10-11-2019, 08:12 AM (This post was last modified: 10-11-2019, 08:41 AM by David Andrews.)
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.
David Andrews Wrote: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.
10-11-2019, 12:48 PM (This post was last modified: 10-11-2019, 01:41 PM by Richard Booth.)
Found another piece in my archive that sheds light on the OKBOMB structure. This is from a newspaper article talking about BOB RICKS.
Based on this information that would make a rough FBI org chart:
|+LOUIS FREEH
|
|+LARRY POTTS (HQ) (OKBOMB chief at FBI HQ)
|
|+DANNY DEFENBAUGH - 'Inspector-in-Charge' - from Mobile, AL field office
|+BOB RICKS - Hand picked the investigation team - from OKC Field Office
|+DANNY COULSON - 'On-Scene-Commander', from Dallas TX Field Office
|
|+WELDON KENNEDY - 'Field Commander', Phoenix AZ Field Office
|
Anyway, here is what BOB RICKS said in an October 1st, 1995 Daily Oklahoman piece:
"I think my role was complete with regard to what I had to do," he said. "Primarily. my job was to assist in assembling the investigative team that would be there for the long term, and I selected the individuals that would be involved in the direct supervision and the investigative process, and those are still the same individuals that are there. "What I did, of course, is select the best individuals that we had in our office. It was quite a compliment to those agents that President Clinton recently said it was the best investigative team ever assembled. Except for the inspectors and higher- level supervisors who were brought in for long-time supervision, the investigative team is predominately from the Oklahoma City division which reflects well, I think, upon this division."
-----
In this same article, Bob Ricks makes the incredulous claim that the FBI had no active intelligence operations ongoing. Nothing targeting white separatists, hate groups, militias, abortion clinic violence ... yet, we both know that w/ VAAPCON and PATCON they had two very active huge Group 1 Undercover Operations in Domestic Security / Terrorism (DS/T). So this is a huge lie on his part:
"That was the key case, following the congressional hearings there, that pretty much took us out of the intelligence business (in the mid- 1980s)," Ricks said. The FBI was still out of the intelligence business when the bomb exploded in Oklahoma City, he said. "As a result, we ... have a number of entities out there these hate groups or whatever that in some cases were carrying out activities that we probably should have been aware of," Ricks said. "Some say that if we had been doing what we had done in the past that we probably never would have been able to stop this bombing (anyway). I have no idea. You don't know what you are going to get into until you get into it. When you have no intelligence at all with regard to groups that are advocating violence and the overthrow of the government, I think that sometimes you put yourself in an exposed position."
---
From the DOJ report "Investigation of the Belated Production of Documents in the Oklahoma City Bombing Case" more information about the organizational structure of OKBOMB can be gleaned.
The primary command post was in OKC. It was then moved to Denver, CO.
The OKBOMB investigation had a number of command posts throughout the country where presumably you'd have supervisors and case agents working the leads.
I wonder if any of these command posts would have utilized John O'Neill:
Command posts were located in Oklahoma City; Atlanta, Georgia; Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; Phoenix, Arizona; and Washington, D.C.
There are a couple DOJ reports that relate to the OKC bombing worth reading:
USDOJ/OIG Special Report The FBI Laboratory: An Investigation into Laboratory Practices and Alleged Misconduct in Explosives-Related and Other Cases (April 1997) https://oig.justice.gov/special/9704a/
and USDOJ/OIG Special Report An Assessment of the 1996 Department of Justice Review of the FBI Laboratory, Evaluation and Inspections Report I-2014-004 https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/e1404.pdf
The stuff about the FBI crime lab in the 1997 report is damning.
It has the FBI crime lab supervisor altering a technicians report to say that traces of PETN (an explosive) were found on Timothy McVeigh's knife. The original report said that the test was inconclusive and could not identify PETN.
So, fabricating evidence.
The IG recommendations based on the misconduct in the OKC case at the crimelab are also damning
10-11-2019, 07:31 PM (This post was last modified: 10-11-2019, 08:29 PM by David Andrews.)
Thank you, Richard. Just digging in now to the material you upped yesterday. THANKS
Re: Hersley and Coulson - If you look at Jack Cashill's two books on Flight 800, you'll find accounts of interviewing FBI agents opening their notepads but not writing as the witnesses give their accounts, and also telling witnesses they couldn't possibly have seen a missile.
You wrote: 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+
That makes two of us.
Murray Weiss, so far O'Neill's only biographer, mentions O'Neill being involved in OKBOM in the video linked to below. It's a throwaway reference that goes by quick and is never followed up, including in his book, The Man Who Warned America:
David Andrews Wrote:Thank you, Richard. Just digging in now to the material you upped yesterday. THANKS
Re: Hersley and Coulson - If you look at Jack Cashill's two books on Flight 800, you'll find accounts of interviewing FBI agents opening their notepads but not writing as the witnesses give their accounts, and also telling witnesses they couldn't possibly have seen a missile.
You wrote: 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+
That makes two of us.
Murray Weiss, so far O'Neill's only biographer, mentions O'Neill being involved in OKBOM in the video linked to below. It's a throwaway reference that goes by quick and is never followed up, including in his book, The Man Who Warned America:
I have a couple hundred pages of PATCON documents that were released via FOIA to a Salt Lake City attorney. I occasionally look through them to see if maybe I missed anything. In almost all cases the names of agents are redacted, but the offices are very clear. Lots of stuff happening out of the Knoxville and Philly offices re: PATCON.
I will keep my eyes open for anything from the Atlanta field office if that's where O'Neill worked.
The writeup about O'Neill following his death, in the NY Times, says this: O'Neill "coordinated information in the Oklahoma City bombing that led to the arrest of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols"
Coordinated information. Hmm. Makes me wonder if he might have been involved in the ZyIndex program. This was a special piece of software that the OKBOMB task force used. People uploaded disks of 302s to ZyIndex and it basically stored every word of every 302, so you could do a full text retrieval of a document and search by any keyword and get search hits on the exact 302s you're looking for.
Danny Coulson speaks of this without using the name ZyIndex in the C-SPAN 2 BookTV presentation he did. He says "we had full text retrieval" -- at the time ZyIndex was used solely in the OKBOMB case and was new.
I learned a lot about ZyIndex from two places:
(1) The DOJ/OIG report on OKBOMB documents withheld from the Defense team
(2) Documents relating to Jesse Trentadue's 2008 FOIA suit vs. the FBI (he had many victories in court vs. FBI in that case)
This makes me wonder then if John O'Neill was actually transferred from the Atlanta office to work at the OKC OKBOMB task force where the ZyIndex uploads were done, or if he had access to ZyIndex from the Atlanta office and was one of the agents performing cross-checks.
John Hersley, when he testified before the 1997/1998 grand jury, he testified at length about how Nichols and McVeigh were caught, what they did to get the evidence. So he talks a lot about finding the ANFO purchases, finding the storage lockers under assumed names ('Mike Havens') that were also used when Nichols checked into hotels, he'd use the same phoney name and the FBI would cross-reference the purchases with hotel check-in registers using ZyIndex. They did lots of cross-checking to find the records necessary to put Nichols in a certain city when an ANFO purchase was made, or put McVeigh on the phone with Nichols at a certain time.
Since O'Neill is deceased it might be a worthy task to perform a FOIA request for all documents relating to O'Neill and OKBOMB. I'd also add in there the 'BOMBROB' case because it had some crossover w/ OKBOMB.
I had no luck whatsoever with FOIA requests, filed about 50, I received responses on about 7 of them. All of those responses were denials due to the person I was requesting info on still being alive.
This writeup says that O'Neill was given a gift from an OKBOMB case agent that decorated his office:
John decorated his FBI office in New York with numerous colorful memorabilia from his meetings abroad with foreign law enforcement and counterterrorist officials. On a visit there, I noticed a simple block of Lucite on a table with a scrap of paper embedded in it. John said it was a gift that an agent working the Oklahoma City bombing case had sent to him after the case was solved.
The scrap of paper was part of the agent's notes of a conversation he had had with John right after the bombing. John had been asked by the agent who he thought might have been involved. I looked more closely at the scrap of paper. On it the agent had written the name John had given him: Tim McVeigh.
Willing to bet it was Danny Coulson who gave him this. Just a guess, but Coulson also felt 'it was bubbas' who did the bombing, he immediately zoomed in on that and not international just like O'Neill would have.
Also, Coulson worked out of the Baltimore office at probably the same time O'Neill did.
Coulson also worked VAAPCON, which O'Neill did.
This would be a question worth asking Danny Coulson.
If there truly were a middle east connection to the OKC bombing, John O'Neill would have been shouting about it. You never heard anything from him regarding Oklahoma City.
There is a journalist in OKC who puts McVeigh with a group of Iraqis living in Oklahoma. The big problem with that investigation is this reporter, Jayna Davis, never manages to form a narrative by which you have McVeigh, a neo-nazi, meeting the Iraqis. Where do neo-Nazi white supremacists meet Iraqi ex-soldiers? How does that look, where does that happen?
I can see some suspicious things in Terry Nichols' travels to the Philippines, to a place that had a lot of Islamic terrorists. He traveled to the same cities that Ramzi Yousef stayed it, he was there when Yousef had a meeting with Al-Qaida assets. But beyond speculation and innuendo, there isn't anything linking him firmly to Yousef. Sure, Nichols had a book in his luggage about making bombs, and sure, Ramzi Yousef quotes that book in his notes that were found at the bomb factory Yousef maintained and abandoned in the Philippines. But that's not a strong connection. So two mad bombers read the same book.
But if you ignore Nichols and his sojourns overseas, you find absolutely no place in which McVeigh would cross paths with middle easterners.
I've read the book on this -- 'The Third Terrorist' by Jayna Davis. It's awful, every single witness in her book has been RE-NAMED, she gives them fictitious names which is totally unheard of in non-fiction journalism. She also has reconstructed dialogue in the book which is dreadfully bad. Another thing, too, is the book suffers some kind of weird espionage fetish on behalf of the author: any time there is more than one piece of paper in a stack it becomes a 'dossier' -- that word appears in 'The Third Terrorist' about 30 times. A guy's medical records? A dossier. A stack of bus tickets? Dossier. Any time an FBI agent interviews someone, it's not an interview. It's a debriefing. Debrief appears in that book about 50 times too. It's beyond silly.
But the worst part about that book is that she's taken about 12 witnesses and changed what they said they saw. First, she gives the witness a phony name. But you can figure out who it is--if the guy is a 'mechanic' who 'gave directions to Timothy McVeigh' about 15 minutes before the blast, well, that's Mike Moroz. The problem is she has all these witnesses identifying a man with McVeigh who the witnesses allegedly said was "exotic and foreign", "dark skinned", "arabic looking" -- yet I have read all of these witnesses 302 reports and in some cases their court testimony and about 2/3rds of them never once said anything about the man seen with McVeigh being middle eastern. In fact, Mike Moroz said only that the man had darker skin than McVeigh, but 'could be any one of millions of people'. Others said the guy just had a 'tan' and was white. Yet others said he might have been mexican. Very few witnesses ever said they saw a middle eastern man with McVeigh, but Jayna Davis twists the testimony and puts words in witnesses' mouths.
I believe had there been any kind of Middle Eastern connection, John O'Neill would have said something about that.
11-11-2019, 02:21 AM (This post was last modified: 11-11-2019, 02:52 AM by David Andrews.)
I will keep my eyes open for anything from the Atlanta field office if that's where O'Neill worked.
O'Neill would have worked out of Chicago until early February, 1995, when he began a stint in Middle East counter-terrorism in Washington. In 1996 he was working out of the New York field office. The authorized sources are slim on whether he made investigatory or liaison visits to other US cities in 1995-1996. Murray Weiss's book says that in 1996 "O'Neill was engaged in efforts to map out security strategies for the upcoming Olympics in Atlanta," in addition to going to Saudi Arabia in June to investigate the Khobar Towers bombing, and helping to create Alec Station earlier in the year. I suppose he would have had to make a trip to Atlanta, but Weiss only places him in DC and NYC, plus SA cities.
I doubt that O'Neill would have drawn any attention to a Middle East involvement in OKC, just as he also did not in the Flight 800 case (though perhaps for a different reason in the later event). No Middle East terrorism was admitted into the OKC official findings, though I would say that the Terry Nichols Philippines trip is reason enough for deep suspicion. I suspect that O'Neill is one of the great myth-makers of Usama Bin Laden's influence, and was instructed as to when he could shout about Al Qaeda and when he could not.
I'm just interested in O'Neill's possible involvement in the OKC investigation since Murray Weiss refers to it but does not reveal anything. The obvious initial connection would be O'Neill's pre-1995 domestic terrorism investigations...but if there's more than that to discover....
