FBI Placed Own Interest Above Truth, Secret Memos Show

WASHINGTON (April 19, 1997 01:43 a.m. EDT) -- FBI agents probing the Oklahoma City bombing placed the "FBI ahead of the investigation," ignoring the expertise of federal explosives experts and freezing out other investigating agencies, according to documents obtained by Scripps Howard News Service.

The highly critical charges from bomb experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were made to Justice Department investigators examining problems in the once-vaunted FBI crime laboratory.

The allegations, which could weaken the prosecution of the Oklahoma bombing case, include:

-- Evidence could have been lost by the FBI's failure to follow proper crime scene procedures.

-- Sloppy crime scene management allowed Red Cross volunteers and others to "walk on evidence."

-- The FBI explosives unit agent in charge of the bombing investigation spent too much time away from the actual bomb site.

-- The FBI froze ATF agents out of the search at the Michigan farm of defendant Terry Nichols and his brother, and from the search of Timothy McVeigh's car.

The turf fighting detailed in the memos also explains why the Oklahoma City prosecution team is bringing an expert from Great Britain to explain forensic evidence to the jury, said an attorney familiar with the defense strategy.

"They (prosecutors) knew if they called ATF experts or anyone else affiliated with the government, that on cross-examination defense lawyers would raise all the problems everyone had with the FBI," the attorney said.

"They needed to get someone with no direct involvement in what happened."

On April 19, 1995, when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was shattered by a massive blast, the ATF sent a team of experts from its Washington-based Midwestern National Response Team.

On that ATF squad was James Powell, who had four years experience as an explosives expert with the ATF, and 15 years experience on the Washington D.C. police bomb squad.

Powell and others in the ATF were shocked by what they found at the explosion scene, which was controlled by the FBI.

"The crime scene was not adequately secured," Powell told investigators assigned to the Justice Department Inspector General's office in a February 1996 interview.

"At the Okbomb crime scene, Red Cross volunteers serving refreshments, and military personnel were allowed to enter this area and walk on evidence," Powell told investigators. "Parts of the damaged courthouse were lifted with cranes onto dump trucks and removed to unknown locations."

Another ATF explosives expert, Daniel Boeh, of the Pittsburgh office, also found the FBI management lacking professionalism. David Williams, the FBI explosives unit official at the scene, "should have spent more time at the site of the bombing," Boeh said.

Williams placed "the interests of the FBI ahead of the investigation," Boeh told investigators.

The FBI lab work on the Oklahoma City bombing was severely criticized by the inspector general in his report released this week.

The FBI report written by Williams "contains several serious flaws," the inspector general found. "These errors were all tilted in such a way as to incriminate the defendants," the inspector general's report said, recommending that Williams be transferred out of the FBI laboratory.

Not publicly released by the inspector general were witness statements that showed that other federal agents -- including bomb experts from the ATF -- had found the FBI probe wanting well before a whistleblower's accusations led to an investigation.

One of the most damaging statements comes from ATF agent Powell.

"Parts of vehicles were removed without first plotting their location in relation to the center of the explosion," Powell said. "The FBI marked their location with paint, removed the parts and then one week later began to plot their locations."

According to protocols used by other investigative agencies, all parts are plotted on a grid before being removed, experts said.

When ATF experts asked to look at evidence of the explosion, it was withheld by the FBI, Powell said. Only after bureaucratic wrangling were ATF agents given access to the debris.

By that time, "some evidence could have been lost in the debris that was removed," Powell said.

"ATF explosive officers' expertise was not utilized," Powell told investigators.

"... because they were not being utilized, a decision was made to reassign the enforcement officers to reconstruct the explosive device."

That done, the ATF and FBI argued over the accuracy of the reconstruction, Powell said.

Some ATF agents were put on a team headed by an FBI agent to determine the effect of the explosion on 80 damaged vehicles. The ATF agents charged that the FBI agent heading the team "lacked knowledge in this area and violated unspecified protocol," the IG investigative memos said.

When the FBI decided to raid a farm in Michigan where it believed Terry Nichols, his brother James, and McVeigh might have built practice bombs, "The FBI did not ask ATF to participate in execution of search warrants," the witness memos said.

And when Williams searched McVeigh's car, he excluded Powell and other ATF agents. Williams "is not a bomb technician, and the search should have been conducted by a bomb technician," Powell told investigators.

Even though the ATF has skilled bomb investigators, they won't be called by the prosecution in the McVeigh case. When evidence from the bomb scene is delivered in court, the government will use a British expert, Linda Jones, who has extensive experience with Irish Republican Army bombings, Justice Department officials said.

The judge in the case has banned both sides from talking, but McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, has said he will call two British experts to give the defense version of the evidence.

Jones has said he'll make the FBI's handling of bomb evidence an important element in his defense of McVeigh.

An attorney familiar with the case said evidence of FBI efforts to discount and exclude the opinions of other government experts strengthens McVeigh's hand.

"The opinions of ATF experts that the FBI made mistakes is very strong evidence for the defense," the attorney said. "This is government agents saying it, not some paid defense witness."