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According to one of Jones' more insubstantial theories, the Oklahoma bombing may have been a government sting operation that got wildly out of hand. Strassmeir, he hypothesizes, may have been an FBI informant who attempted to entrap McVeigh in a phony bombing scheme, only to see his intended victim carry the plan to its conclusion. Two weeks before the bombing, McVeigh placed a call to Elohim City, and Jones believes that McVeigh was trying to reach Strassmeir. McVeigh isn't saying whom he was calling. Strassmeir says in any case no one told him about the call or summoned him to the phone.
Strassmeir left the U.S. in December, after being approached by one of Jones' investigators, and surfaced later in Berlin. Reached there by phone last week, he denied any role in the bombing. He acknowledged that three years ago he bought some secondhand clothes from McVeigh at a Tulsa gun show and "probably" gave him an Elohim City business card. Otherwise, Strassmeir insists, they have not been in touch. "The only connection between me and McVeigh," he says, "is that I bought an old pair of pants from him in 1993."
Is that the cement of a conspiracy case? Well, says Jones, Strassmeir also knows Dennis Mahon, late of the Ku Klux Klan, now a leader of the White Aryan Resistance. Mahon sometimes spent weekends at Elohim City in a trailer he kept there, and Strassmeir sometimes stayed at Mahon's home in Tulsa. Jones says he has turned over to the prosecution statements that Mahon has made "to people assisting the defense" in which Mahon linked himself to the bombing. What were those statements? Jones won't say, claiming that as potential trial evidence they must remain confidential. Jones also says either Mahon or his brother Daniel owns a brown pickup truck that resembles the one witnesses say fled the Murrah building minutes before the bombing.
Mahon denies any direct role in the bombing. He does admit knowing Strassmeir but rejects any suggestion that his German friend was a government informant. "When you get drunk with a guy over a period of days, you get to know him," says Mahon. "Andi never pried into my activities; we just sat around talking about how much we hate the government."
For good measure, Jones has also tried to rope in some right-wing Britons. He has asked the court to allow him to talk to Kenneth Tyndall and Charles Sergeant, both of whom are active in ultra-right politics in England, and to David Irving, the British historian connected to circles of Holocaust deniers, whose new biography of Goebbels was canceled last week by a mainstream publisher (see page 103).
If those don't pan out, Jones is also hinting at a Middle East connection. For one thing, he is floating the idea that on the day before the bombing, Vince Cannistraro, the retired head of CIA counterterrorism operations, tipped the FBI to a terrorist attack planned by a Middle Eastern nation, possibly Iraq, against a U.S. facility, possibly the Murrah building. Not quite, corrects Cannistraro, who says the tip came to him on April 19, after the bombing, from a Saudi Arabian source he considered untrustworthy. Although he passed it on to the feds, it was with the warning that it was problematic. "Jones called me about this," says Cannistraro. "I pointed out to him that it came to me on the 19th and told him that the person didn't appear to have any credible information."