Domestic Terrorism's Re-emergence Feared

April 18, 2005
On anniversary of Oklahoma City bombing, continued concern for acts of domestic terrorism

A decade after the Oklahoma City bombing killed her two young grandsons and 166 other people, Jannie Coverdale worries that Americans may be forgetting the lessons learned in the nation's worst act of terrorism from within.

"The bombing here wasn't the end. It was just the beginning," said Coverdale, whose grandsons were among the 19 children killed in the April 19, 1995, blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. "We have too many government-hating racists running around this country," Coverdale said. "Sure, something else is going to happen. Unless we're very careful." Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of the day Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck packed with an explosive mixture of diesel fuel and fertilizer. He parked it at the front steps of the Murrah building, just under a day-care center where Coverdale's grandchildren and others were beginning their morning play. The bomb exploded at 9:02 a.m. The front of the Murrah building caved in. More than 300 buildings in the area were damaged or destroyed. About 850 people were injured in addition to the 168 killed. Authorities described McVeigh as an angry, intolerant "lone wolf" who hated the government. Defense attorneys said McVeigh's crazed behavior was driven by rage over the government's mishandling of a standoff near Waco between federal agents and the Branch Davidians. That ended in a gunbattle and fire that killed nearly 80 Davidians on April 19, 1993 -- two years before McVeigh would light his fuse. The horror of the Oklahoma City bombing was eclipsed on 9-11 when Islamic terrorists killed about 3,000 Americans in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. It was not until then that "everybody woke up" to the fact that terrorism is a real problem in this country, said Danny Defenbaugh, a recently retired FBI commander who was the lead investigator of the Murrah building explosion. Local, state and federal police say it's vital for them to remain vigilant for "homegrown" terrorists like McVeigh in this country, even as they devote much of their attention to watching for international threats like those in al Qaeda. "I think we still need to be very, very diligent in looking from within," Defenbaugh said. Some officers and families of Oklahoma City victims believe the 9-11 attacks have distracted authorities -- and the public -- from domestic terrorism threats. "Not a lot of attention is being paid to this, because everybody is concerned about the guy in a turban," Geoff Shank, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service in Chicago, recently told USA Today. Coverdale agreed. She said that, because of 9-11, the government has stopped looking for other people who may have been responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing -- and the deaths of her two grandsons, Elijah, 2, and Aaron, 5. "What happened in New York and D.C. and in that field in Pennsylvania caused a war," she said from her home in Oklahoma City. "What happened here," Coverdale said, "evidently didn't do much to anybody but to the families and the survivors." In the decade since the bombing, law-enforcement officials say, they have had numerous successes in stopping domestic terrorists and potential terrorists, thanks largely to vigilant Americans who noticed something amiss. "You're the one who's going to know if something's out of place," said Guadalupe "Lupe" Gonzalez, special agent in charge of the FBI in North Texas. "Each one of us, in our own little domain, know what's normal and what's not normal, whether it's in a neighborhood or a workplace," Gonzalez said. Last week, Eric Rudolph -- another "lone wolf" -- confessed to setting the bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, as well as bombing abortion clinics and a gay club. A white supremacist and an anti-Semite, Rudolph was sentenced to life in prison, with no chance for parole, for the attacks that collectively killed two people and injured more than 100. A year ago in East Texas, William Krar told a federal judge that he was not a terrorist. He did not explain why he had stockpiled in a Tyler-area shed a half-million rounds of ammunition and enough sodium cyanide to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building. Described as a past associate of anti-government militia groups, Krar, then 63, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. At about the same time Krar was heading for prison, animal-rights activists, charged with terrorism, were being arrested by the FBI in New York, New Jersey, California and Washington state. And in North Texas, the FBI still notes its work in arresting four Ku Klux Klan members in 1997 for plotting to blow up a Wise County gas plant. The explosion was meant to divert police while the Klan members robbed an armored car at a nearby bank, officials said. The loot, authorities reported at the time, was to have been used to finance terrorist acts. The government has said it spent nearly $100 million -- including $15 million for McVeigh's court-ordered defense team -- to investigate and prosecute the Oklahoma City bombing case, making it the most expensive criminal inquiry in American history. However, it was not until the aftermath of 9-11 that the government started devoting large, long-term investments to guard against terrorism, including the establishment of the Homeland Security Department. In the past three years, Texas has spent an estimated $1.3 billion, most of it from federal grants, to shore up its protection against terrorism. "The threat level in Texas is significant compared to other states," said Steve McCraw, appointed by Gov. Rick Perry to be the state's homeland security director. Oil refineries, the Houston Ship Channel, 1,200 miles of international border, a nuclear weapons plant near Amarillo and President Bush's ranch in Crawford are just some of the reasons authorities remain in a "very high state of readiness," McCraw said. This year, about $30 million has been funneled to the Metroplex, with Fort Worth and Arlington -- the homes of NASCAR events, the Texas Rangers and one of the busiest airports in the world -- getting about a third of that money to guard against terrorism. "There has been threats and suspicious activities that have occurred ... in Tarrant County that justify the additional funding," McCraw said. He declined to elaborate. McVeigh's anti-government history led to a new national awareness of so-called patriot and militia movements. Those movements peaked in 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, with 858 such groups existing throughout the country, many of them in the "heart of Texas," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors radical organizations. The groups have dwindled to about 150, Potok said, mainly because police and the public have become less tolerant of their violent nature. The decline in militias, however, has been accompanied by a rise in racist groups, Potok said. The Intelligence Project, which the center publishes, counted 762 hate groups last year, up from 751 in 2003. Texas has 40 racist organizations, including at least a half-dozen in Tarrant and Dallas counties, Potok said. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, has been sentenced to life in prison, convicted in federal court and in an Oklahoma state court.