- I'm Tammy Payne in the TV9 newsroom.
If you are anywhere downtown,
you've probably heard it and felt it--
an explosion of some kind downtown.
[tense music]
- The Alfred P. Murrah Building
in Downtown Oklahoma City ripped apart by,
as far as we can tell, a single explosion.
- I looked over my shoulder out into Downtown,
and it was just a large black cloud of smoke.
[sirens wailing]
- It's total chaos.
Sirens are blasting.
Cars are on fire.
People are screaming.
People are injured and hurt.
- And they haven't found anyone from the office yet.
- People are being carried away.
- Damn it, move! - This is one of the critical.
- Potentially were over a thousand people in there,
a daycare facility that housed upwards of 50 kids.
- This is the deadliest terror attack on US soil, ever.
♪
- Early on, there was speculation in all quarters.
- A U.S. government source has told "CBS News"
that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.
- But you let the facts lead the investigation.
- I saw everybody starting to run, which I thought was odd.
But then I heard over a loudspeaker,
"Second bomb. Evacuate."
- Get 'em back! Get 'em back!
- Go! Go! - Get 'em back!
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪
- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children,
as well as human and drug trafficking.
Kottis was the supervisor
of the FBI's threat response squad,
overseeing the bureau's response to terrorism threats
in New York City.
- So on that day in 1995, April 19th,
where were you, Barry,
when you first heard about what's happened?
- I'm Tammy Payne in the TV9 newsroom.
If you are anywhere downtown,
you've probably heard it and felt it--
an explosion of some kind downtown.
- The Alfred P. Murrah Building
in Downtown Oklahoma City ripped apart by,
as far as we could tell, a single explosion.
- We had an arrest warrant for a fugitive.
We thought he might be at Tinker Air Force Base,
which was about seven linear miles from downtown.
It was a tremendous explosion.
- Wow. - Look at that shot.
- Holy cow. - It is absolutely incredible.
The side of the federal building has been blown off.
- It registered 3.2 on the Richter scale,
like an earthquake. - Oh, my gosh.
- Barry Black earned a degree in accounting
before joining the FBI in 1988.
He worked white collar crime before training as a sniper,
and then as a master bomb technician.
- After the explosion, I looked over my shoulder
out to the west to downtown,
and it was just a large black cloud of smoke
starting to blow to the north.
It was clearly a large explosion
just based on the report and the ground shock.
- Bob, where were you that fateful day
on April 19th, 1995?
- On that particular day, I was at a fundraiser--
a golf tournament in Shawnee, Oklahoma,
which is about 30 miles east of Oklahoma City.
I was with the agent in charge for secret service,
the U.S. marshal, and the FBI supervisor.
Then all of a sudden, all of our pagers went off.
- Bob Ricks joined the FBI in 1969
and became the special agent in charge
of the bureau's Oklahoma office.
He served as commissioner
of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety,
then chief of police in Edmond, Oklahoma, until 2017.
- So I called my secretary at the FBI office,
and I said, you know, "What's going on?"
She said, "We've had some kind of a bombing
down at the federal building."
- About a third of the building has been blown away.
Uh, this is just devastating.
- And so, we need to get to Oklahoma City
and see what the heck is going on.
- It's very chaotic.
We don't know exactly what caused the explosion.
Police reports have said that it is
in the federal courthouse building.
It was the target, and the entire front of it,
from top to bottom, is gone.
- Barry, I know you're a bomb tech.
What are some of the thoughts and options
that are going through your mind?
- In 1995, terrorism was not in the forefront.
We started hearing chatter
about maybe a gas main explosion or a plane crash.
- So you guys jump into your work cars, and--
- Yeah, we're going, and I'm trying
to get any information that I can.
And I'm now talking to my assistant agent in charge.
Then he says something that resonates forever.
He says, "Bob, you know what today is?"
And I took a pause, and I said, "what do you mean?"
He said, "Today is April the 19th."
And my heart sank.
April 19 was the last day of Waco,
when the conflagration occurred
and the compound was burned to the ground.
- The Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas,
went up in flames
after a seven-week standoff with federal agents.
David Koresh and 84 of his followers were killed.
Survivors and the FBI still disagree
about how the fire started.
- The previous year, we were on high alert.
The chatter was high.
We expected something--
some retaliation for the events in Waco.
But nothing happened.
So this is now the two-year anniversary of Waco.
- Are you in the car when you hear
it's the federal building? - Yes.
- And what are your thoughts at that point?
- My wife was a federal probation officer.
She parked in that building.
- Wow. - Her office was
across the street at the old federal courthouse.
So where she was was forefront in my mind.
- Bob, you're the special agent in charge
of the Oklahoma Division,
so you're the decision maker for the FBI.
When do you first roll up on what you're seeing?
- It's total chaos.
- Many people are running around,
trying to find friends and coworkers.
- Sirens are blasting.
Cars are on fire. People are screaming.
People are injured and hurt.
People are being carried away.
- Move! Damn it, move!
- When I arrived that morning,
I was maybe 200 feet from the crater.
There's a 32-foot crater in the street.
- Take me there. What's that?
- I've never seen anything like it.
Most of the federal building was gone.
- It is amazing sight.
It's as if somebody came
and sheared off an entire half of the building.
- Cars were burning.
The roof of the adjacent building had been torn off.
Other buildings had collapsed.
There were about 300 buildings damaged.
It was a-- it was a tremendous scene.
- At any time of the day in that federal building,
you'll have upwards of a thousand people.
- And who was in that building?
- You have all of the major federal agencies
that are involved-- secret service, ATF,
military department, DEA, social security.
People coming to get their social security benefits
or check on information.
- Didn't that have a fed kid program, or a fed care?
- Kids. - They had a daycare.
A daycare facility that housed upwards of 50 kids.
[children sobbing]
- Your wife's in the building. So what are you thinking?
- I walked the entire block to survey the scene.
They have court security officers--
we call them blue coats--
and one that knew both myself and my wife, I saw him.
And I asked if he had seen her.
And he said, yes, she was OK.
Having somebody say that he had seen her,
that freed me up to go ahead and do the rest of the job.
- I'm standing there by myself in front of this crater,
and this building that's been blown away.
And all I can do is just say a prayer
that, you know, "Lord, help me through this,
"'cause I don't think I can do it by myself.
"And just help me find justice
"for those who were killed today
"and those who have been affected
by this horrible tragedy."
Once I said my prayer,
you have to go into a detached mode.
If you continue to focus on the lives
that are being lost and injured,
the emotions will overwhelm you
to the point where it's-- - It's crippling.
- Absolutely. It can just take over,
and you can't respond.
It's crippling, I think, is probably the best way
to describe it.
- [sobbing]
- Paramount right now
is that we're in a life-saving recovery mode.
- Absolutely.
- Barry is working on the bomb side.
But at this point, our focus is saving lives.
And that's always the most important thing.
- They haven't found anyone from the office yet.
- The rescue workers are working at their own risk,
but there is one thing that is certain:
this is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil, ever.
- It became evident very early on.
Gas explosions look a little bit different.
The crater, the placement of the crater,
this was going to be what we call an LVB,
a large vehicle bomb, or a vehicle-borne IED.
Not common in the United States,
And it was clearly gonna be
several thousand pounds of explosives.
- During this investigation
and as this chaotic scene is unfolding,
something else happened where you had to make a decision
about whether we keep going, recover, or change course.
- After I was there approximately an hour,
we had set up a temporary command post.
So we were about two blocks away.
And communications are awful.
Our cell phones will not work.
All of a sudden, I get a runner that comes in and said,
"There's another bomb in the building!"
- This building was right in it,
and my mom's in there.
- There's a bomb! Move! Move! Move!
[shouting]
- Barry, are you familiar with this second device
that was found, or were you near it?
- I was on the east side of the building,
up where the playground had been,
just trying to assess the blast pattern.
There were kids' toys on the ground,
and there were still victims in the building.
To my left, you could look up
seven, eight, nine stories high.
- And what do you see when you look up?
- Well, there are people in the windows
that desperately wanted down,
waving their arms, making sure--
they wanted somebody to know that they were still there.
I saw everybody starting to run...
[shouting]
Which I thought was odd.
But then I heard over a loudspeaker,
"Second bomb. Evacuate."
- Let's go! Let's go!
- And it was described as a large wooden box
with explosive markings on it.
It appeared to be a piece of military ordnance
called a tow missile.
- And what does that look like?
- Imagine a long, wooden, rectangular crate.
- OK. - And inside's
a olive drab tube, open on each end.
It's an anti-tank weapon, maybe 6 inches in diameter,
like an old bazooka from the World War II movies, sort of.
- I had to put out the order
to evacuate for their own protection.
- Get 'em back! Get your stuff, right now!
- It's driving me crazy.
There are people who have been seriously injured
that could bleed out
if we don't put tourniquets on them immediately.
There are people's lives that we could save
that we're probably not saving.
- Tell me about the injured that you had to leave behind.
What were they saying? What were they doing?
- They didn't want us to leave,
but we had to leave them.
- What did they say? - "Don't leave."
- Many of them made the hard decision not to leave,
and some people holding the hands
of those who were still breathing.
- Wow.
- Some were carrying out operations on people inside.
- What do you mean?
- We had one lady that was completely trapped.
Her leg was under debris that was so heavy,
they could not remove the debris.
- Wow. - So they were in the process
of amputating her leg when the order went out.
- Her blood pressure was falling.
There was really no choice.
- And they made the decision to stay
and to save her life.
- We couldn't lift anything to extract her.
And the only choice, really,
was to either do that or to die.
- There were state and local bomb techs
who went in and recovered the device.
Upon examination, they said, "Something's wrong.
This is a tow missile, but it's inert."
No explosive, no warhead.
So using the serial numbers on the launch tube,
we were able to recreate its origin.
And it was actually part of a undercover sting operation
for another federal agency, so it wasn't a bomb at all.
[siren wailing]
- It seemed like an eternity,
but I think it was close to about 40 minutes.
Finally, we got the word.
So I had to put the order back in that it was all clear
and everybody could go back into the building.
- Bob, I remember hearing some early speculation
on, like, who did what. What were you hearing
as the special agent in charge of this?
- Early on, there was speculation in all quarters.
One particular congressman came out
and made a declarative statement
that this was obviously Middle Eastern terrorism.
- A U.S. government source has told "CBS News"
that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.
- It looked like a number of bombs
that had occurred in the Middle East,
but you let the facts lead the investigation.
You don't take your theory and make the facts
fit your theory. - Right.
Barry, when as a bomb tech
do we get our first break in this investigation?
- The key piece came very early on.
A reserve deputy called me and my partner, Jim Norman,
over to this rear axle, if you will.
- What's a rear axle?
- Well, it's just the heavy part of the car,
where the differential is, in a rear-wheel drive vehicle.
Thing weighs about 300 pounds.
It exhibited blast damage.
Clearly, it had been extremely close
to the seat of the explosion.
It hit a car outside of tower.
It was twisted.
A lot of explosives use heavy oxidizers.
It was already starting to rust a little bit,
which is another tell.
But on it was stamped
a confidential vehicle identification number.
And the deputy wiped some grease away.
That number was clearly visible.
So I wrote it down, Jim wrote it down.
We compared notes
to make sure there was no transcription error.
And then Jim gave his note to a runner
that took it to the command post.
- So we took that.
We ran it through the National Insurance Crime Bureau
in Dallas.
And within roughly an hour or so,
they are able to trace it, that it's now--
it comes back to a Ryder truck.
Ryder truck headquarters is in Miami, Florida.
Then we dispatch agents to Miami, Florida,
and we go talk to Ryder truck.
And they were immediately able to determine
that that particular truck had been rented
from an Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas.
But I have agents call the Kansas City Division.
We set out leads
that they immediately need to go to Elliott's Body Shop
and get all the details they possibly can.
- What happens then?
- In reviewing the records, we learned
that the truck was rented on April the 17th
by a Robert "Bob" Kling.
He used a South Dakota driver's license,
indicated that he was gonna use the truck for four days,
was gonna go to Omaha, Nebraska.
Not only did they give us the background information,
they gave us descriptions
of what they thought were the people involved.
Initially, they said that there were two people
that came in and rented the truck.
We got an artist's conception that was done
of not only Robert Kling
but the gentleman that he said that was with him.
We have no idea who Bob Kling is.
We don't know if he's a real person.
We now take agents,
and we disperse them throughout Junction City.
And we're trying to see if we can come up
with somebody that's had a Ryder truck
that could fit the description
that was given by the people in Elliott's Body Shop.
One particular agent went to a motel
called the Dreamland Motel.
And the owner of the motel says, "As a matter of fact,
"I had a young man in here who had a Ryder truck,
had rented his room for four days."
It started on a Friday before, on the 14th,
and had checked out on the 18th.
The registration turns out to be
in the name of a gentleman by the name of Timothy McVeigh.
We have no idea who Timothy McVeigh is.
There's no criminal history.
We also show the owner of the motel
the artist's conception,
and she says, "Yes, that looks almost exactly
like the gentleman that had rented the room."
So then we checked telephone records,
and we learned that Timothy McVeigh has,
over the four-day period that he was there,
made four or five calls.
One of those was to a local business there
called the Hunam Palace,
which is a Chinese place, for takeout.
Made an order of moo goo gai pan
to be delivered to room number 25
under the name of Robert Kling.
So now, for the first time,
we have somebody else associated with Robert Kling.
Is Timothy McVeigh Robert Kling,
or is there a second person involved?
We do not know at this stage.
But we do know now that we have Kling
associated with Timothy McVeigh.
Timothy McVeigh also had a Ryder truck.
We now really have probable cause
that a Timothy McVeigh somehow is involved
with the bombing in Oklahoma.
- There was an offline NCIC search
for the name of Timothy McVeigh,
and that search revealed
that he had been arrested by an Oklahoma Highway patrolman.
- So he's under arrest? - Yes.
He was in custody about 90 minutes after the bombing.
- OK. - An Oklahoma Highway
patrol trooper had stopped McVeigh
northbound on I-35,
going away from Oklahoma City towards Kansas.
He was passed by this yellow Mercury.
And he noticed the Mercury didn't have a license plate,
so he pulled the car over for failing to display a plate.
McVeigh got out.
And the trooper noticed a bulge under McVeigh's jacket
and recognized it as a pistol.
- Oh, wow.
- McVeigh said, "I've got a gun, and it's loaded."
And Trooper Hanger pulled his pistol,
put it to McVeigh's head, and said, "So is mine."
- Oh, wow. Yeah, well, there you go.
- He was booked into the county jail.
- My right-hand man came in and said,
"Boss, you're not gonna believe this.
Timothy McVeigh is in custody."
And I said, "What?" - Yeah.
- And he said, "He was arrested
"approximately 90 minutes after the bombing
and is currently in jail in Noble County, Oklahoma."
- Unbelievable.
- But he's getting ready to have an appearance
before the judge and is gonna be released.
I use the National Guard helicopter,
and I dispatch a team.
I have a special agent in charge from Dallas,
and his assistant, as well as two of my agents,
and I dispatch them up to Perry, Oklahoma,
to make the arrest of Timothy McVeigh.
- I flew up. We called ahead.
Had the troopers find us a spot to land
on the side of the highway.
I hopped out to stay with the car
until we got a warrant for it.
You always have to be concerned about,
you know, explosives or booby traps,
or other types of forensic evidence like fingerprints,
hairs, fibers, such and such.
And the rest of the group went over
to take custody of McVeigh.
- The team that was dispatched up to Perry,
they immediately go in and ask him,
"Do you know why we're here?"
And he says,
"It's probably about that Oklahoma City thing."
- Wow.
- So then they give him his Miranda rights.
And he says, "I do not want to speak
until I confer with my attorney."
So that was the sum total of the conversation
that we had with Timothy McVeigh.
We never had any other discussions.
- McVeigh was held for two days
and was minutes from a likely release on bond
when FBI agents using a computer
found that the most wanted man in America
was already in jail.
- As you can imagine, the tensions
are rising significantly in Oklahoma.
People know people or have relatives that have died.
And right now, even in Perry, Oklahoma,
there's crowds that are starting to gather.
They're starting to get noisy.
[shouting]
So we're very much concerned about a--
a Jack Ruby situation.
[gunshot] - He's been shot.
Oswald has been shot. Lee Oswald.
- We have to actually protect Timothy McVeigh now
to make sure he's not assassinated.
So we come up with a plan of using a van
to back it up closely to where he is.
And we march him out
so that the public can actually see him.
[shouting]
- You murderer!
- They were, you know, booing.
A lot of emotion.
- Tonight in Perry, Oklahoma, suspect Tim McVeigh,
among the most wanted men in American history,
was escorted from the courthouse.
- Well, now we're trying to see,
who is Timothy McVeigh?
What is his role in the bombing?
It doesn't appear logical
that one person could do it on his own.
Did he participate in building the bomb?
Was he just a coconspirator?
And were others involved?
We do not have the whole picture.
- Now with one suspect in jail,
the FBI says another remains on the loose.
- They knew when it was gonna happen.
They knew where it was gonna happen.
And they knew how it was gonna happen.
- Not only are we trying to prove a criminal case,
we want to know why.
Why did this happen?
What could cause somebody to do this?
- The basic tenets of, you know, hatred,
hatred for the government, are alive and well.
[explosion]
- All right, they're going into the house.
They are walking into the house.
- Literally, he was trying to start a war
against the United States.
[tense music]
♪