The same informant program that just drew an 11-count federal indictment was operating inside the compound where Timothy McVeigh’s bombing conspiracy took shape. Declassified FBI teletypes prove it. The SPLC has never explained what its operative was doing there — but a pattern confirmed by the 2026 indictment makes the silence harder to accept.

Related: The SPLC Paid an Operative Who Helped Plan Charlottesville. Biden’s DOJ Buried It. The Trail Goes Back to Oklahoma City. | The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Full Story of Andreas Strassmeir, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the Cover-Up That Followed

On January 4, 1996, FBI Director Louis Freeh sent a four-page classified teletype to field offices in Birmingham, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, and Omaha, and to the OKBOMB command post.

The cable, heavily redacted but later obtained through FOIA litigation by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, disclosed something the FBI and the Department of Justice had denied for months: the Southern Poverty Law Center had an informant operating inside Elohim City, a Christian Identity paramilitary compound near Muldrow, Oklahoma, at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing.

The SPLC’s operative was at the compound on April 17, 1995. Two days later, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck loaded with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people.

Thirty-one years later, on April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering — confirming that the organization’s informant program paid extremists through shell companies, put operatives inside leadership structures, and directed those operatives to make racist postings, coordinate event logistics, and actively participate in the movements they were supposedly dismantling.

The indictment covers 2014 to 2023. The program it describes started in the 1980s. The Elohim City operation falls squarely within that timeline. And the SPLC has never given a public accounting of what its informant was doing at a compound connected to the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history before 9/11.

What the Freeh Teletype Says

The January 4, 1996 cable is the single most significant document linking the SPLC to the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. Despite heavy redactions, several facts are legible.

First: the SPLC had an informant present at Elohim City. The teletype references a person “of the SPLC” who “was in the white supremacist compound” on April 17, 1995 — two days before the bombing.

Second: on that same date, a telephone call was placed to the compound. The caller’s name is redacted, but the date corresponds to one of two calls McVeigh is known to have made to Elohim City (the other was April 5, 1995). The person McVeigh was trying to reach is also redacted — but researchers who have studied the document, including investigative journalists J.D. Cash and Roger Charles, have identified the redacted name as Andreas Strassmeir.

Third: Freeh’s teletype describes a person at the compound who “allegedly has had a lengthy relationship with” one of the two indicted OKBOMB conspirators. The FBI had previously told the court — under oath — that it had no reliable information connecting McVeigh or Nichols to anyone at Elohim City. The Freeh teletype proved that was false.

Fourth: the teletype warned that Strassmeir was preparing to leave the country through Mexico. Days after the memo was issued, Strassmeir did exactly that — escorted across the border by Dave Hollaway, an associate of attorney Kirk Lyons, with assistance from what Lyons described in a CAUSE Foundation newsletter as members of Germany’s elite counterterrorism unit, GSG 9.

The FBI listed Strassmeir as “possibly armed and may be dangerous.” The Oklahoma bombing task force wanted him brought in for questioning. He was an illegal overstay on his visa and wanted by the ATF for unlawfully carrying a firearm. Freeh’s memo showed the FBI knew where he was — staying at Lyons’ residence in Black Mountain, North Carolina — and where he was headed. No arrest was made. No agents were dispatched.

Who Was at Elohim City

Understanding what the SPLC’s informant was embedded in requires understanding what Elohim City was in April 1995.

The compound was founded by Robert Millar, a Canadian-born Christian Identity preacher who taught that white Europeans were the true Israelites and that Jews were the literal descendants of Satan. By the mid-1990s, Elohim City had become a waypoint for some of the most dangerous figures on the American far right.

Andreas Strassmeir ran weapons training. He was a former German military officer — a Panzergrenadier lieutenant — whose father, Günter Straßmeir, had served as chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl and led the Berlin branch of the Christian Democratic Union. Before arriving at Elohim City in 1992, Strassmeir had attempted to build a career within the U.S. Department of Justice, aided by a retired Air Force colonel he described as “a former CIA guy my father had known.” He spent time on a kibbutz in Israel. He joined the Texas Light Infantry, a paramilitary group run by Kirk Lyons and Dave Hollaway — where members suspected he was a government agent and expelled him.

He then moved to a compound whose theology held that his father’s people were agents of Satan. He became their chief of security.

Sharing Strassmeir’s stone house at the compound was Michael Brescia, a member of the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery gang. Other ARA members — Kevin McCarthy, Scott Stedeford, Richard Guthrie — cycled through Elohim City regularly. McCarthy later told the FBI that he and Stedeford arrived at a safehouse in Pittsburg, Kansas in the early hours of April 20, 1995 — the morning after the bombing — having traveled directly from Elohim City. McCarthy admitted to FBI agents that he had “liabilities” arising from the Oklahoma City bombing.

Six Elohim City-connected individuals were eventually arrested in the BOMBROB case (the FBI’s Midwest bank robbery investigation). None were charged in connection with the bombing.

The ATF also had an informant at Elohim City: Carol Howe, a former honor student and Miss Teenage America semifinalist from Tulsa who had fallen into white supremacist circles through Dennis Mahon, leader of White Aryan Resistance. From August 1994 through March 1995, Howe — designated CI-183 — was paid $120 a week to monitor the compound. She reported that Strassmeir and Mahon discussed blowing up federal buildings, that they had cased the Murrah Building and two other federal targets, and that a plot was in motion.

The ATF’s Tulsa office sought an arrest warrant for Strassmeir in early 1995 — he was an illegal overstay with weapons violations. The arrest plan was killed when the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office, through Special Agent in Charge Bob Ricks, contacted U.S. Attorney Steve Lewis in Tulsa and shut it down.

Howe was deactivated before the bombing. The ATF later claimed she was fired for mental instability. She was sent back to Elohim City after the bombing to gather information, then discarded again. When McVeigh’s defense team tried to call her as a witness, the government fought to block her testimony. The FBI’s discovery documents on Howe contained misspellings of every significant name — Elohim City was rendered as “Elohm City,” Mahon as “Mehaun,” Millar as “Lamar,” Strassmeir as “Strasmeyer” — making them unsearchable by computer. McVeigh’s attorneys called the misspellings deliberate.

So by April 1995, there were at least two informant operations running at Elohim City: one by the ATF (Carol Howe), and one by the SPLC (identity still redacted). A compound housing Strassmeir, the ARA bank robbers, and men with direct connections to McVeigh was penetrated by multiple intelligence assets. Carol Howe warned of a bombing plot. The ATF’s arrest of Strassmeir was blocked by the FBI. And 168 people died.

What Morris Dees Said — and Didn’t Say

Investigative reporter J.D. Cash, working for the McCurtain Daily Gazette in Oklahoma, broke the story of the SPLC’s Elohim City informant in December 2003 after obtaining the Freeh teletype.

Cash later confronted Morris Dees at a public appearance at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant. He asked Dees directly what the SPLC was doing at Elohim City.

Dees’s response: “If I told you what we were doing there, I would have to kill you.”

Cash described Dees’s reaction to the question itself. When asked whether he had seen the FBI teletype, Dees responded: “Do you have it with you?”

That exchange — jocular on the surface — is the closest the SPLC’s founder ever came to a public acknowledgment that his organization had an operative at a compound connected to the worst domestic terrorist attack in American history.

The SPLC has never disclosed who its Elohim City informant was. It has never explained what intelligence the informant gathered. It has never stated whether the informant’s reporting was shared with the FBI, the ATF, or any other law enforcement agency — though the Freeh teletype, which discusses the SPLC informant alongside OKBOMB task force findings, suggests the FBI was aware of the operation.

Documents produced through the Trentadue FOIA litigation revealed the FBI’s own language: the SPLC was “engaged in an undercover role where they monitored subjects for the FBI believed to be linked to executed bomber Timothy McVeigh, the white supremacist compound at Elohim City, and the mysterious German national Andreas Carl Strassmeir.”

“Monitored subjects for the FBI.” That phrase — buried in a declassified teletype — describes a relationship between the SPLC and the Bureau that goes beyond a nonprofit passing along tips. It describes a joint operation.

What the 2026 Indictment Tells Us About the 1995 Operation

The SPLC indictment unsealed April 21, 2026 doesn’t mention Elohim City. Its financial charges cover 2014 to 2023. But it confirms the operational infrastructure that was already in place decades earlier.

The indictment describes a program in which the SPLC paid individuals inside extremist groups through shell companies, directed those individuals to make racist postings and coordinate event logistics, and concealed the payments from donors, banks, and the public. The informants — known internally as “field sources” or “the Fs” — were paid through fictitious entities like Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, and Rare Books Warehouse, with money loaded onto prepaid debit cards.

The SPLC’s own interim CEO, Bryan Fair, confirmed that the informant program started in the 1980s and was only recently discontinued. The indictment charges eight informants paid between 2014 and 2023. The program’s full scope — the total number of operatives, the total payments, the full range of organizations penetrated — has never been disclosed.

What the indictment confirms about the post-2014 program tells us something about the pre-1995 program by extension. The SPLC didn’t just collect tips from volunteers. It ran paid operatives inside extremist organizations. It directed their activity. It concealed the financial relationship. And it used the intelligence those operatives gathered — or the extremist activity those operatives helped sustain — to generate fundraising appeals and media coverage.

At Elohim City, the SPLC had a paid operative inside a compound where the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy was taking shape. That operative was present two days before 168 people were killed. The organization’s founder, when asked what his people were doing there, made a joke about killing the journalist who asked.

The question that has never been answered — and that the 2026 indictment makes more urgent — is whether the SPLC’s operative at Elohim City was doing the same thing F-37 was later doing at Charlottesville: not just observing the threat, but actively participating in the activity that generated it.

What Remains Classified

Jesse Trentadue’s FOIA lawsuits have produced more than 150 pages of FBI documents related to the SPLC’s Elohim City operation. All were heavily redacted. No document was dated earlier than April 19, 1995 — the day of the bombing.

The FBI fought to keep the redactions in place, citing privacy interests of “third parties who were (and, possibly, still are) of investigative interest to the FBI” and arguing that “being a suspect or person of interest in an FBI investigation — in particular, the FBI investigation of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building — carries obvious negative connotations.”

A federal judge in Salt Lake City ordered the FBI to turn over unredacted copies for in camera review. The full contents of those documents have never been made public.

Among the questions those documents might answer:

Who was the SPLC’s informant at Elohim City? What intelligence did they provide? When did the SPLC first establish contact with someone at the compound? Was the informant’s reporting shared with the OKBOMB task force before or after the bombing? Did the SPLC informant have direct contact with McVeigh, Strassmeir, or members of the Aryan Republican Army? And did the FBI or the SPLC possess advance knowledge of the bombing plot that was not acted upon?

The SPLC has had 31 years to answer these questions voluntarily. It has not done so.

The indictment now confirmed that for decades the SPLC operated a covert network of paid extremist operatives, concealed the financial infrastructure, and directed their activity from inside the organization’s Intelligence Project. If the SPLC’s defense in the 2026 case requires opening its full informant history — and it may, since the SPLC will argue the program was standard practice with law enforcement knowledge — then the Elohim City files could finally reach the light.

That may be the most consequential thing about this indictment. Not the wire fraud charges, which legal experts have already called thin. But the door it opens to 40 years of questions that the SPLC, the FBI, and the Department of Justice have collectively refused to answer.

This article is a companion to the Pocono Review’s investigation of the SPLC indictment and its connections to the Charlottesville operative, the Sines v. Kessler civil case, and the provocateur pipeline, and the Pocono Review’s full investigation into Andreas Strassmeir and the Oklahoma City bombing cover-up. Readers with information about SPLC informant operations in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, or elsewhere are encouraged to contact the Pocono Review newsroom.