Former ATF Agent and Counterterrorism Explosives Expert Looks Back at the Oklahoma City Bombing 30 Years Later

Thirty years ago today, Timothy James McVeigh, a former U.S. Army Infantry sergeant, Desert Storm combat veteran, and Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunner who became embittered with the U.S. government after washing out of Special Forces Assessment and Selection school and in response to his perception of government actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco respectively, pushed in, twisted, and released the pull ring on two M-60 fuse igniters.

As the time fuse burned, McVeigh got out of the Ryder truck he rented under an assumed name in Junction City, Kansas, walked about a block away to where he had parked his car, a 1977 Mercury Marquis, and drove off.  A short time later, at 9:02 AM, there was a thunderous explosion as approximately 4000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with nitromethane racing fuel and laced with dynamite, detonated. Dynamite and blasting caps McVeigh and his Army basic training friend Terry Nichols had previously stolen from a quarry near Marion, Kansas.

The blast sheared the face off and nearly collapsed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK, killing 168 souls in the process. The blast was so large that as the shock wave partially reflected on overhead clouds, the roofs of nearby parked cars were dented in as if somebody had jumped on them.  Human body parts were found on rooftops many blocks from the scene.

The background story of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 has been told from a wide variety of legal, operational, and technical vantage points, so I won’t attempt to re-plow that ground.  With a significant anniversary upon us though, it gave me a chance to think back to long ago, and recount some of the lesser or unknown behind-the-scenes aspects of a case that touched me deeply, having been in it from the get-go.

On April 19, 1995, I was a young special agent with what was then called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), assigned to the Los Angeles Field Division.  I had joined ATF five years prior while still a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, having just left the 297^th MI Company (CEWI, SF [ABN]), and was looking for a new unit close to my office in downtown Los Angeles.  ATF had yet to send me to the coveted Certified Explosives Specialist course, a school for agents which involved weeks of intensive training in how to properly and safely use vast types of explosives, both military and civilian, and dispose of same, but I was regularly working explosives cases, to include occasionally buying pipe bombs, grenades and stolen explosives undercover.

I was having the time of my life.  The year prior, I was accepted into ATF’s elite National Response Team (NRT), a group of approximately 100 special agents, chemists, and explosives enforcement officers who rapidly respond to major fire and explosive incidents as a fully equipped team ready to tackle the largest and most complex scenes.  My “go bag,” an ATF issued and massive green, wheeled Orvis duffel, sat dutifully in the closet, ready for action, and my then state-of-the-art Skytel 2-way pager lay on my dresser next to my SIG P226 9 mm pistol as I was getting ready to leave my house in Long Beach, California for the long drive into downtown Los Angeles.

My girlfriend, a Deputy United States Marshal who would later become my ex-wife, noticed my pager buzzing and handed it to me.  It was my NRT supervisor, Harry, advising there had been a massive explosion in Oklahoma City, and to get on a plane ASAP.  After turning on the television to watch the horrifying situation, I caught up with Harry in a quick call to get some additional details, and booked the next flight to Oklahoma City, where I would live for the next 18 days.

Arrival

The NRT in the mid-1990s consisted of four regionally based teams, and I was assigned to the Western NRT, which covered a vast swath of territory from the West Coast all the way to Texas and Oklahoma.  I knew that two of the most senior members of the NRT were based in Oklahoma City, and that they were alive and coordinating the NRT’s deployment.  When you respond to massive fires and explosions for a living, you get really good at it, and the machine that was the NRT sprang into action.

I recall it was drizzling and late in the afternoon when I arrived on scene in Oklahoma City and linked up with the initial members of my team.  Both ATF and the FBI had set up command posts a few hundred yards from the blast seat and we had a block of room reservations at the nearby Embassy Suites.  Temporary barriers set up to keep out a legion of onlookers, concerned citizens, and the media quickly became chain link fencing with armed guards.

I remember hearing one evening that someone wearing surplus firefighter gear had climbed over the fence and been caught by police, so we eventually had to resort to special photo ID tags made up on the scene with periodically changing colored stickers as an additional layer of Operational Security (OPSEC).  The OPSEC threat was not just theoretical, either.  One evening, we were briefed that attractive female reporters were hanging out “undercover” at the Embassy Suites’ ubiquitous evening “manager’s reception,” where we were all drinking after the end of our shifts. The Embassy Suites staff was absolutely stunning in their hospitality, as were the people of Oklahoma in general.  By hanging out, listening, and asking questions of the mostly male federal agents, the reporters learned valuable information that found its way into news articles.  I saw the same elicitation techniques used when I was working the Centennial Olympic Park bombing about a year later as a NRT member in Atlanta, Georgia because some boys never learn!

Managed Chaos

This was the largest bombing scene I had deployed to in my then relatively nascent career, because the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, while massive, was confined to the parking garage and had far fewer fatalities.  The Oklahoma City bombing, by contrast, was an absolutely insane crime scene when I arrived, with massive rescue efforts underway in the hopes of locating trapped survivors from the rubble.  There was very real concern of further collapse, to include a total loss of the building.

The Army Corps of Engineers arrived relatively quickly and set up specialized laser monitoring equipment to observe the building.  While law enforcement was focused on an obvious crime scene, the fire department and subsequent Urban Search and Rescue teams were focused on finding and rescuing survivors.  This particular bombing was unusual as well because of the vast size of the crime scene, primarily radiating out in a fan shape from the front of the building for blocks. In fact, from the back of the federal building, you could scarcely tell a massive explosion had nearly toppled the structure.  Multiple buildings in front of the Murrah building were also heavily damaged, to include the Water Resources Board and Journal Record buildings, which sustained heavy blast damage and were found to contain valuable evidence from the rented Ryder truck that McVeigh and Nichols turned into a Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED).

Between the Journal Record building and the bombing site, a lone tree survived, blasted almost completely free of leaves, and it is today part of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Although there was occasional tension as to competing mission priorities, after several days, when it became apparent no more survivors would be found alive, the problem abated. Any debris taken away had to be searched for potential evidence, and doing it all on scene was wildly impractical.

While the NRT set up selective evidence screening and sifting triage on scene, complete with screens to look for very small items of evidence, this was insufficient given the scores of tons of debris that needed to be screened.  We decided to use dump trucks to take the debris to the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department range, and methodically deposited it there in numbered piles for screening.  It was this site where I was assigned to help lead screening operations. One agent, a Western NRT teammate, had a particularly macabre job: he was assigned to the coroner’s office, trying to match up various limbs and body parts to each other to find out just how many victims we actually had.

The Range

Because of the sheer volume of debris which needed to be carefully screened, and the recognition there was no place in the immediate vicinity of the Murrah building to do it, the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department range was chosen to deposit the debris and do search operations. The site was ideal because it was not too far from downtown Oklahoma City, had large amounts of open flat space, and could be access-controlled.  In addition to the more typical sifting operations ATF and FBI do for most post blast investigation scenes (with literal wire screens set inside raised forms where you sift through dirt and debris), the massive amount of evidence prompted the use of some experimental technology in the form of a giant piece of mining equipment used to sift dirt for gold with massive amounts of water.

This “hydro-sifter” was a great idea in theory, but in application, it was really primarily designed to be able to go through lightly rocky soil, and proved to be ill-suited for screening chunks of concrete, pieces of automobiles, and other building detritus.  The giant and noisy machine regularly broke, and made a godawful mess with the dirt, covering the operators in mud at the end of the day.  A Los Angeles-based special agent bomb technician friend of mine from the FBI, Kevin, was assigned to supervise the contraption, and by the end of the day, he was at times unrecognizable because of the mud.

Help in conducting the searches was not a problem, as every law enforcement agency and fire department wanted to help.  Unfortunately, having too many hands proved not to be terribly useful, as they were not trained in post-blast investigation, and thus were really not sure what to look for.  Ultimately, we settled upon taking help primarily from Federal agencies, particularly those that had offices in the destroyed Murrah Federal Building.  Every day, a small group of new volunteers arrived, enthusiastic to be part of the team.

As we would work our assigned mounds each day, we would often have to stop work to document specific kinds of findings, particularly human remains, and potential evidence I would be called upon to examine to give my opinion as to whether or not it was part of the truck, or even seized law enforcement evidence.  Something rarely discussed in stories coming out of the blast was the fact evidence vaults of multiple federal law enforcement agencies were damaged or destroyed, and the evidence necessary for ongoing federal cases was in fact scattered in the debris remaining at the federal building, as well as in the piles before us. Ranging from cashier’s checks to cocaine, and machineguns to marijuana, these were items of particular interest to us, and when they were found they were photographed by agents from the relevant agencies and collected for safe storage.

We had related problems at the Murrah Federal Building blast site, when inert ATF explosives props were spotted in the debris, causing all work to stop.  Some conspiracy-minded individuals who know zero about explosives later spun that into tales of internal building detonations and illegal storage of live explosives in the federal building, but it is a losing proposition to reason with people who wear tinfoil hats.

After a few days at the range, my ATF colleagues and I noticed a particular trend.  Young agents would arrive in the morning, practically tearing at the piles with their bare hands to get the job done.  As we would find human remains and key evidence, they would gradually slow down, becoming withdrawn. I remember one young agent from a small federal law enforcement contingent uncovering what proved to be a child’s forearm, almost completely intact, and he shut down then and there.  We gently took him aside to relax and de-stress. He was not the same for the rest of the day, and we never saw him again.

Similarly, I remember finding a DEA agent’s badge and credentials one day; I never did learn if it belonged to the DEA agent who was killed or was rather from an agent who had left credentials in their desk. Eventually, chaplains, peer support teams, and social workers set up at the scene in the event people needed or wanted to talk, and we held occasional stand downs for people to gather and process what they were seeing.

About a week into the range sifting and screening operation, the U.S. Army, answering our call for federal resources that could help us rake down and sift the piles so they were more manageable in size, sent about a platoon’s worth of soldiers to assist us.  One day, a young PFC flagged me down because he thought one of the parking meters in the debris – and there were many – appeared “funny” to him.  When I looked at the item, I immediately recognized the gears and shape as something that would have had to have come from the Ryder truck VBIED, in particular an axle half shaft, which must have been blasted into the building like a missile from the force of the explosion.  With his help, I dragged the item off to the evidence recovery truck, where I filled out a rudimentary evidence tag.  I would not see it again until 1997, when I flew to Denver, Colorado to participate in trial prep for McVeigh and Nichols.

R & R. Sort of

Because our shifts were long and both physically and mentally draining, our chief activity after getting cleaned up, calling home, and eating was to start drinking.  Perhaps not the best way to cope, but for those in the thick of really ugly things, it was common then.  There were no really good gym facilities close by to use for a workout, and most people were frankly too mentally and physically exhausted to try anyway. The Embassy Suites, as part of their desire to be extra hospitable to front line personnel, kept expanding the manager’s reception hours so that it became, in effect, an hours long open bar.

Not long before our team wrapped up and redeployed home, some of my agency’s senior management thought it would be a good idea to have an “all hands” meeting in one of the large hotel conference rooms to thank all of us in person and answer questions. Well over 100 ATF personnel were present, along with a number of other federal agents from different agencies who were drinking with us. It was a great idea until it wasn’t.  Unfortunately, the meeting was scheduled to kick off deep into the evening’s drinking fest. Everything started out well enough, with appropriate laudatory comments from the visiting brass.  A number of agents asked why [ATF Headquarters] was so reticent to get out in front of the media to highlight ATF’s great work, the frankly amazing and cathartic visits with area school kids, and skill of the NRT in particular.

One of the well lubricated agents, a veteran of the 1993 Branch Davidian raid and standoff in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of four ATF agents, asked pointedly why headquarters was again letting the street agents down instead of sticking up for us. At this point the senior executive, himself associated with the tragic events of Waco, responded by accusing the agent of being one of “you people” who failed to support management by speaking to sources outside of ATF, instead of keeping everything internal in the aftermath of Waco. The room fairly erupted. Agents began standing up, shouting and pointing at the clueless senior executive, who began to stammer and physically backpedal.  Fortunately, a well-respected agent stepped in to diffuse the situation, and the visiting executive beat a hasty retreat for the exit, leaving our non-ATF federal agent friends in the crowd wide-eyed in disbelief.

The Aftermath

In February 2016, I was part of ATF’s “All-Senior Executive Service” conference in Oklahoma City. Ironically, I had started a new job as Deputy Director of the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center a month prior.  Co-leading the U.S. government’s sole strategic facility for the exploitation of terrorist explosive devices of interest to the United States, I was now going (back) to the scene of the worst terrorist bombing ever committed on U.S. soil. It felt otherworldly.

A highlight of the management conference was a specially guided and narrated tour of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum.  It was like stepping back into a giant time capsule, and it was the first time I had been to Oklahoma City since the bombing.  It was frankly eerie to see so many artifacts from the bombing, the subsequent trials, and walk the same ground, which was hard to recognize with the Murrah Federal Building gone and the passage of 20-plus years.

If you have not seen this museum, it is incredibly well done and reminds me of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.  You should make it a point to see both. Finally, in May 2024, at an ATF retiree’s association meeting, I bid on and won a very special engraved piece of granite that was rescued from the remnants of the Murrah Federal Building when it was demolished in 1995.  I see it every day in my home office and it serves a reminder of 30 years ago, not just of man’s inhumanity to man, but more importantly of the incredible generosity and resilience of the people of Oklahoma, who rallied to overcome the evil that was visited upon them that late spring morning.