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Title: Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing
Author: Margaret Roberts
Publication Date: 2025 (book), 2025 (audio)
Publisher: Tantor Media
Narrated By: Cassandra Campbell
Recording time: 11 hours, 27 minutes
PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY
via Amazon
What if everything we know about one of America’s darkest days is wrong?
Tragedy unfolded on April 19, 1995, when a massive bomb exploded in America’s Heartland, killing 168 people, including fifteen children. History says the Oklahoma City bombing was lone wolf terrorism. But haunting fresh evidence points instead to a neo-Nazi plot in which the FBI played a hidden role.
The FBI launched the biggest manhunt in its history for two suspected bombers. Yet they never captured the other suspect, known only as John Doe 2, who rode next to McVeigh in the bomb truck. Soon, the FBI canceled the search, saying eyewitnesses who saw John Doe 2 were mistaken.
None of this rings true to award-winning journalist Margaret Roberts. How could twenty witnesses be wrong?
More troubling clues lead Roberts to reopen the mystery of John Doe 2 before the thirtieth anniversary of America’s deadliest domestic terror attack. Blowback chronicles her shocking discoveries, including journalism’s only face-to-face prison interviews with McVeigh coconspirator Terry Nichols. Roberts puts the puzzle together after a whistleblower steps forward, though one burning mystery remains. Is John Doe 2 the FBI’s guilty secret?
THE REVIEW
As a resident of Oklahoma City, and a lifelong Okie, this is a difficult topic for me to read about or even to discuss. There is a sense sometimes, with horrific tragedy, that the refusal to put it in the past is akin to keeping open an old wound. People who are in many cases still hurting and trying to heal from the bombing, physically, mentally, and or spiritually might rightly view their healing effort as being thwarted if one starts asking them to question whether justice – a key starting point on their recovery journey – was really served.
Yet there are also a lot of people who have grieved for three decades in search of answers that have not been forthcoming. Should those people be ignored for the sake of others who have accepted the mainstream narrative and moved forward? This book is a compelling argument for hearing those unanswered questions in full and demanding answers.
Margaret Roberts is a prize-winning investigative journalist and the former news director of the hit crime TV show America’s Most Wanted. She was recruited to investigate the bombing by an Oklahoma City grandmother who needed help getting questions answered. That call led to decades of investigation and ultimately this book.
There are a couple of key mysteries surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing that serve as a starting point for what turns into a twisting and turning true crime exposé.
- Did John Doe #2 exist, and if so, who was he?
- How did Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols fund the bombing?
The official story – despite the testimony of numerous witnesses – is that John Doe #2 does not exist and never existed. Roberts points to the surprisingly large amount of evidence, complete with consistent physical descriptions by multiple witnesses, to suggest that this person did exist. Further, she also points to the very suspicious alleged suicide inside an Oklahoma County jail of Kenneth Trentadue. The suicide was deemed suspicious by his family because the extensive bruising and cuts on his body suggested a struggle took place. Trentadue’s brother Jesse, a high profile lawyer, was given a tip that his brother was killed by members of the FBI who had mistakenly believed him to be John Doe #2. This incident is part of a pattern of circumstances which suggest that the FBI might – despite its public statements – believe in the existence of the mystery accomplice and know more about the bombing in general than it has told the public.
The second major mystery question is one upon which the public never spent a lot of time focusing – though it has plagued those in the weeds of the investigation who have sought out answers. It is unknown how McVeigh and Terry Nichols funded the bombing. Their respective resources can be traced, and the available public information on the subject suggests they could not have paid to carry out the attack without outside help. A lack of funds suggests either A) they had outside help, or B) there is a funding mystery to be solved. The available evidence suggests that they had help.
A lot of the book then follows these two mysteries as they are investigated. If the second man existed, who was he? If McVeigh and Nichols had outside help, who was it from and why weren’t they tried and prosecuted? It’s an absolutely chilling read, covering a lot of people and places of which you’ve likely never heard (“Andy the German,” “Elohim City,” “the Aryan Republican Army,” etc.), and the evidence from these people and places points an arrow at the FBI itself.
Several people and organizations on the periphery of the crime have been suggested to have ties with the Feds and Intel agencies. The reality of whether they had those ties or not is not as straight-forward as you might think. Roberts shares early in the book that during infiltration operations, the government might place more than one person inside an organization, but not tell its moles about the other moles. The point of that would be to keep an eye on its plants and to independently verify information. That makes sense. Nevertheless, long work together and long prison conversations create suspicions. The trouble from the perspective of an outside investigator is that all of the suspicions, slips of the tongue, and occasional confessions are inherently untrustworthy both due to who spoke the words and who listened. If there is a hidden hand pulling strings that knows the truth, it can simply remain silent.
Roberts reveals in the book’s final chapter the existence of a covert FBI operation from the 1990s, called “PatCon” (Patriot Conspiracy) wherein the Federal Government formed right wing militia groups designed to entrap civilians in the commission of violent crimes. The idea behind the operation is that if the Feds organize their own opposition, they’ll be best able to catch the people most likely to be involved in this type of crime anyway. If you know people are likely to rob banks, for example, you might form a bank robbery syndicate to draw in and capture would-be criminals before they commit the crimes.
Roberts points to other examples of operations like this taking place, including abuses learned during the 1975 Church Committee hearings in the U.S. Senate, as well as the almost kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, wherein it was uncovered that half of those involved in the plot against her worked for the FBI, including those who did the organizing of the plot.
The book, as it ends, suggests that the Oklahoma City bombing may have been a PATCON operation that was allowed to go forward by mistake. If that were true, it would be tremendously embarrassing to the Federal government and would lead to understandable, though unacceptable, acts to cover up its own involvement. The unspoken alternative explanation is that the government allowed the bombing to occur on purpose, though as I said, Roberts does not suggest this or even discuss it (wisely so, in my opinion.)
If you’re looking for encouragement to pick this up, I highly recommend it. The first chapter, titled “Trail of Death,” is absolutely unnerving and should hook you for the remainder of the read. It focuses on a string of mysterious and brutal deaths in the periphery of the bombing conspiracy – including Kenneth Trentadue mentioned above, gun dealer William Mueller and his entire family, Aryan Republican Army leader Richard “Wild Bill” Guthrie, former Oklahoma City Police officer Terrance Yeakey (who was on the scene rescuing people on the day of the bombing and who did not believe the official story), and others as well.
I hope that this book inspires anyone with additional information to come forward, and maybe more importantly, I hope it causes today’s FBI to have the courage for a legitimate investigation of the questions raised by this book and a self-investigation into its own involvement in the bombing and any cover-up in which it might have participated. Failing that, I hope that a huge number of people read the book and that wider knowledge creates a pressure campaign that encourages honest people in a position of authority to do the right thing, to the best of their abilities. People deserve the truth, and justice should prevail.
