Probing the McVeigh/Neo-Nazi connection
What connection does a 36-year-old former German soldier from one of Germany’s most prominent families have to the Oklahoma City bombing? What was the extent of his association with Timothy McVeigh? Was he an agent/informant in a joint operation of German and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies? What was the relationship between this German national, McVeigh, and virulent elements of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups?
Over the past several months, The New American has pursued answers to these and related questions in an intensive investigation that stretches from a bizarre religious commune in rural Oklahoma to an Aryan Brotherhood leader in a Texas prison, to a North Carolina attorney infamous for representing violent racists, to the execution of a convicted murderer in Arkansas, to an alleged former CIA operative in Virginia, to Berlin, Germany – and to other points in between.
Boy From Berlin
The key character in this intriguing part of the Oklahoma City bombing puzzle is one Andreas Strassmeir, who fled from the U.S. back to Germany earlier this year. Strassmeir, who was the subject of fleeting coverage in the Establishment media around the time of the bombing anniversary, recently admitted to an investigator who traveled to Berlin on behalf of this magazine some startling revelations concerning his relationship to an alleged former CIA agent now operating a company in Mannassas, Virginia. This and other developments have added another troubling dimension to this case which reinforces already well-founded suspicions of cover-up and prior knowledge by federal officials.
Andreas Strassmeir’s name first surfaced in relation to the bombing after J.D. Cash, a reporter for the McCurtain Daily Gazette in Idabel, Oklahoma, revealed that the mysterious German had been the intended recipient of a telephone call placed on April 5, 1995 – two weeks before the OKC bombing – from Kingman, Arizona to Elohim City, a white separatist commune near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. The call had been made to Elohim City on a prepaid phone calling card found by authorities in a search of suspect Terry Nichols’ home, and registered to Daryl Bridges, which appears to have been a fictitious name. According to the prosecution, Nichols and McVeigh both used the card to place numerous calls related to planning and carrying out the bombing and other criminal acts.
However, the Elohim City call had been placed to a communal telephone serving a constantly fluctuating populace of 70 to 100 inhabitants in this secluded “Christian Identity” settlement, and spokesmen for the sect professed ignorance of both the April 5th call and Timothy McVeigh. Robert Millar, the 69-year-old patriarch and founder of Elohim City, initially insisted that no one at the settlement knew anything about McVeigh and that the bombing suspect had never been to Elohim City. Gradually, however, Millar began to soften his stand, finally admitting that McVeigh “might have” visited the heavily guarded community.
Link to McVeigh
Sources close to the official investigation have informed The New American that there is no question that McVeigh visited Elohim City on numerous occasions, including 20 or more trips to the community over a period of several weeks before the bombing. Moreover, say the same sources, there is solid proof that McVeigh called Elohim City on April 18th, the day before the bombing, even though that alleged call does not show up on the “Daryl Bridges” phone card record.
Paper evidence of McVeigh’s probable association with Elohim City exists in the form of a traffic ticket issued to McVeigh by an Arkansas State Police officer back on October 12, 1993 not more than five miles from the commune. The location of his ticketing is far off the beaten path, and Elohim City is the most likely destination or point of origin for one traveling in that remote area.
But it is McVeigh’s connection to Strassmeir that is of particular interest. Robert Millar also claimed after the bombing not to have any knowledge of Strassmeir. Yet Strassmeir had bought a small shack at the commune for a residence and Strassmeir had lived among the Elohimites for five years, until August 1995. According to some of the residents, because of his military expertise Strassmeir had been made director of security and had introduced the first military-type training in small arms.
When attention began focusing on Strassmeir after the bombing, he started moving around the country, finally fleeing back to Germany in January of this year, reportedly crossing the Texas border into Mexico and then traveling clandestinely to Berlin by way of Paris and Frankfurt. The only journalist known to have interviewed and photographed Strassmeir while he was in the United States is Richard Sherrow, a correspondent for Soldier of Fortune. In Sherrow’s unpublished interview, conducted shortly before Strassmeir slipped out of the country, the German presented himself as a harmless adventurer and American Civil War buff living a peaceful existence in the outback. He claimed never to have heard of Timothy McVeigh.
Chance Encounter?
In February of this year, Strassmeir issued a statement from Berlin through his attorney Kirk Lyons, executive director of CAUSE, a legal foundation in Black Mountain, North Carolina notorious for championing the causes of the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists. In this unsigned “affidavit,” Strassmeir states that he met Timothy McVeigh at a large gun show held in Tulsa, Oklahoma in April 1993, shortly after the Waco conflagration.
“During this show,” says Strassmeir “… I stopped by a table of a man, later identified to me as Timothy McVeigh, who was selling fatigues and military clothing. I sold him a U.S. Navy combat knife with a sheath. Later, I returned to this table and bought a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a pair of leather glove shells from him. During this transaction, we discussed the events that transpired at Waco, Texas, as it was being discussed by nearly everyone at the gun show and was so close to the event.”
According to Strassmeir, “This man, who I remember as a clean-cut white male in his early twenties, seemed to be a nice person and a moderate…. As near as I can remember, we both agreed that it wasn’t right for the government to use such force against a religious group or to kill them for what they believed in.” The entire conversation, testified the former lieutenant in the West German armed forces, “could not have lasted for more than five or ten minutes.” He asserted also that “I may have given McVeigh a card belonging to Elohim City and Robert G. Millar and that I may have told McVeigh my first name, Andi.”
In a letter to CAUSE supporters appealing for financial aid, Kirk Lyons describes the Strassmeir-McVeigh connection as a grossly exaggerated chance meeting:
As luck would have it, Strassmeir had attended a gun show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just after the Mount Carmel conflagration. While at this gun show, Strassmeir bought a pair of fatigues and gloves from a guy at one of the tables. Guess who? Timothy McVeigh. Strassmeir gave McVeigh a card from Elohim City. Two years later, McVeigh would return the favor by calling Elohim City days before the bombing, asking to speak to Strassmeir. Fortunately, Strassmeir wasn’t there and didn’t talk to McVeigh. McVeigh also called CAUSE Foundation on April 18th, the day before the bombing, and spoke for 20 minutes with Dave Holloway [a director of the foundation]. However, Stephen Jones, lead attorney for McVeigh, saw more in the 60 second call to Strassmeir; it was evidence of the “international right-wing conspiracy” that Jones needed to defend his client.
Oddly enough, Newsweek and much of the Establishment press seem to agree with Lyons. In a lengthy poke at Jones’ defense plan, the February 19th Newsweek charged that Jones is “blowing smoke” using a “bizarre legal ploy to sow confusion about the road to Oklahoma City.” The flamboyant attorney from Enid, Oklahoma has invited such ridicule with his constantly shifting theories about who is responsible for the crime and for what appears to be wild grasping at every straw in the wind.
But is the evidence connecting McVeigh and Strassmeir really so thin as to be dismissed as mere “smoke”? Not at all. Nor does it necessarily conflict with evidence The New American has published in previous articles pointing to a Middle Eastern involvement. In fact, it may reinforce it, as we shall demonstrate.
Who is Andi Strassmeir?
In Germany the Strassmeir name is well known. Andreas Strassmeir’s father, Gunther Strassmeir, has served in various government offices, and – as Helmut Kohl’s Secretary of State – is known as the “architect of German reunification.” Kirk Lyons admits that his friend and client received military intelligence training at the Bundeswehr Academy in Hanover, Germany. According to Dennis Mahon, former Imperial Dragon of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan and a close friend and former roommate of Strassmeir at Elohim City, Strassmeir was a member of GSG-9, Germany’s elite counter-terrorism unit.
Another interesting revelation came when John Michael Johnston, an Oklahoma City attorney, went to Berlin in April to interview Strassmeir. In all of his previous media interviews, Strassmeir had stuck to the prepared script which parroted the earlier statement released by Lyons. When interviewed by Johnston, Strassmeir began by saying that he really had nothing new to say that hadn’t already been published or broadcast. At which point Johnston asked, “Why did you try to buy some Boeing 747s from Lufthansa Airlines?”
Strassmeir, who had obviously been caught flat-footed, sputtered: “Who told you that?” He then proceeded to confirm the authenticity of copies of letters that had been in his possession at Elohim City. The letters had to do with negotiations for the Lufthansa 747s by Strassmeir on behalf of Vincent A. Petruskie of Petruskie Associates in Manassas, Virginia. Reportedly, Petruskie was negotiating for the planes for a private airline in New York. Strassmeir identified Petruskie as “a former CIA guy who my father had known since he [Petruskie] was stationed in Berlin during the Cold War.” He was simply using his contacts, he said, to help an old family friend.
Nothing wrong with that, per se, of course. It does, however, help cast Strassmeir in a whole new light. Clearly he is not your common, run-of-the-mill German ex-soldier. So what is the son of one Germany’s most prominent politicians doing helping negotiate multi-million-dollar deals for commercial jetliners while living in poverty in a ramshackle redoubt in Oklahoma’s backwoods? Was he, perhaps, operating as a “shared asset” of the German and American governments to penetrate targeted militias and racist, neo-Nazi groups? That is altogether plausible.
Over the past decade, the rise of neo-Nazi and violent “skinhead” groups in Germany and the support these groups were receiving from extremist elements in the U.S. had been a major subject of concern for authorities in both Washington, DC and Bonn. Joint U.S.-German intelligence-gathering operations against these groups were announced by FBI Director Louis Freeh in 1993. But “unofficial” operations of a similar nature may have been underway long before that public announcement.
Agent or “True Believer”?
During the interview in Berlin, Michael Johnston asked Strassmeir: “At the time of the bombing, or immediately prior thereto, were you acting as an informant or undercover operative for any governmental entity?” To which Strassmeir responded: “Not at that time. I had formerly done that kind of work while in the German army.” However, Strassmeir’s further admissions in a recent interview with The Sunday Telegraph of London do little to allay suspicions of his possible role as an undercover operative. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported in the Telegraph for May 19th that Strassmeir “said that he first lived in the U.S. in 1989 because he was planning to work on a special assignment for the U.S. Justice Department.” Evans-Pritchard quotes Strassmeir as saying: “I discussed the job when I was in Washington. I was hoping to work for the operations section of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]. It never worked out.”
But if Strassmeir was not acting in an undercover capacity, one can only surmise from his associations that he was himself involved as a “true believer” and participant in the neo-Nazi underground. As previously mentioned, one of his closest friends in the United States is Dennis Mahon, a vociferous racist, former KKK leader, and now, reputedly, the No. 3 leader of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR). Mahon exudes hatred and revels in the media attention that accompanies his cross burnings and vile, racist rantings against “n****** and Jews.” On a recent edition of the television program Hard Copy, Mahon faced the camera and seethed: “I hate the federal government with a perfect hatred. If I had a nuclear bomb, I’d put it in a truck and drive it right up to the Capitol Building in Washington and blow it all up, me included….”
Mahon and his ilk provide made-to-order fodder for the likes of Morris Dees, John Nutter, Chip Berlet, Ken Stern, and other self-anointed “experts on extremism” who have been given carte blanche in the Establishment media to viciously smear all principled opponents of socialist big government as hate-filled extremists.
In 1991, Mahon traveled to Germany to fan the flames of race hatred and spread the neo-Nazi gospel to a new generation of Germans. While there he reportedly organized a KKK-style cross burning outside of Berlin. Around the same time, Mahon boasted in a Los Angeles Times interview: “We’re the most violent Klan in America. We are trained in counterinsurgency.”
This is the man Andreas Strassmeir chose as a friend and roommate in Elohim City. Strassmeir’s selection of Elohim City as a place to settle is itself extremely curious. Why, of all the possible places to reside in the United States, would he seek out an obscure, extremist cult in the secluded wilds of the Midwest? Is it just coincidence that he ended up in a place closely associated with other important April 19th events that may be connected to the Oklahoma City bombing?
An Earlier Plot
It was on April 19, 1985, ten years tothe day before the Oklahoma City bombing, that members of a “Christian Identity” group linked to Elohim City surrendered to federal authorities after a tense four-day siege in rural Arkansas. Members of the group, known as the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, included James Ellison, who now lives at Elohim City and is married to a granddaughter of the commune’s founder, Robert Millar. In his 1988 sedition trial, Ellison admitted that he had been involved in a plot to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1983. One of his co-conspirators in that plot was Richard Wayne Snell, who was executed in Arkansas on April 19, 1995 – the day of the actual Oklahoma City bombing – for the murder of a black Arkansas State Trooper. At the time of his execution, Snell was attended by his “spiritual adviser,” Robert Millar. Following Snell’s execution, Millar took Snell’s body back to Elohim City for burial.
According to Arkansas prison official Alan Ables, as reported in the Denver Post, “Snell repeatedly predicted that there would be a bombing or an explosion the day of his death,” and in the hours before his execution “Snell chuckled and laughed as he watched television coverage of the Oklahoma City disaster.”
Did Snell know something, or is the matching of his predictions with reality mere coincidence? Was the bombing an act of revenge by his supporters and disciples, or was it merely meant to look that way? And if the bombing was carried out by those associated with Snell, how does that square with the testimony of multiple witnesses who point at Middle Eastern suspects with McVeigh and the Ryder truck on the morning of the bombing? As mentioned earlier, there is no inherent conflict of evidence precluding involvement of both Middle Eastern and Neo-Nazi elements in the crime. In fact, according to our sources, one of the key witnesses in the case identified Andreas Strassmeir with Timothy McVeigh in the Mercury Marquis as it followed the Ryder truck through downtown Oklahoma City. The same witness, say our sources close to the official investigation, described the men in the Ryder truck as being of Middle Eastern appearance, matching the details provided by other witnesses.
This would not be an unprecedented cooperative effort between these forces. During the Persian Gulf War, neo-Nazi groups in Germany staged demonstrations in support of Saddam Hussein and the PLO and even spied on Western troop movements and military base activities for Iraq.
Unconvincing Claim
On May 17th, the Tulsa World reported that, according to Kirk Lyons, Andreas Strassmeir had been “cleared” by federal prosecutors of any involvement in the OKC bombing. Lyons stated that a federal prosecutor had interviewed Strassmeir for 90 minutes by telephone the previous week and that Strassmeir’s testimony will be formalized in the German courts once written questions are submitted to him.
Lyons’ claims of exoneration for Strassmeir don’t go very far toward convincing family members of some of the bombing victims, however. Edye Smith, mother of Chase and Colton Smith, who were killed in the Murrah Building day-care center, and Glenn and Kathy Wilburn, grandparents of the two murdered boys, are unimpressed with Lyons’ claims. “Strassmeir has not been ëcleared’ with us yet,” Mr. Wilburn told The New American. “We’re not privy to what questions were asked and what answers were given and are not inclined to believe anything either Lyons or Strassmeir might say anyway. And as long as we have multiple witnesses placing Strassmeir in Junction City, Kansas around the same time as McVeigh before the bombing – and we do have multiple witnesses who do so state – then we know that he lied in his affidavit when he claimed to have never been to Kansas except for one trip to Dodge City in 1994.”
Wilburn points also to testimony from a convict in a Texas prison who is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood (AB) which he believes strongly implicates Strassmeir. Only a few days after the bombing, according to FBI documents, the Bureau received a report from prison officials relaying the testimony of an AB convict who claimed to have been involved in a 1992 truck bomb scheme targeting a federal judge. In that context, he states, he was introduced to Timothy McVeigh by an Aryan Nations official named Butler. McVeigh was introduced, reportedly, as “Sergeant Mac.” A man accompanying McVeigh was introduced as “Bonard Sevenakkar.” The convict, who made these revelations months before any stories on Strassmeir surfaced in the press, described, in speaking of Sevenakkar, a man fitting Strassmeir’s features who “spoke with a marked German accent.”
Because of what they claim is “overwhelming” evidence of Strassmeir’s involvement with McVeigh and the bombing, the Wilburn family is considering adding Strassmeir’s name to the civil law suit which they have filed against Timothy McVeigh.