[dramatic music]
- The Alfred P. Murrah building
in downtown Oklahoma City
ripped apart by, as far as we could tell,
a single explosion.
[sirens wailing]
- It comes back to a Ryder truck with explosives in it.
- Where did the vehicle come from?
- The truck was rented by a Robert "Bob" Kling.
Is Timothy McVeigh Robert Kling,
or is there a second person involved?
[crowd screaming]
[siren wailing]
- About 90 minutes after the bombing,
an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper had stopped McVeigh.
- We have no doubt that Timothy McVeigh
is involved with the bombing.
♪
- You murderer!
♪
- Now, with one suspect in jail,
the FBI says another remains on the loose.
- When Timothy McVeigh was booked,
he gave an address in Decker, Michigan.
We immediately dispatch agents.
- All right, they're going into the house.
They are walking into the house.
- The basic tenants of hatred, hatred for the government,
are alive and well.
♪
McVeigh tried to recruit Fortier.
- We actually put wiretaps on Fortier's residence.
We have him under constant surveillance.
♪
- We had 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate.
♪
- Literally, he was trying to start a war
against the United States.
[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."
[dramatic music]
♪
- 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.
- The fear generated by the Oklahoma explosion
is rippling across the country.
- Now, with one suspect in jail,
the FBI says another remains on the loose.
- We have Timothy McVeigh in custody.
♪
- He was actually sitting in jail
in a small town called Perry.
- You're in charge of this ginormous event.
What are you thinking, Bob?
- Did he deliver the bomb?
Did he participate in building the bomb?
Was he just a co-conspirator?
None of these questions
we have fully answered at this stage,
but we have no doubt
that Timothy McVeigh is involved
with the bombing in Oklahoma City.
- You murderer!
♪
- What happens next?
- Troopers had stayed with McVeigh's car
to make sure nothing happened to it.
I accompanied the vehicle with a trooper
to this remote location,
and we relocated that to a secure off-site,
where our evidence response team could process it.
And inside were a lot of documents,
references to "The Turner Diaries,"
some of McVeigh's handwritten notes.
- What is "The Turner Diaries"?
- Turner Diaries is a novel, a fictional work
where a group of right-wing extremists,
they destroy a federal building in DC
and kill hundreds of people.
- The FBI buildings. - Yes.
♪
- Wow.
And that was in the car?
- Pages from it, excerpts from it.
There were statements from McVeigh,
some of McVeigh's handwritten notes,
anti-government sentiments that showed some intent.
♪
- Deep down in my heart, I felt more than likely
that the Oklahoma City bombing
was connected to the events that had occurred
in Waco two years before.
- Tragedy tonight in Waco, Texas.
At least four federal agents and a member of a cult group
are dead after an hour-long gun battle
at the cult's ranch.
- We know he was at the Branch Davidian standoff,
made numerous trips to Waco.
- And ultimately, the attack on April 19,
the second anniversary of the fire.
That date was so important to him,
he used that date as his date of birth
on the false identification, the Robert Kling ID.
- We learned that the truck was rented
by a Robert "Bob" Kling,
a pseudonym of Timothy McVeigh.
♪
- What happens then?
- When Timothy McVeigh was booked
in the Noble County Jail,
he gave an address in Decker, Michigan.
So we immediately dispatch agents
to Decker, Michigan, which is now the next step
in the investigation.
- Just as the media descended on the Noble County Courthouse
in Perry, Oklahoma, federal agents
began swarming around a farmhouse in Decker, Michigan.
- The authorities have been looking, throughout the day,
at four buildings in particular--
the farmhouse, a shed,
a metal building, and a red barn.
- It turns out that the property
was owned by two brothers, James and Terry Nichols.
- Neighbors were still trying to sort out today
how the Nichols family fits into all of this.
Some describe James Nichols as a quiet farmer.
Another told of seeing Terry Nichols detonate
a bomb several years ago.
- All right, they're going into the house.
They are walking into the house.
- So what do you say about the bombing?
- Terry Nichols had actually-- had left the property,
but we learned that Terry Nichols
and Tim McVeigh are best friends.
- Wow. - Both of them expressed
the need to take reprisal against the federal government.
- Timothy McVeigh was a close friend of the Nichols brothers
and a frequent visitor to the farm.
He lived here in the Nichols house for eight months
until about a year ago.
- Terry Nichols now lived in Kansas.
We had Terry Nichols under surveillance,
but we weren't trying to be secretive about it.
We wanted him to know that we were there.
♪
- So we have Timothy McVeigh in custody.
You were watching Terry Nichols.
Now what?
- Well, now we're trying to see, who is Timothy McVeigh?
What is his role in the bombing?
We do not have the whole picture.
Not only are we trying to prove a criminal case,
we want to know why.
Why did this happen? - Yeah.
- What could cause somebody to do this?
And the only way to really do that
was to examine his entire life.
What was the contributing factor that caused someone
like Timothy McVeigh to carry out a bombing
against innocent people?
I brought Timothy McVeigh's dad to Oklahoma City.
- Suspect Tim McVeigh was escorted from the courthouse.
As McVeigh was being moved,
his father was taken in for questioning.
- He's living in a suburb of Buffalo, New York.
- OK.
- He's a blue collar worker and worked for one company
for most of his life.
Good fellow. You know, salt of the Earth.
- How do you handle things?
How do you get through this?
- A day at a time.
- And of course, he doesn't believe
his son could possibly do this.
But he is very cooperative,
wants to help, do whatever he can.
What he relays is a description of a young man that
was troubled in many ways.
The divorce that his parents had gone through
affected him greatly.
- His mother and father's frequent marital battles
left him feeling angry and isolated.
- He also was one that was bullied.
He was picked on, made fun of.
Actually was a bright young man
that scored around 120 IQ,
but not very successful.
Mediocre.
He loved his granddad, who taught him how to shoot.
He loved to go out and hunt,
and that was something that he was good at.
And then eventually, joins the military.
- He was fairly successful in the military.
He won a Bronze Star.
He killed an Iraqi in combat in Desert Storm.
Timothy McVeigh's dad says that he had two best friends,
Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier.
They had joined the military at the same time,
had gone to boot camp together.
And if anything had happened,
he believed that both of those would have been involved.
- So the dad was suggesting,
hey, you may want to talk to Michael Fortier.
- Right.
So that's when we decide now to dispatch another crew
to Kingman, Arizona,
where Michael Fortier lives
with his wife, Lori, and a young baby.
So that's now a new focus of the investigation.
So we have now the primary locations
are obviously Oklahoma City, Decker, Michigan,
Terry Nichols's house in Kansas,
and Kingman, Arizona.
We actually put wiretaps on Fortier's residence,
and he's very circumspect.
He doesn't reveal anything at all
with regard to the bombing.
We approach him, but he's not cooperative initially.
- Are you doing OK?
- But we keep the pressure up.
We have him under constant surveillance.
Finally, we have subpoenas that are issued
for his appearance in Oklahoma City.
- How do we get to him? And what happens with him?
- They knew it was going to happen.
They knew when it was going to happen.
They knew where it was going to happen,
and they knew how it was going to happen.
It really got down to wanting to protect his wife.
They just had a new baby. - OK.
- He was concerned that
if we learned the entire plot...
- Right.
- That she was going to go away for a substantial time.
And she would because
she was as much involved as her husband.
- McVeigh was Fortier's army buddy,
the best man at his wedding, and now Fortier
is McVeigh's most damning accuser.
They both hated the federal government.
When Waco went up in flames,
both blamed federal agents for causing the fire.
Fortier testified McVeigh started
to talk about blowing up a government building
on Waco's anniversary.
Fortier-- "He wanted to cause
a general uprising in America."
- While McVeigh was living with him,
he took soup cans from their cupboard
and used them to show how he was going to array the barrels
in the back of the truck to maximize
the damage to the building.
He told Michael Fortier that he and Nichols
had stolen some of the explosives.
It filled in the blanks.
- When it got down to it,
Michael Fortier struck a deal with the government
that he would testify as long as his wife, Lori,
did not go to prison.
- What happened to Terry Nichols?
- Terry Nichols surrendered himself to the local police
once he saw McVeigh was in custody.
- Oh, wow.
- The second suspect, now identified
as Terry Nichols of Decker, Michigan,
surrendered in Herington, Kansas,
without a fight after coming under police surveillance.
- But he did not exercise his Miranda rights.
He was willing to talk with us. - Oh.
- Terry Nichols said that in the fall of '94,
they rented storage sheds to store the components
because we're talking about thousands of pounds
of ammonium nitrate, hundreds of pounds of fuel.
- Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil
were the principal ingredients in the Oklahoma City bomb.
- So he facilitated the rental of those.
He purchased the ammonium nitrate
and then actually helped him assemble the bomb out of the--
- Oh, wow.
- It's called Geary Lake State Park.
- He was directly involved in mixing the bomb,
putting the bomb together.
The weekend before, he went to Oklahoma City
and helped Timothy McVeigh stash the car--
the getaway car, the Mercury. - OK.
- Picked him up and took him back to Kansas.
He wanted to talk his way out of it,
but he also, you know, lied through his teeth.
So it was difficult to know when he was telling the truth
and when he was not.
Most of the time, he was lying,
but he actually gave us some helpful information.
- And then the following day, we executed a search warrant
at Terry Nichols' home in Kansas.
[dog barking]
- Timothy McVeigh,
the man charged in the crime yesterday, remains in custody.
The two Nichols brothers questioned yesterday
are being held as material witnesses,
but have not been charged.
- It was really invaluable, some of the things
that we obtained there.
We recovered 29 or 39 weapons
that had been taken in a burglary,
armed robbery situation. - Oh, wow.
- There were still coins, jade jewelry,
that was taken from a robbery of a guy
named Moore in Arkansas.
This guy dealt and sold a lot of armaments.
- To finance the bombing, McVeigh told Fortier
that they were going to rob Roger Moore.
We found a receipt for 40 50-pound bags
of ammonium nitrate.
It was wrapped around a roll of gold coins,
which were similar to those that were stolen
at the Roger Moore burglary,
but it had Tim McVeigh's fingerprint on it.
So that's 2,000 pounds.
We had a general idea about the size of the bomb
based on the damage that we saw,
so we sent agents to the co-op
to see if any other purchases had been made.
In fact, there was one in October and one in September,
both for 2,000 pounds. - Wow.
- That's a lot of fertilizer.
♪
- Plus we found out that Terry Nichols,
when he learned that we might be coming for his house,
had taken the ammonium nitrate
and had spread it out over his yard--
his porch and portions of his yard.
- What are you thinking at this point?
- This was starting to make sense.
We had 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate,
which is starting to approximate the estimate
for the size of the device.
♪
- There was one key piece of evidence
that we haven't talked about. - Oh.
- There was a calling card
that we recovered during the search warrant
of Terry Nichols' house.
But Bridges was a name that they
had used for the calling card.
It was one of the key things that
enable us to tie the entire conspiracy together.
- Oh, wow.
- They thought that they were secretive,
and they would use that to make
their confidential phone calls.
So we really were able to put together and link
where they were at different times.
- I think there was a total of 604 calls made...
- Wow. - Using the calling card.
We were able to match, literally,
the Yellow Pages for chemical companies.
He had told Fortier that the explosives
were going to be in barrels.
We saw calls to barrel companies.
And then when we executed the warrant at Nichols' home,
we found barrels there.
They were chemically identical--
same color, same size.
The calling card had calls to racetracks
where you sell nitromethane, which is a good fuel
for the other side of that explosive equation.
- We also found a drill, a cordless drill,
that was used to burglarize an explosives quarry
where some of the explosive materials were stolen
that were used in the bomb. - Wow.
- That tied Terry Nichols directly to it.
- Yes.
- And with the testimonial evidence
Fortier was able to provide, Fortier said
McVeigh told him that we stole explosives from a quarry.
Well, we've got that testimony,
and we've got the lock.
And we've got the drill and the drill bit
in Terry Nichols' home.
We also recovered explosives that match the same type
that were stolen.
We also took McVeigh's clothes, and the clothing
had explosive residue in it.
Each explosive has a chemical signature.
Those were the components of the device
that we're able to track through evidence
recovered at Nichols' home.
We showed that McVeigh made a call to Nichols' home,
and then, magically, five hours later,
they show up in Oklahoma City together,
which is the travel time.
When Nichols was interviewed,
he said that he hadn't seen McVeigh for months
until that Sunday.
But we were able to show, through forensic evidence,
that he was not being truthful, so it tied it all together.
- Wow. Amazing.
- McVeigh tried to recruit Fortier,
and Lori and Michael said, you know, not going to do it.
So McVeigh was living with them up until early April.
When he realized they weren't going to,
he left and went to a motel.
- Sources say Fortier knew of the plot,
but did not take part in the attack.
- Terry Nichols was more of a witting accomplice.
- He had a significant, active role.
- Oh, sure.
- It could not have happened except for the actions
of Terry Nichols.
He was talkative.
He kept thinking he could talk his way out of the deal.
But when he was finally done through talking,
he was arrested and brought into custody.
♪
- The results of this investigation--
what did you learn the plot was?
- Some newspapers wrote that it was
directed against me because I was the spokesperson for Waco.
- OK.
- It was not our intention that this compound be burned down.
I can't tell you the shock and the horror that all of us
felt when we saw those flames coming out there.
- Timothy McVeigh was asked, was that the case?
By one of his attorneys. He said, no.
Said he knew I worked in Oklahoma City,
but his primary goal was to attack the ATF,
whom he believed had agents at Waco,
and also other federal agencies.
He had said, if he would have gotten me,
it would have been a bonus.
The end goal was to cause an uprising in the United States
that would ultimately cause a revolution.
[dramatic music]
- That's chilling on so many levels...
- Mm-hmm. - For so many reasons.
- We tried to determine if he was involved
with any militia groups and so forth.
- Soldiers on training maneuvers,
but they're not the US Army.
[gunshots]
They are the Michigan Citizens Militia,
which claims 15,000 members.
It is part of a growing nationwide phenomenon
whose enemy is the US government.
- If they hurt our Constitution anymore,
they are going to have to answer to us.
- And I promise you, we're not going to give up our guns.
[men cheer]
- But Timothy McVeigh belonged to no group.
♪
- As early as tomorrow, a federal grand jury
is expected to indict three men
in the Oklahoma terror bombing.
The indictments will allege the mass murder
was motivated by a hatred of government
and financed with the sale of stolen weapons.
- What are you feeling as this is all unwinding,
as you're watching the news?
- What could cause a young man to turn against his country?
What could drive a person to that extent?
We learned that he was a very troubled young man
and ultimately ended up blaming the US government
for his own failures.
- Prime suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
will be charged in the bombing itself
and will face the death penalty.
Also to be indicted, Michael Fortier,
an army buddy of the suspects who will plead guilty
to relatively minor charges in return for his testimony.
- What did McVeigh get? What was his conviction?
- He was convicted under what was then
a new weapons of mass destruction statute,
which carries the death penalty.
- Everybody knew almost somebody
inside that federal building.
- Right.
- We knew people, Secret Service, DEA,
the ladies at the credit union.
It's a relatively small community.
It's difficult when you know people.
[somber music]
♪
- It took me about 10 years to go to the memorial.
People say, why? Because, uh...
[stammers] [knocks on table]
- That's--I understand.
- The, uh...
♪
You're not able to express those emotions.
- Right.
- But they're there.
- Yeah.
- And it took me a long time to say,
"I can go and see this,
and touch it, feel it." - Yeah.
- And you almost depersonalize it to the point
where you can't trust it as being real.
- Yeah. - But you have to be objective.
- Yeah.
- And so it was difficult for me.
It still is.
♪
These were individuals, people I knew, people I worked with.
And their life was snuffed out in seconds
for no real good cause, no reason.
And we had to do everything in our power
to see that they obtained justice,
or that would have been a thing
that would been hard to have lived with,
if we did not find justice for them.
♪