don't really understand it.

I frequently tell my mom,

and when we do presentations around the United States,

that if I ever saw Terry Nichols

and we were in a room together for five minutes,

I'd be the only one that comes out.

[birds chirping]

[Sanders] I have forgiven, yes.

Do I think people should be punished? Yes.

Forgiveness and punishment are two different things.

I want everybody involved in this to be accountable.

You know, forgiveness is a choice you make.

You can forgive...

or you can stay bitter.

And forgiving Terry Nichols

was one of the best choices I ever made.

It changed my life.

Terry Nichols was remorseful, unlike McVeigh.

And he told me, "Whenever I'm not under the threat

of the death penalty anymore, I'm gonna tell you everything."

And he has tried.

I'd like to read you part of this letter

that Terry Nichols sent me.

"So to put everything in a nutshell, Kathy,

Timothy McVeigh was the manipulated foot soldier,

Roger Moore the middleman

who supplied Tim with encouragement,

instructions, and some explosives.

And the top dog, the director who orchestrated it all,

is a rogue FBI agent with the help of others

who I will not name at this time."

[somber music playing]

[Sanders] I don't know

if what he wrote was true or not,

but after that letter, he was notified by the warden

that I was to be taken off of his calling list.

We've been stopped.

[reporter] Here's how it works.

Timothy McVeigh lives in a special confinement unit.

That is the building there with the green roof.

He will be transported by van to the execution house.

[Herbeck] He told us that,

"When the federal government puts me to death,

I'm still gonna be the winner,

because it's 168 for Tim McVeigh

and one for the government."

[Michel] You have these three tubes

that are coming out of a wall

with the three chemicals, poison, to kill him.

The executioner was given the order,

and all of a sudden these tubes started swaying

in, like, this ghostly way.

And meanwhile, McVeigh is looking straight up at a camera

that is giving a live feed to an auditorium

where other victims, and family members,

survivors are watching.

[Sanders] He glares this "go to hell" look at us.

They push the button...

and he went... [gasps softly] He was gone.

[Michel] He died with his eyes open.

[Clinton] I wondered what would've happened if...

I'd known Timothy McVeigh when he was a boy.

I wonder if I would have gone out of my way to befriend him.

I wonder if-- You know, you can--

I wonder about all that.

McVeigh was a tragic example of a guy who thought

our differences were more important

than what we have in common.

Were there objective reasons that he felt the way he did,

both personal and psychological?

Absolutely.

And political and economic? Yes.

But we can't blow the house up.

It doesn't matter whether he was right

about anything or not.

What matters is he decided

he should kill people he didn't know,

including little kids.

But the words he used, the arguments he made...

literally sound like the mainstream today.

Like he won.

[bagpipes playing]

Tim McVeigh set out to destroy the government.

He destroyed my family.

My brothers passed away in the Oklahoma City bombing,

and we go there to remember.

[man] The risk of terrorism,

it's always kind of in the back of your head.

[Kimble] I think there will be civil war in our country.

It's frightening.

But there are lessons to be learned

from what happened here in Oklahoma City.

The reason we come back here every year

is that this wasn't a one-off thing.

It can really happen again.

Where we're standing now was the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

The empty chairs represent the 168 victims.

The gate behind me says "9:01,"

the moment of innocence before the bombing.

The gate over your shoulder says "9:03,"

the aftermath.

Today.

This year we're living in is not much different from 1995.

People yelling at each other,

not making arguments based on fact, but emotion.

Many folks feel left behind.

Like their American dream has been stolen.

[all chanting] No sale! No sale! No sale! No sale! No sale!

No sale! No sale!

[Boettcher] That rage doesn't disappear.

It can explode on the fringes,

as we've seen too many times since April 19th, 1995.

[indistinct yelling]

[Boettcher] The Oklahoma City bombing

was a crossroads.

It was a huge signpost in history.

"America, wake up."

But I think that sign got blown down.

[reporter 1] ... a mass shooting.

[reporter 2] ...180-page manifesto.

[reporter 3] He didn't come to worship. He came to kill.

[reporter 4] Tree of Life has never been the same.

[Noble] Every time I hear a news report on mass shootings,

and domestic terrorism, right-wing extremism,

it always reminds me of when I was in the movement,

how dangerously close we as a group got,

how dangerously close I got

to committing domestic terrorism.

So much has changed from our days back in the '80s.

How mainstream extremism has become,

that was something we hoped for.

I'm seeing that now, and honestly, it scares me.

The closest thing that has happened

since Oklahoma City, of course,

is the January 6th riot on the Capitol Building.

[indistinct yelling]

[Coss] On January 6th,

I was the emergency planning specialist

with the incident commander

and everybody else who showed up.

So I was at that scene for about 18 hours.

[all yelling]

[Sanders] When I saw the storming of the Capitol

on January 6th, I'm thinking, "What's the chances

that my boy's gonna be down at the bombing

and gonna be involved in this as well?"

And I was concerned for his safety.

[all yelling]

[Coss] There's no call for what they did on January 6th.

What they did was wrong,

and they should be prosecuted for it.

Every single day, we have protests.

The majority of the people up there are peaceful.

But as long as our country continues to divide itself,

I believe there's more to come.

You poke a dog long enough, the dog's going to bite.

If you're going to push people to the extremes,

violence is inevitable.

[Sanders] I drove up to this building a hundred times.

We used to go on our break up there over that wall.

- Mm-hmm. - We would stay...

We'd take treats and stuff

and go up there and watch the kids play in the playground.

[Coss chuckles]

That's where I found Colton. You know that, right?

- Yeah. - Right there.

[somber music playing]

[Sanders] When I delved into the bombing

and started having questions,

I told a reporter, I said,

"You know, it's not going to be too many years

that when I tell someone I lost my grandchildren

in the bombing, they'll say, 'Which one?'"

- Exactly. - And that's where we are today.

It's still hard to believe it's been 28 years.

Yeah.

Love you guys. We'll see you next year.

You ready?

Yeah. Bye, guys.

[somber music playing]