Subject No. 3 was also named in a document pertaining to a federal bank-fraud investigation in Texas. The Texas case resulted in federal fraud charges’ being filed against several anti-government Republic of Texas (R.O.T.) members, including the group’s leader, Richard McLaren. As part of its evidence against R.O.T., the government entered videotapes of the group preparing the fraudulent bank warrants. The videos also revealed a surprise. They clearly showed that the person teaching the R.O.T. how to create the bogus documents was none other than Subject No. 3. What McLaren’s defense team couldn’t understand was why their client and virtually every other person on the tape was arrested and charged, whereas Subject No. 3 was never charged in this investigation. The defense team began to suspect a sting operation. According to court documents in the McLaren case, Tom Mills, McLaren’s attorney, asked the government for all of its files pertaining to Subject No. 3. The prosecutors, in a move explained only to the judge, filed a motion to keep Subject No. 3’s files from the McLaren defense team. The government would turn over the files only if they would be held “in camera.” In other words, the F.B.I. would make them available to the judge but not to the defense.

Undaunted by the “in camera” setback, McLaren’s defense team tried a new approach. If they couldn’t see the files, they would subpoena the man. Mills hired an investigator, who quickly located Subject No. 3 in Oregon. Mills asked the court for money to fly the investigator to Oregon to serve the subpoena. The judge agreed, but then the government did something even more unusual than suppressing files. It arrested Subject No. 3 in the middle of the night, just five hours before the subpoena would have been served. Mills spent several hours interviewing Subject No. 3 in a Dallas jail. Afterward, Mills filed yet another motion, which stated that he was more convinced than ever that the man had cooperated with authorities on some level in the past, and therefore the attorney should be allowed to view the “in camera” files. His request was again denied. Subject No. 3 eventually took the stand while the jury was sequestered. The conventional wisdom said that if he was a government agent or informer he would have to take the Fifth. But he didn’t. When asked by the judge if he was the man named in the subpoena, the subject gave a standard Freemen defense. He asked the judge to spell his name and confirm which letters were capitalized. The judge did so and the man said that the judge had spelled his name incorrectly. At that point, the government prosecutors, who had worked so hard to keep Subject No. 3 from testifying, told the judge that the man was in need of psychiatric evaluation. The judge agreed, and Subject No. 3 was never forced to explain his apparent immunity to prosecution. In April 1998, McLaren was found guilty on 27 federal counts. His defense team was never allowed access to Subject No. 3’s files.

Despite the F.B.I.’s continuing denial, what we do know is that the government inexplicably failed to investigate solid leads pertaining to Subjects No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and, I suspect, still others in their organization.

It will be interesting to see if the F.B.I. is sufficiently intrigued by what Joel Dyer has written to pursue the leads that he has so generously given them.

Thus far, David Hoffman’s The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror is the most thorough of a dozen or two accounts of what did and did not happen on that day in April. Hoffman begins his investigation with retired air-force brigadier general Benton K. Partin’s May 17, 1995, letter delivered to each member of the Senate and House of Representatives: “When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases.… For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out in the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity.” In separate agreement was Samuel Cohen, father of the neutron bomb and formerly of the Manhattan Project, who wrote an Oklahoma state legislator, “It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil … no matter how much was used … to bring the building down.” One would think that McVeigh’s defense lawyer, restlessly looking for a Middle East connection, could certainly have called these acknowledged experts to testify, but a search of Jones’s account of the case, Others Unknown, reveals neither name.