Peter Schweizer: Book Claims Oklahoma City Bombing Was ‘Manufactured Terror’ with Deep FBI Involvement

Was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing really an FBI deep-cover operation that went wrong? That is the conclusion of a new book by an author who has studied the worst incident of domestic terrorism in America’s history for more than 20 years.

Margaret Roberts, author of the new book Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, was previously news director for the hit TV show, America’s Most Wanted. An award-winning investigative journalist, she is the only reporter who got a face-to-face interview with co-conspirator Terry Nichols, who is serving a life sentence in a Colorado federal prison. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, was executed in 2001 for his crimes, yet questions have lingered since the 1995 bombing that the FBI knew more than it was telling about the plot.

Roberts’s book is well-timed, with the FBI under the microscope for its role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, as well as the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, and Roberts joins The Drill Down to discuss with hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers what she learned.

With efforts by new Attorney General Pamela Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to release previously classified documents on a variety of FBI-related mysteries, Roberts hopes they will expose the government’s real role in the most devastating domestic terrorism incident on American soil.

“The Oklahoma City attack was not a lone wolf operation,” she tells the hosts. “It was manufactured terror — a sting operation that went sideways.”

On April 19, 1995, a massive bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, slaughtering 168 people including 15 children in the building’s daycare center. Almost immediately, a massive federal manhunt focused on Timothy McVeigh.

Roberts’s research has produced evidence of a neo-Nazi plot by a white supremacist group called the Aryan Republican Army, in which the FBI played a hidden role. To conceal its counter-terrorism operations, the FBI  allowed suspects, whom she names, to walk free, thus denying justice to the victims and hiding the truth.

“I had been the news director of America’s Most Wanted, worked hand in glove with the FBI for three years on the highest profile manhunt stories,” she tells the hosts. “And this story, before it took a big U-turn, was a manhunt story because 24 eyewitnesses on the ground in Oklahoma City on April 19 saw not just Timothy McVeigh in the Ryder truck, but a never-identified accomplice who rode next to him and was known only as John Doe #2, who exited the truck with Timothy McVeigh and vanished into thin air… Timothy McVeigh had an accomplice in the bomb truck.”

“It’s a shocking claim,” says Eric Eggers.

Roberts followed a trail laid by “an attorney named Jesse Trentedue, who pressed landmark Freedom of Information Act litigation to force pieces of the untold story into the public view.” Trentadue sued the FBI over the documents, and his star witness, a top FBI deep-cover agent named John Matthews was scheduled to testify but backed out under pressure from the bureau.

She learned of an FBI program known as “Patriot Conspiracy” or PATCON. As part of that program, Matthews infiltrated 22 extremist groups that could be capable of acts of domestic terrorism. Many intelligence and law enforcement people have long warned, though, that the problem with this law enforcement tactic is knowing where the surveillance ends and entrapment and incitement begin.

Matthews left that FBI program because he became disillusioned by what it was doing, Roberts says. “As he said to me, ‘it was set up to incite violence and I signed on to stop the violence.’”

Matthews told her that he believed that the bombing was a PATCON operation that did not intend for the bomb to go off. “It was intended to catch the terrorists,” she says.

“But his bombshell revelation, which he said he knew directly, was that the FBI had set up the Aryan Republican Army terror group as a front group to incite violence,” she says.

“So instead of preventing violence, were they accelerating it?” asks Schweizer.

“Nichols told me that his agenda was revenge. But he mentioned a man named Roger Moore as a third conspirator who he believes was a government provocateur,” and that it was Moore who provided the explosives.” Moore, retired in Florida, denied the claim in 2005.

Yet, all this is not a history book, because some of the same FBI tactics have been speculated to have been at work in other (foiled) incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing, and particularly in the attempt on the life of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “There seemed to be a lot of undercover operators in that case,” she notes.

Nichols even told her that McVeigh had once “slipped” in conversation with him and said that he was himself acting as a government asset. That, she says, was echoed by a fellow death-row prisoner who told her the same thing, as well as by McVeigh’s first public defenders, assigned to him right after his arrest.

Schweizer points out that government agencies develop incentives to increase their funding by making a problem seem worse. He wonders if that happened in the Oklahoma City case. “We know some of these groups exist, but government agencies get budgets based on the demand for their services. You don’t get a bigger budget by downplaying threats; I think it would help the FBI to be transparent.”

“My book is the origin story for how we got to where we are. Everyone wants transparency and we know we don’t have it,” she says. “Something important to consider is the cost of the concealment,” she says, in terms of public trust. “The FBI collected surveillance videotape of the delivery of that bomb, of the two men getting out of the truck. If we had been, but the FBI never allowed the American public to see those images, which would answer so many questions.”

What would she like to see the federal government do to bring greater transparency?

Matthews’s sealed deposition has never been made public, after he withdrew under FBI pressure from testifying in Trentadue’s lawsuit. “[Atty. Gen. Pamela] Bondi has a letter from Trentadue asking for the Department of Justice to stand down and release that deposition. She also believes the archival video footage showing who got out of that truck in front of the Murrah building should be released. Finally, she thinks the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold hearings on the entire PATCON effort, modeling on the 1975 Church Committee hearings.

Blowback is now available online and in stores.

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