The OKC Bombing thread: Surveillance Camera Footage

[Richard Booth]

Thanks for all that, Richard. It's going to take me til Sunday to digest the info.

O'Neill would have moved into Counter-terrorism, Middle Eastern Section, in DC during February 1995. However, he was in charge of some domestic terror incidents under the Violence Against Abortion Providers unit (VAAPCON) out of Chicago in the years before OKC, and so may have communicated with the OKBOM investigative team. I am also researching his involvement in the Atlanta Olympic Park Bombing (July 1996) committed by Eric Rudolph, who had previously bombed an abortion clinic. So - areas of overlap with O'Neill rumored to have been in in the loop on OKC and Atlanta.

Once again, to all, I'm seeking all the material I can on John O'Neill, during his service in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington and New York.

DANNY COULSON was connected to VAAPCON. In fact, Coulson was in Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995 around midnight, about 9 hours before the bombing. Agent COULSON, when he wrote about Oklahoma City in his book, he has this passage about him driving in a rainstorm from Dallas to Oklahoma City after he heard about the bombing. He wrote that because at the time the book was published VAAPCON (and PATCON) were still huge secrets, and COULSON would not easily be able to explain his presence on Oklahoma City on April 19th nine hours before the bombing without also discussing his reason for being there, which was related to the VAAPCON program. This was all covered by J.D. Cash of the McCurtain Gazette, he obtained COULSON's motel receipt showing he was checked in at 12:05 A.M. nine hours before the bombing. Cash published in his newspaper piece that Coulson's real reason for being in town was in fact VAAPCON.

If O'Neill was involved in VAAPCON I would be highly interested to know if he was involved in PATCON, which ran from around 1989-1995+

If O'Neill was involved in VAAPCON, which was a Major Case Group I Undercover Operation, then that would have been supervised by the FBI's undercover operations review committee, which Danny Coulson was the chair of.

So, this would put John O'Neill and Danny Coulson on the same operation, insofar as Coulson would be regularly debriefed on both VAAPCON and PATCON when the review committee met to authorize funding or authorize expansions for the program.

This makes O'Neill must more interesting to me as both PATCON and VAAPCON are huge areas of interest to me. I have hundreds of declassified (very redacted) PATCON documents, they end at about 1992 though. What I am really interested in are PATCON operations from 94 and 95. It is widely suspected that Andreas Strassmeir of Elohim City was a PATCON asset providing intelligence reports via the Southern Poverty Law Center.

--Richard