Time: Wed Mar 05 17:43:23 1997
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Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 17:42:46 -0800
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: L&J: ATF Informant Says Cover-Up!

<snip>
>
>The New American * March 17, 1997
>
>
>                  ATF INFORMANT SAYS COVER-UP
>                  ---------------------------
>                      by William F. Jasper
>
>After nearly two years of adamant denials that any federal agencies
>had even the slightest inkling of any plot to blow up the Alfred P.
>Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, federal prosecutors have been
>dealt a stunning blow. Just weeks before the scheduled March 31st
>start of the trial of bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, a series of
>revelations have forced the Justice Department to concede that they
>did indeed have an undercover informant inside a white supremacist
>group which this magazine and other news organizations had
>previously linked to McVeigh. Even more important, newly available
>evidence from this informant and other federal sources strongly
>supports the suspicions that Andreas Karl Strassmeir, a mysterious
>German national reported on previously in these pages (see The New
>American for June 24, 1996 and July 8, 1996), not only was a
>confederate of McVeigh, but was also a federal undercover
>operative.
>
>During the first two weeks of February, Justice Department
>officials went into panic mode in an attempt to suppress what
>threatened to become an avalanche of exposes by major media
>organizations concerning the freshest and most damning proof that
>federal authorities had detailed information about the bombing
>conspiracy long before the fateful explosion of April 19, 1995. The
>primary object of their alarm was Carol M. Howe, a 26-year-old
>former Miss Teenage America semi-finalist and honors student from
>Tulsa, Oklahoma who had become involved with the militantly racist
>White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), and
>a related white separatist community in Oklahoma known as Elohim
>City.
>
>Early Warnings
>
>According to Howe, in mid-1994 she was approached by ATF Agent
>Angela Finley and became a confidential informant for the agency.
>Agent Finley regularly debriefed Howe concerning her activities
>with WAR chief Dennis Mahon of Tulsa and her many visits to Elohim
>City.
>
>According to J.D. Cash, investigative reporter for the McCurtain
>Daily Gazette in Idabel, Oklahoma, specific warnings of plans to
>blow up the Murrah Building were contained in the more than 70
>reports Howe made to Finley during 1994-95. Cash, who has broken
>many of the major stories on the Elohim City connection to the
>bombing, had apprised The New American of his discovery of the ATF
>informant months ago. However, it was not until early December 1996
>that he learned Howe's identity and began a series of interviews
>with her that culminated in an extensive and explosive article
>published in the Gazette on February 11th.
>
>Utilizing contacts and information developed by Cash, the ABC 20/20
>team, which had already produced an important report on the
>government's prior knowledge in its January 17th broadcast,
>obtained a telephone interview with Howe, who had gone into hiding.
>This interview was deemed so "hot" that ABC decided not to wait for
>the regular 20/20 airing but to break it on the evening news with
>Peter Jennings. Part of the impetus for this quick-release decision
>came from the fact that the NBC Dateline team was also closing in
>on the same story.
>
>Aware that ABC was preparing to broadcast what was potentially a
>devastating blow to the Clinton Administration's repeated claims
>that it had no forewarning, the Justice Department began a
>preemptive strike. Calling journalists and news groups,
>particularly those gathered in Denver to cover the McVeigh trial,
>Justice officials warned that ABC would be breaking a story that
>was sensational and irresponsible, and that grossly misrepresented
>the ATF's and FBI's prior knowledge of the OKC bomb attack. At the
>same time, Justice officials were bearing down on Jennings and ABC
>executives. To the dismay of the 20/20 and ABC News crews, who
>recognized a major scoop, ABC management buckled and the show was
>scratched.
>
>Strassmeir Connection
>
>Two nights later, however, Tom Brokaw and NBC News did give some
>significant coverage to this important story. In a special
>investigation story, NBC's Mike Boettcher reported on the Carol
>Howe revelations and ran heretofore unseen video footage of Howe
>(with a large swastika tatoo on her arm) and others at Elohim City
>firing weapons during their paramilitary training. The broadcast
>also featured a 1994 German television interview in which Mahon and
>Howe appeared. In that interview, Howe, ironically, was asked if
>she thought that their neo-Nazi group had been infiltrated by
>federal agents. Of course, she cooly replied, giving no indication
>of her own role in that effort. With file videotape rolling of
>Andreas Strassmeir in Berlin, NBC's Boettcher stated:
>
>Howe gave the government information before the bombing on alleged
>threats by others in Elohim City, including this man, Andreas
>Strassmeir. According to federal documents, Strassmeir was the
>military training officer for Mahon's organization called the White
>Aryan Resistance. The FBI summary of informant Carol Howe's report
>states, "Strassmeir has talked frequently about direct action
>against the U.S. government. He is trained in weaponry and has
>discussed assassination, bombings, and mass shootings. Strassmeir
>and Mahon have taken three trips to Oklahoma City."
>
>The NBC report on Howe ended by noting that "the government
>acknowledges in federal documents that she was their informant.
>While Carol Howe reported on white supremacists, their talk about
>bombings and anti-government threats, there is no evidence that she
>reported a specific threat to the Murrah Federal Building before
>the bombing."
>
>But according to others, there is indeed evidence of a "specific
>threat" to the Murrah Building in Howe's ATF reports. Sources
>familiar with the reports informed The New American that as far
>back as November 1994, Howe warned that two Elohim City residents
>were casing three federal buildings in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and
>that Howe also secretly filmed Strassmeir, Dennis Mahon, and ARA
>bank robbers Peter Langan and Kevin McCarthy arming and painting
>hand grenades.
>
>Howe also reportedly has identified Timothy McVeigh and Michael
>Fortier as visitors to Elohim City in December 1994. However, she
>says she knew them as "Tim Tuttle" and "Mike Fontaine." Tim Tuttle
>is a name that other witnesses have also reported McVeigh using.
>
>Transparent Denials
>
>Back in November 1996, federal prosecutors complained vigorously
>that discovery requests by defense attorneys suggested "that there
>may have been 'prior knowledge (of the bombing) by the government'
>and, in particular, suggests that the bombing actually may have
>been a misguided 'sting operation' conducted by the Bureau of
>Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF)." This was completely
>"unfounded," they insisted, "because the prosecution is not
>withholding anything that even remotely would support such an
>outrageous charge." But the Carol Howe testimony provided to the
>ATF goes far beyond "remotely" supporting this charge. And if
>anything is "outrageous" it is the prosecution's previous
>suppression of this "nonexistent" evidence, which it has now been
>forced to provide to the defense teams for McVeigh and Nichols. It
>is altogether possible, however, that the defense attorneys may
>also elect to suppress the evidence, since Howe's reports link
>McVeigh to Strassmeir, Mahon, and Elohim City - connections which
>McVeigh's lawyers deny.
>
>The Justice Department has repeatedly denied - to the press, the
>bombing victims' families, and the federal court - that it has any
>information linking Strassmeir to the Oklahoma bombing. That
>position has now become so patently ludicrous that even many of the
>willfully blind Establishment mediameisters may eventually catch on
>and inadvertently give away some of the deceptive game plan. Carol
>Howe's testimony is not the only evidence linking the government's
>prime suspect, Timothy McVeigh, to Andreas "Andi" Strassmeir. As
>reported in The New American in earlier stories, the two are
>connected by:
>
>* A call to Elohim City for "Andi" placed on McVeigh's calling card
>from Kingman, Arizona on April 5, 1995.
>
>* A traffic ticket issued to McVeigh in 1993 on a remote rural road
>just a few miles from Elohim City.
>
>* Witnesses in Herrington, Kansas (where Terry Nichols resided) who
>reported seeing McVeigh with Strassmeir.
>
>* A belated admission by Strassmeir that he had met McVeigh at a
>gun show and purchased some military clothing from him.
>
>* Witnesses who identify Strassmeir's Elohim City roommate, Michael
>Brescia, as the elusive John Doe No. 2.
>
>
>Ignoring the Obvious
>
>Incredibly, the soi-disant investigative reporters of the prestige
>press have failed thus far to connect the obvious dots. Even if one
>ignores the mountainous evidence now accumulated pointing to prior
>knowledge and swallows the Justice Department line, one is faced
>with a glaring problem: Why didn't the ATF or FBI arrest
>Strassmeir, Mahon, and company after the bombing, or, at the very
>least, bring them in for questioning? On the basis of Carol Howe's
>reports alone, these should have been the FBI's prime suspects. In
>the months following the deadly blast, hundreds of federal agents
>interviewed thousands of witnesses and suspects, and many militia
>groups with no known criminal intentions were targeted in high-
>profile raids while Strassmeir, a foreign national at high risk of
>fleeing, was ignored. Months after the bombing, after Strassmeir
>had fled to Germany, the FBI decided it might be worthwhile to
>interview him. By then, of course, it was too late; the best they
>could do was conduct the interview by telephone.
>
>Is the FBI really that incredibly inept, or were they under orders
>to let Strassmeir walk because he was an important undercover asset
>for the bureau or some other federal agency? In the period since
>the bombing, the FBI and ATF have shown that they have had deep
>moles placed in a great many militant "right-wing" organizations
>from coast to coast. It is incomprehensible that they would have
>neglected the notorious Aryan socialists who flowed through Elohim
>City on a regular basis, especially since people affiliated with
>the group had been involved in an earlier bombing conspiracy
>targeting the same Alfred Murrah Building in 1985.
>
>In a series of interviews conducted in Berlin last year with
>Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Daily Telegraph of London,
>Strassmeir stated that he came to the U.S. in 1989 because he was
>planning to work on a special assignment for the U.S. Justice
>Department. "I discussed the job when I was in Washington," he told
>Evans-Pritchard. "I was hoping to work for the operations section
>of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]." But, Strassmeir
>said, "It didn't work out." Or did it? Last July The New American
>interviewed Vincent Petruskie, a former Air Force officer whom
>Strassmeir identified as a CIA agent and friend of his father.
>Petruskie, who now runs Petruskie Associates, a business consulting
>firm in Manassas, Virginia, confirmed that "Andi wanted to work for
>the U.S. government - DEA, Justice - undercover," and he had put
>the German soldier in touch with "some people in Washington."
>
>One of Strassmeir's closest friends in the U.S., Dennis Mahon,
>asserts that Strassmeir had been a member of Germany's elite GSG-9
>counter-terrorism unit. According to Strassmeir himself, he had
>done undercover work in Germany for the German government before
>coming to America.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>THE NEW AMERICAN - Copyright 1997
>American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated
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Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S.    : Counselor at Law, federal witness
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