'Others Unknown' in the Oklahoma City bombing and how two Okies spooked the FBI

On the morning of April 19, 1995, I was standing outside the downtown L.A. courthouse where the O.J. Simpson trial was being held. I shared a seat in the courtroom with four other weekly magazines, and each morning after I spent my one day at the trial, CNN would interview me on its platform across the street. It was a live, two-minute deal with me answering questions from an invisible anchor. I tried to keep it light, commenting about Marcia Clark's new "do" or how certain jurors reacted to witnesses by nodding off.

I'd been covering the trial, once a week, for four months. But this day would mark the end of my O.J. coverage--and the beginning of a near-compulsive journalistic journey that would last for the next six years.

It would also bring me into the orbit of a writer who's become one of my few journalistic heroes--and a friend.

As they rigged the mic onto my shirt front, the producer was listening in his headphones. We gotta wait, he said, some kind of gas main explosion in Oklahoma. Should just be a minute or two.

We never did go on the air. It wasn't a gas main explosion. It was Tim McVeigh and 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel and other witch's brew in several barrels in the back of a rented Ryder truck. The blast at the federal Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City--the town where I was born--killed 168 and injured more than 850.

When it became clear that cool spring morning in California that CNN had bigger breaking-news fish to fry than even O.J., I dashed across the street to a pay phone. Remember--this was mostly pre-cell phone days. Used my calling card to phone my boss in Washington.

"What are our guys with contacts in the FBI and CIA saying about the bombing?" I asked him.

"Middle East," he replied.

"I think that's bogus," I said. "I think it's domestic."

That's because for two years I'd been covering what my editors came to call the Fear and Loathing Beat--the antigovernment movement of the 1990s, mainly in the West. I'd already, for example, covered the trial of white separatist Randy Weaver, whose wife and son were killed by FBI snipers and ATF agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho; and the Montana Freemen, who endured an 81-day siege by the feds and others when their brand of frontier justice and common law caused them to issue bounties on the local sheriff, a judge and others.

I'd broken bread and drunk beer with these people. I thought I knew 'em better than most anybody.

I knew a lot about 'em--but one guy knew more.

After the bombing, I spent two weeks in Kingman, Ariz., where McVeigh had lived the year before he blew up the building. Learned some interesting stuff, but little of it got into the magazine I was working for. But I convinced my immediate boss--one of the two best bosses I've ever had--that these people and their groups and their movement mattered, that they should be reported on.

So I tracked 'em where they lived: the Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Vidor, Tex.; the sovereignty movement in Catron County, N.M.; a secessionist outfit in far west Texas; a far-right Catholic church in St. Marys, Kan. Other places and other causes.

Because I'd grown up in northeastern Kansas, where McVeigh and Nichols had been stationed at Fort Riley, I had an advantage if talking to people back there. I wrote, for example, the first national story about eyewitnesses who identified a local man as the John Doe No. 2 they'd seen with McVeigh before the bombing--a man the FBI tried repeatedly to retract and make disappear.

Wherever I went, I kept running across the traces of another journalist. Either he'd just been where I was or he was scheduled to show up soon.

His name was Joel Dyer.

I forget exactly how and when Joel and I finally met. He'd been aware of my work and movements, too, and we quickly found a mutual Okie-ness (he was born there too) along with a ruthless, relentless drive for the truth. He wrote the single-best book on the antigovernment movement, "Harvest of Rage," (http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Rage-Oklahoma-City-Beginning/dp/0813332931), and as we continued our separate but equal operations, we both began to firmly believe that there were more people involved in the Oklahoma City bombing than McVeigh and his Sad Sack buddy, Terry Nichols.

In particular, we came to believe that one man had probably been some sort of ATF or other federal informant, knew about the bombing before it happened, let it happen and became a Johnny Appleseed of the antigovernment movement--traveling, for instance, to the Freeman compound in Montana, but leaving just before the feebies surrounded it; to the Republic of Texas at Fort Davis (where he pulled out a .45 from a holster on his hip and asked me if I knew what it was); and to several militia groups in Kansas and Missouri.

Just before McVeigh was first scheduled to be executed in the spring of 2001, I faxed a list of a dozen or so questions to the FBI press office--questions Joel had helped me prepare. I never got the questions answered--but within three days, his execution in Indiana had been postponed. The FBI, it seemed, had suddenly discovered that it had somehow failed to turn over thousands of pages of evidence to McVeigh's defense team. Our questions had asked about a lot of those pages.

Joel did that, with a little boost from me.

His work was cited heavily by Gore Vidal in a "Vanity Fair" profile of McVeigh in the fall of 2001, after the bomber was eventually executed in June.

Joel went on to found his own weekly newspaper in Colorado, sold out last year and is celebrating a milestone birthday this weekend. It is especially ironic that it's the 13th anniversary of what until 9/11 had been the worst incident of terrorism on American soil.

After we finally met, he and his buddy and fellow Okie Dave Hutton used to dig driving straight through from Colorado to L.A. to see me, stopping only to play golf and gas up. We'd then spend a couple of wild nights before they headed back to the mountains. Our song, for reasons we need not go into here, is Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light."

In the summer of 2006, I spent nearly the entire three months going through numerous boxes of files, dozens of notebooks and hundreds of interviews I'd done on the Oklahoma City bombing. I put it altogether for an Independent Study course I was taking for my masters at Cal State Fullerton, from Associate Dean Fred Zandpour. I dedicated its 75 pages, "Others Unknown: the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy," to Joel and to two Kansas law enforcement folks, Suzanne James and Doug Mauck, who had helped us over the years with our reporting. "They kept the faith," I inscribed.

In the academic paper, I named names of the other men I believe were part of the bombing conspiracy. If you ever wanna hear 'em, you can ask me. And someday Joel and I hope to maybe do a book on our discoveries.

Meantime, Brother Joel, happy birthday.

We did some good stuff together. And I hope we do it again--with Dave driving...