On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Nineteen of them were children in a second-floor daycare. The U.S. government convicted Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Case closed.

Except it wasn’t.

At the center of the bombing conspiracy was a man named Andreas Carl Strassmeir, a German national who ran security and weapons training at Elohim City, a white supremacist compound in rural Oklahoma. He was connected to McVeigh in the weeks before the attack. The FBI never meaningfully investigated him. He was flown out of the country by a former CIA pilot. And his biography contains a contradiction so glaring that it should have ended the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing the moment anyone looked at it closely.

Andreas Strassmeir spoke fluent Hebrew. He spent three summers in Israel carrying an Uzi on armed military patrols. He was photographed with a senior Israeli general. He described himself, on the record and in his own words, as “a very staunch Zionist.”

And the U.S. government wants you to believe he was a white supremacist.

The Contradiction

Strassmeir enrolled in Hebrew classes as a teenager in Berlin and became fluent in the language. He spent three summers on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, near the Golan Heights. During his second visit he was given an Uzi submachine gun and placed on armed security detail. During his third visit he was deployed on patrol along the Green Line, the militarized boundary between Israel and the West Bank.

Gumbel and Charles, in their book Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed, noted that this assignment was “a job usually reserved for the military.” That is an understatement.

Kibbutz volunteering is open to non-Jewish foreigners aged 18 to 35. Volunteers pick fruit, work kitchens, clean chicken coops. They do not receive Uzi submachine guns. They do not conduct armed security patrols. They are not deployed on the Green Line, which is a military boundary patrolled by the IDF and Israeli Border Police.

Under Israeli law, foreign citizens who are not Jewish may only volunteer in non-military frameworks. Armed security and border patrols are military frameworks. The Mahal program, which enables foreign Jews to serve in the IDF, requires Jewish identity qualifying under the Law of Return.

There are exactly two explanations for a German national conducting armed Green Line patrols in Israel. Either Andreas Strassmeir had Israeli citizenship or Jewish legal status qualifying him for military service, or he was operating under a formal institutional arrangement with Israeli security services that granted him access no civilian volunteer receives.

There is no third option.

When asked in an interview whether he had worn an IDF uniform during these patrols, Strassmeir’s expression reportedly changed. He broke into an embarrassed smile before insisting he had gone out in jeans.

He acknowledged, in a detail captured in a photograph, that he had “bumped into” General Rafael “Raful” Eitan at Golan Beach near Lake Galilee. This was not Rafi Eitan, the Mossad spymaster who captured Adolf Eichmann and later ran the Pollard spy case. This was Rafael “Raful” Eitan, the IDF Chief of Staff who oversaw the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. A casual encounter between a kibbutz tourist and one of Israel’s most senior military figures, memorialized in a photograph. As one does.

When asked directly about contact with the Mossad, Strassmeir did not deny it.

In 2023, responding to the Showtime miniseries Waco: The Aftermath which depicted him plotting the OKC bombing with McVeigh, Strassmeir told Headline USA: “I’m actually a very staunch Zionist, to be honest. I spent a lot of time in Israel, I have friends over there.”

This is the man who ran security for a community whose theology held that Jews are the literal children of Satan.

Inside Elohim City

In 1991, white supremacist attorney Kirk Lyons sent Strassmeir to Elohim City, a Christian Identity compound near Muldrow, Oklahoma. The stated reason, per a CAUSE Foundation newsletter: Strassmeir might “meet eligible young ladies,” marry, and resolve his immigration status. He had overstayed his tourist visa and was living in the country illegally.

At Elohim City, the Hebrew-speaking, Zionist-identifying, IDF-trained German became head of security and weapons training. According to a state law enforcement source quoted in the McCurtain Daily Gazette, Strassmeir was believed to be operating a “large-scale terrorist-training facility” at the compound, with 15 to 30 recruits arriving every few months for paramilitary exercises.

He shared a room with Michael William Brescia, a member of the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery gang. The ARA members who cycled through Elohim City (McCarthy, Stedeford, Guthrie, Brescia) were with Strassmeir at the compound immediately before the bombing, according to McCarthy’s statement to the FBI.

And every leadership or monitoring figure at Elohim City was working for someone. Strassmeir was the security chief. Robert Millar, the compound’s founder, was an FBI cooperating source according to WhoWhatWhy. Carol Howe was an ATF informant filing over 70 reports. The SPLC had informants there. The FBI had informants there. Richard Schrum was sent by the FBI to infiltrate. When every person in a leadership or surveillance role at a compound is an operative, that is not a community being watched. That is a community being run.

The Warnings That Were Ignored

Carol Howe, a former Tulsa beauty queen recruited by the ATF as an undercover informant, spent months inside Elohim City. Between June 1994 and March 1995 she submitted more than 70 intelligence reports to her handler, Angela Finley.

Howe reported that Strassmeir, whom she knew only as “Andy the German,” frequently talked about “blowing up federal buildings” and advocated “direct action against the U.S. Government.” She reported that the group had narrowed its target list to three buildings: one in Oklahoma City and two in Tulsa. ATF informant reports indicated that Strassmeir and an associate had been seen casing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in late 1994 or early 1995.

Two days after the April 19 bombing, Howe reminded the ATF of these warnings. The information was not acted upon. The FBI stepped in to block an arrest warrant the ATF had sought from the Tulsa U.S. attorney’s office.

After Howe went public with her story, the federal government turned on her. She was arrested in 1997 for allegedly conspiring to make bomb threats and possessing a “destructive device.” A jury found her not guilty.

McVeigh’s Connections to Strassmeir

On April 5, 1995, exactly two weeks before the bombing and just minutes after reserving the Ryder rental van that would carry the bomb, Timothy McVeigh telephoned Elohim City. The call was answered by Joan Millar, daughter-in-law of the compound’s founder. The message was for Strassmeir: McVeigh would be visiting soon.

McVeigh had Strassmeir’s card in his wallet when he was arrested 90 minutes after the bombing on a routine traffic stop. The two men acknowledged meeting at a gun show in Tulsa in 1993, where they traded McVeigh’s military fatigues for a German combat knife.

The day before the bombing, McVeigh called Kirk Lyons’s office looking for Strassmeir. Unable to reach him, McVeigh spoke with Lyons’s associate Dave Holloway for 15 minutes about Waco and the need to “send a message to the government.”

FBI Director Louis Freeh sent a teletype to the OKBOMB task force and select FBI offices two days before the bombing noting that McVeigh had contacted Elohim City asking Strassmeir for help. The FBI was aware of the connection before the bomb went off.

In the 2001 declaration that Terry Nichols filed from prison, McVeigh’s co-conspirator named two people he believed were involved in the bombing beyond himself and McVeigh: Andreas Strassmeir, whom he called an agent provocateur, and FBI agent Larry Potts.

The Most Curious Non-Investigation in FBI History

What happened after the bombing, or more precisely what did not happen, is what former FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny Coulson has called inexplicable.

For nearly a year, the FBI did not interview Strassmeir. The Bureau did not visit Elohim City to question him. It did not seek to bring him before a grand jury. This was despite McVeigh’s phone calls, Howe’s 70+ intelligence reports, Strassmeir’s card in McVeigh’s wallet, and the broader investigation into the Aryan Republican Army, three members of which lived at Elohim City in Strassmeir’s quarters.

Only after Strassmeir had fled the country was he queried, briefly, by telephone. The agents accepted his denial of any relationship with McVeigh. There is no evidence of any further investigation.

The FBI has stated categorically that Strassmeir was not an FBI informant. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who chaired the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, pressed the question directly and entered the denial into the Congressional Record. But as Rohrabacher noted on the House floor: if Strassmeir was not an informant, why was a man connected to the Murrah Building bomber, linked to bank robbers and violent white supremacists, given only a brief phone call and permitted to leave the country?

“How much of an investigation was done into Strassmeir?” Rohrabacher asked. His subcommittee was unable to answer the question.

The Escape

After the bombing, Elohim City founder Robert Millar expelled Strassmeir. The German fled to Kirk Lyons’s home in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to Germany to question Strassmeir as a witness. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Justice refused unless the U.S. guaranteed he could not face the death penalty. By that time Strassmeir was already gone.

Notes from a 1997 FBI investigation state that CIA pilot Dave Holloway flew Strassmeir out of the country. Holloway had served eight years in U.S. Army Special Forces and worked two years as a CIA pilot. When Strassmeir stayed with Holloway, the pilot later told the FBI, the German had with him McVeigh’s Army fatigues, the name ripped off but McVeigh’s initials and his unit patch, the “Big Red One,” still visible.

Lyons offered a competing account: that the escape was facilitated by Germany’s elite counterterrorism unit, GSG-9.

At the time of his departure, Strassmeir was listed as an illegal overstay by the INS and wanted by the ATF for illegally carrying a firearm. The OKBOMB task force had contacted the INS and requested that Strassmeir be stopped at the border. He crossed into Mexico and was not stopped.

Kirk Lyons paid for the trip. Someone else reportedly provided an overnight express delivery of $6,000 in cash to fund it.

“What Happens If It Was a Sting Operation from the Very Beginning?”

The most haunting piece of evidence in the entire case is a telephone conversation between Strassmeir and journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who interviewed the German for five hours in 1996.

Evans-Pritchard suggested that there comes a time in every failed operation when the informant needs to speak publicly to protect himself.

Strassmeir’s response, shouted into the telephone: “How can he? What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur?”

And then: “What happens if he talked and manipulated the others into it? What then? The country couldn’t handle it. The relatives of the victims are going to go crazy. He’s going to be held responsible for the murder of 168 people.”

Strassmeir later denied he was referring to himself.

So Who Is This Man?

Now that you know what Strassmeir did, the question becomes who he actually is. And the answer starts with what we don’t know.

His father, Günter Straßmeir, was a CDU politician whose career is documented in official German records: Bundestag member from 1972 to 1990, Parliamentary State Secretary under Chancellor Helmut Kohl (described in Martin Lee’s The Beast Reawakens as a de facto chief of staff), later a member of the Berlin House of Representatives. His biography appears on page 854 of the Biographisches Handbuch der Mitglieder des Deutschen Bundestages and page 361 of the Biografisches Handbuch der Berliner Abgeordneten.

Here is what those records don’t tell you: anything about the Strassmeir family before 1950.

Günter was born in 1929 in Bavaria. He got his Abitur in 1947, started studying political science in Berlin in 1950, and the record picks up from his CDU involvement in 1956. Everything before that is a void. The Nazi era. The wartime role. The parents. The grandparents. The religious background. None of it exists in any record anyone has produced.

Multiple secondary sources claim his grandfather was “a co-founder of the Nazi Party.” No source has ever named this grandfather. No German historical record has been produced. No primary documentation exists. The claim is a phantom, repeated so many times it became accepted fact. It serves a specific purpose: making Strassmeir’s white supremacist cover identity seem like a natural extension of family ideology rather than a manufactured disguise.

Remove that unverified backstory and you’re left with an open question. We don’t know who the Strassmeirs were before 1950. We don’t know their religious background or ethnic heritage. One unverifiable sentence claims Andreas “briefly joined a charismatic Christian commune in Berlin.” Three summers of documented armed Israeli service say something else entirely.

The CDU-Israel Pipeline

To understand the institutional world Günter Straßmeir inhabited, you need to understand the CDU’s relationship with Israel.

The CDU built the Germany-Israel relationship from the ground up. In 1952, Adenauer’s government negotiated reparations through which West Germany paid 3 billion Deutsche Marks to Israel. This wasn’t charity. Estimates suggest 80 to 100 percent of Israel’s steel and iron industry in the early years came from German payments. The reparations built Israel’s industrial base.

In 1957, a secret meeting between Shimon Peres and Franz Josef Strauss resulted in covert West German arms deliveries to Israel, including American-manufactured weapons, before the two countries even had diplomatic relations. The CDU was arming Israel in secret.

Simultaneously, the CDU was reintegrating former Nazis into government wholesale. The 131 Law allowed former Nazi civil servants to reclaim positions. By 1957, over 77 percent of the German Ministry of Justice’s senior officials were former Nazi Party members. The BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, was riddled with former Nazi intelligence officers who knew Eichmann’s location since 1952 but withheld it from Israel for years.

This wasn’t contradictory. It was complementary. The CDU rehabilitated Nazis and built the Israel relationship because both served the Western Cold War framework.

Günter Straßmeir spent his entire career, from 1956 through the 1990s, inside this institutional nexus. His son didn’t stumble into the overlap between German politics, intelligence work, and Israeli connections. He was born into it.

The Intelligence Training and the American Legend

Andreas Strassmeir studied museology and theology at a military university in Hamburg. He joined the German Army in 1979 as a Panzergrenadier, reached the rank of lieutenant, served as a liaison officer with the British Welsh Guards, and then took what Gumbel and Charles called “an interesting turn.” He was seconded to intelligence work, tasked with rooting out East German informants and spies. He eventually served as acting head of his battalion’s intelligence unit, a position that gave him access to classified internal reports.

He arrived in the United States in 1989, reportedly aided by Vincent Petruskie, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel whom Strassmeir described as “a former CIA guy my father had known.” Petruskie confirmed helping Strassmeir seek employment with the DEA’s operations section but denied any CIA connection.

That federal career never materialized. Instead Strassmeir built a paper trail across the American South that looks less like a drifter and more like a legend being constructed. He obtained a Social Security number in Virginia in 1989, remarkable for a foreign national on a tourist visa. He obtained a Tennessee driver’s license using a Knoxville address where his landlord confirmed he rented a house but never lived in it, a practice known in intelligence tradecraft as a notional residence.

His tourist visa expired. He never renewed it. He lived illegally in the United States from 1991 to 1996, five years during which the ATF, the FBI, and immigration authorities were all aware of his presence but his arrest was blocked by higher-ups whenever law enforcement tried to act.

In Houston he sold computers and embedded himself in the Texas Light Infantry, a militia that conducted paramilitary training. The Texas Light Infantry expelled him because members suspected he was a government agent. Militia members, people who are by definition suspicious of government infiltration, looked at Strassmeir and could smell it on him.

PATCON and the Broader Operation

Jesse Trentadue’s FOIA litigation, now spanning nearly 17 years and litigated largely behind closed doors with gag orders on all parties, has revealed the outlines of a broader FBI operation known as PATCON, short for “Patriot Conspiracy.” PATCON entailed numerous undercover FBI agents and informants posing as neo-Nazis, infiltrating militia groups, and according to one informant named John Matthews, fomenting crimes including illegal gun trafficking and plots against critical infrastructure.

Matthews provided a sworn declaration that prior to the bombing he had seen Timothy McVeigh and Andreas Strassmeir together at a militia training facility near San Saba, Texas. When Matthews reported this to the FBI, he was told the Bureau was already aware, which indicated to him that federal agents were monitoring McVeigh in the months before the attack.

Matthews was scheduled to testify in Trentadue’s FOIA case. He did not appear. He later said his former FBI handler advised him not to testify. The FBI denied any witness tampering. A special master was appointed to investigate.

Secret Service records obtained by Trentadue indicate that surveillance footage of the Murrah Building exists showing the truck detonation “three minutes and six seconds after the suspects exited the truck.” The plural “suspects” is in the original document. The FBI swore under oath that no such footage existed. Secret Service records proved otherwise. Trentadue’s FOIA requests to the CIA produced 37 blank pages stamped “Secret — National Security.” The CIA told the court that releasing them would “pose a grave threat to the security of the USA.”

Three Deaths in Federal Custody

Jesse Trentadue began investigating the OKC bombing not because of Strassmeir but because of his brother.

Kenneth Michael Trentadue, a convicted bank robber, was transferred to the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center in August 1995, four months after the bombing, at a time when the FBI was searching for additional suspects. His body bore 41 wounds and bruises, severe cuts, and signs of possible strangulation with plastic handcuffs. Prison officials ruled it a suicide by hanging with a bedsheet. Jesse Trentadue believes his brother was interrogated and beaten to death because federal authorities mistook him for John Doe #2.

Kenneth Trentadue is not the only person connected to this case who died in custody. Richard Guthrie, a member of the Aryan Republican Army who lived at Elohim City and could have testified about Strassmeir’s role, was found hanged in his cell in 1996 while awaiting sentencing. Alden Baker, another potential witness, also died in federal custody under circumstances ruled self-inflicted.

One suicide by hanging in federal custody is plausible. Three, all connected to the same case, all of whom could have provided testimony about the nexus between Strassmeir, the ARA, and the bombing conspiracy, follows a different pattern.

What the Intelligence Community Said, and Didn’t Say

In 2006, a very senior retired CIA official told Russ Baker of WhoWhatWhy that he had read an in-house CIA study examining whether the agency had any “exposure” in the OKC bombing case. The study cleared the CIA but identified a German intelligence operative as being involved. That operative was Andreas Strassmeir. According to Baker’s source, the CIA report stated Strassmeir worked for the German government and that his intelligence on McVeigh had been shared with the FBI.

Danny Coulson, the FBI Deputy Assistant Director who worked the OKC case before being abruptly removed, said he believed Strassmeir was some kind of government informant, but not for the FBI. He suggested Strassmeir was working for a foreign intelligence service. “I think there are people who know the answer to that and I think they’re in the FBI,” Coulson said.

Documents obtained through Trentadue’s FOIA lawsuits include an FBI interagency communication asking the CIA directly whether a person matching Strassmeir’s description “has ever been a CIA confidential source or asset.” No corresponding CIA response was ever released.

Former NSA counterintelligence officer John Schindler participated in a post-9/11 intelligence community re-examination of recent terrorist attacks. When the review reached Oklahoma City, he found that “the FBI and DoJ had no interest in anyone peeking into the case, which they considered closed, indeed tightly shut. Even in Top Secret channels, avenues were blocked.” He described Strassmeir as “the key to much of the remaining mystery.”

Gumbel and Charles concluded that Strassmeir’s history “strongly suggests that Strassmeir was not the radical right-winger he appeared to be, and might even have been a government agent of some sort, spying on extremists in the United States.” They added: “The Germans were certainly interested in intelligence on American radicals, because they worried that money and propaganda materials from the United States were fueling neo-Nazi violence at home. The Israelis were interested, too.”

The Israelis were interested, too.

Cui Bono

If Strassmeir was an intelligence operative, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests he was, the question becomes: who benefited from what happened next?

The legislative response to the Oklahoma City bombing was the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. AEDPA was passed in the wake of a bombing committed by white supremacists. But its legislative history, as documented by the Boston Review, is full of statements from congressional representatives equating “terrorism” with Palestinian groups. AEDPA created the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation framework that has been used primarily against groups Israel considers enemies. A bombing by white extremists became the legal weapon used to designate Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups.

That redirection didn’t happen by accident.

Benjamin Netanyahu had been pushing exactly this framework since the 1979 Jonathan Institute conference, which sought to equate terrorism with Arab and Muslim resistance. His 1995 book Fighting Terrorism was published the same year as the bombing, arguing for the expanded counterterrorism powers that AEDPA delivered.

The bombing also triggered a massive expansion of domestic surveillance authority and federal law enforcement power. The FBI hired 500 additional agents. The militia movement was decimated. PATCON was retroactively justified.

A man with concealed Israeli connections was embedded in the community from which the bombing was organized. The bombing’s legislative aftermath served Israeli policy interests. The cover-up has been maintained for 31 years across every level of the intelligence community.

What We Know and What We’re Being Asked to Ignore

Here is what is documented:

A man with German military intelligence training, fluent in Hebrew, who conducted armed military patrols in Israel under circumstances that require either Israeli citizenship or an institutional security relationship. A man photographed with a senior Israeli general who identifies as a Zionist and will not deny Mossad contact. A man whose father spent his entire career inside the CDU, the party that built the Germany-Israel intelligence and arms pipeline. A man who arrived in the United States aided by a figure he identified as former CIA, who obtained identity documents under circumstances suggesting institutional support, who maintained notional residences where he never lived. A man expelled from one militia for being a suspected government agent, then installed as security chief at the next compound, a compound penetrated by ATF, FBI, and SPLC informants simultaneously. A man who talked openly about bombing federal buildings, who was connected to the OKC bomber in the weeks before the attack, and who was then the subject of the most incurious non-investigation in FBI history. A man flown out of the country by a former CIA pilot while federal agents looked the other way.

Here is what we’re being asked to believe:

That all of this is coincidence. That a German tourist stumbled into white supremacism because he liked Civil War reenactments and wanted to meet American girls. That his Hebrew fluency, his armed Israeli service, his general-level contacts, and his self-declared Zionism are irrelevant details. That his family background is exactly what unverified sources claim. That the FBI’s failure to investigate him reflects incompetence, not protection. That the intelligence community’s refusal to discuss him, even in Top Secret channels, reflects bureaucratic inertia, not concealment.

One hundred sixty-eight people died on April 19, 1995. Nineteen of them were children.

Somebody knows who Andreas Strassmeir really is. After 31 years, the public deserves to be told.

Sources: Congressional Record (2005, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher); Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles (2012); FBI documents obtained through Jesse Trentadue’s FOIA litigation; the McCurtain Daily Gazette’s investigative reporting by J.D. Cash; interviews conducted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph (1996); Headline USA interview with Andreas Strassmeir (2023); WhoWhatWhy investigative reporting by Russ Baker (2015); the German Bundestag’s official biographical records for Günter Straßmeir; Israeli immigration law as documented by Decker, Pex, Levi Law Firm; Israeli Defense Forces recruitment regulations under the Security Service Law; Boston Review analysis of AEDPA and Palestinian designations.