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Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1 · Heroes Behind the Badge

0:00
You guys will remember the
0:01
days of paper paychecks, right?
0:03
There was not direct deposit.
0:05
So every other Thursday, I was in that building
0:08
depositing my paycheck to these young ladies who were
0:10
about my age, 20s, early 30s.
0:14
They were all killed.
0:17
(Upbeat Music)
0:23
Barry, I'm sure as you started
0:25
your day on April 19th of 1995,
0:31
it probably did not cross your mind that by 9.30 that
0:34
morning, you would be in front of the Murrah Federal
0:38
Office Building in Oklahoma City.
0:41
So Barry Black, welcome to Heroes Behind the Badge.
0:45
Tell us, start off what you were doing that day.
0:48
You probably weren't doing what you ended up doing.
0:52
Hey, good morning, Dennis.
0:53
Thanks, happy to be here with you guys.
0:55
Yeah, that morning, April
0:56
19th of 95 was just another day.
1:00
I was still on the SWAT team at the time and I had an
1:03
arrest warrant for a fugitive
1:05
on one of my white collar cases.
1:07
It was a pretty high dollar case and it had taken me
1:10
several years to get indicted.
1:12
And it was time to go arrest this one subject.
1:15
I thought he was gonna be out at Tinker Air Force Base,
1:18
which was about seven linear miles from downtown.
1:22
Myself and another operator were
1:24
sitting in my tactical Oldsmobile Calais.
1:28
We didn't have the vehicle.
1:32
But, you know, heard, felt the detonation.
1:36
It registered 3.2 on the Richter scale.
1:38
It was felt 60 miles away up in Stillwater.
1:41
It's windy and flat here in Oklahoma.
1:44
So I looked over to the west.
1:46
There was already a huge cloud of
1:49
dust and smoke blowing across downtown,
1:52
just as our secure radio started to chatter.
1:56
Back then, if you're on the SWAT
1:58
team or a special unit, you had a pager.
1:59
That was the height of technology then was the pager.
2:02
I remember those, yeah.
2:05
So the pager went off and basically, the news we got was
2:08
something had happened downtown.
2:10
And I touched base with my
2:12
assistant special agent in charge.
2:14
And he said, "Go do whatever it is you do."
2:16
I'd been a bomb technician for 53 weeks.
2:20
Our evidence response team was brand new.
2:23
This was my first bombing investigation.
2:26
So I got down to the scene right about
2:28
9.30 and started doing my little part.
2:32
So what did you, all right, you get on the scene.
2:35
You didn't expect to be there.
2:37
You got there.
2:38
What did you feel?
2:40
What did you see when you got there?
2:42
What was your first impressions?
2:44
The best route in that morning was from the West.
2:48
And again, this type of event was
2:52
not common, certainly not expected.
2:55
So even though I was one of two FBI bomb techs in the
2:58
state of Oklahoma, I was just driving a sedan.
3:02
Had a small kit bag in the trunk, but I drove towards the
3:08
building as close as I could get without getting into the
3:10
debris field, jumped up on the sidewalk.
3:13
So emergency vehicles could get through and started, you
3:18
know, the, it was a little walkabout basically just to
3:21
try to see if we could determine what happened.
3:24
Because we'd been told it might've been
3:25
a plane crash or a gas main explosion.
3:28
And as I mentioned, our evidence response team was new.
3:32
So I touched base with them, asked
3:33
them to start photographing the scene.
3:36
And of course it's just chaos.
3:38
I'm sure each of you has been on a scene, but the
3:42
magnitude of this was
3:44
something like I'd never seen before.
3:46
All right.
3:47
So when you got there, there was still fire, flames,
3:52
debris and people being pulled out.
3:56
What did that look like?
3:58
Well, it's,
4:00
until you've seen one of these large
4:01
events, it's difficult to replicate.
4:04
Seeing it as a training video,
4:07
it's just not the same.
4:08
Movies are just not the same.
4:11
Cars had been burning.
4:13
There were walking wounded,
4:14
people trapped in the building.
4:17
It was chaos.
4:18
And, you know, I was at ground zero
4:20
after 9-11 and some other major events.
4:23
And those are the similarities.
4:25
It's just the mayhem that ensues once those events occurred.
4:29
Yeah, for sure.
4:30
You know, I'm amazed at the numbers I saw when I did a
4:34
little research on this. 167 people died during the
4:39
bombing. 168 was the final total because one of the
4:45
rescue workers was actually killed, struck by debris
4:49
during the rescue work. 19 children killed in the
4:54
bombing. 15 in the daycare center that was at the Murrah
4:58
building. 684 people injured.
5:03
324 buildings either damaged or destroyed.
5:08
We think about the Murrah building being destroyed, but
5:12
there were all these other buildings surrounding it. 324
5:16
buildings, that was amazing.
5:19
$652 million in damage as a result of this, the deadliest
5:25
act of domestic terrorism in US history.
5:29
And
5:30
I am particularly
5:34
involved with the eight federal
5:37
agents who died in the attack.
5:39
Obviously the Murrah building was targeted because it
5:43
housed a number of federal law enforcement agencies and
5:48
the death toll was just so tragic.
5:53
We added eight of these federal law enforcement agents to
5:56
the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
5:58
And I just want to read their names.
6:01
From the US Secret Service, four agents killed, Alan
6:05
Whicher, Mickey Maroney, Cynthia
6:09
Campbell Brown, Donald Leonard.
6:13
From the US Customs Service, two federal agents killed,
6:17
Paul Ice and Claude Medearis.
6:22
From the US Department of Housing and Urban Development,
6:25
from their Office of Inspector General,
6:27
Paul Broxterman killed in the bombing.
6:31
And the eighth federal agent killed was a DEA agent, Drug
6:35
Enforcement Administration agent, Kenneth McCullough.
6:39
I just wanted to make sure we honored those fallen law
6:43
enforcement heroes as we do so often on this show.
6:48
Barry, it strikes me that there were so many questions to
6:53
be asked, but, and we'll talk more about the
6:57
investigation, but why was the Alfred Murrah building in
7:02
Oklahoma City the target of this terrorist act?
7:07
Well, Craig, that's a great question.
7:09
And if I may go back just a minute,
7:12
Dennis asked what these are like when you show up.
7:15
Paul Ice, my wife and I knew
7:17
him, Mickey, my wife and I knew him.
7:21
I have been to a number of these, Lenny Hatton, the FBI
7:24
bomb technician that died when
7:26
the World Trade Center collapsed.
7:28
I knew Lenny.
7:30
So these events are personal a lot of times, even though
7:35
they're major events, losing people that you knew kind of
7:39
makes that response a little more difficult.
7:41
But to your question, this is two years after Waco, the
7:46
Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas.
7:47
I was a sniper down there for that event.
7:51
McVeigh had a hatred for the federal government and Waco
7:57
was sort of the final straw for
7:58
him immediately after the fire.
8:02
He was there during the standoff and then he went back
8:04
after the events of April, 1993.
8:07
And he began telling his friends, it's time for a call of
8:10
action, time to basically strike against the government.
8:14
He wanted to start a revolution,
8:16
an overthrow of the government.
8:19
Oklahoma City,
8:21
the SAIC, the Special Agent in Charge, the public
8:24
information officer for the Waco event.
8:27
And McVeigh believed some of the ATF agents that had
8:31
participated in that Waco situation were officed here.
8:36
Additionally, just logistically, his bases of operation
8:41
were out in Kingman, Arizona
8:42
and up near Herington, Kansas.
8:44
And so I-40 and I-35 intersect just
8:49
almost directly on top of the Murrah Building.
8:51
So it was easy access, easy in and out
8:54
and had some tangential ties to Waco.
8:58
As I recall in my research, he did consider other targets
9:03
and this was interesting to me.
9:06
He at one point seemed to indicate that he wanted to have
9:10
as few non-government casualties as possible.
9:15
And yet he targeted a federal
9:17
building that housed a daycare center.
9:20
And 15 of those children at the
9:22
daycare center were killed in the bombing.
9:24
How did you explain that?
9:26
That seems very strange to me.
9:29
Well, I really don't put a whole
9:30
lot of credence in anything he said.
9:32
You know, he wrote a book, which I've never read, but we
9:36
know emphatically that he was aware of the kids.
9:40
America's kids daycare was there.
9:43
In December, prior to the bombing, he and Michael
9:46
Fortier, an unindicted co-conspirator, took a recon trip,
9:52
drove from Kingman to the building en route to Kansas.
9:56
And Fortier asked him, well,
9:57
you know, what about the kids?
9:59
What about the innocent people that are inside?
10:01
And basically,
10:05
Timothy McVeigh likened them to
10:08
people associated with Star Wars.
10:10
They work for the evil empire, so they have to die.
10:13
It was a very strange way to look at human life,
10:16
particularly children, and he
10:18
did know there was a daycare there.
10:20
So Barry, I wanna jump in, and you said something earlier
10:22
about it was very personal to you, and
10:25
that relates, you and I can relate here.
10:28
My first five years on the job as a cop, four of my
10:32
personal friends were killed in line of duty.
10:34
And there's nothing that makes going to work more
10:38
personal than one of your fellow
10:41
colleagues falling in the line of duty.
10:44
And I can tell you, it changes everything.
10:48
When you show up and when you're at work, you
10:52
are so hyper-focused on hunting that
10:56
person down like a fucking animal, right?
11:00
The animal that they are, and
11:03
it's like you got blinders on.
11:04
It's just balls to the wall, going
11:07
after any lead, trying to find that guy.
11:12
And maybe we can get into the psychology
11:15
of that a little bit, because here you are.
11:17
You're an FBI agent, you're working in that building.
11:21
You and your wife knew those people personally.
11:24
It was personal for you.
11:27
How did you react, and how did you and your colleagues
11:33
gather yourselves, pull those
11:36
emotions together, and try to stay focused?
11:39
Which is one of the most difficult things that I could
11:43
ever remember and experience, just trying to stay
11:46
professional and find this guy, even though you are
11:51
literally hunting this person at that point.
11:55
Right, well, it's a great point,
11:56
and I'll add another layer to that.
11:59
So just before
12:01
the ATF raid in Waco, my wife and I got married.
12:05
So we were unpacked for my honeymoon.
12:08
I left for 51 days to go be a sniper
12:10
at the Branch Davidian standoff.
12:12
I came back, was gone to Hazardous
12:15
Devices School to become a bomb tech.
12:18
That was in 94, 95 the bombing occurred.
12:21
She was a federal officer as well.
12:23
She was in the building.
12:24
She left it at nine o'clock, two minutes before
12:27
detonation, but I didn't know that.
12:29
So it was about 90 minutes
12:31
until I knew that she was okay.
12:33
So not only did we know, we didn't know who had died, but
12:37
it was obviously gonna be a high fatality event.
12:40
So this was, yeah, it was
12:42
personal on a pretty broad scale.
12:44
And to answer your question directly,
12:48
I think, as you all know,
12:51
training tends to tamp down that chaos.
12:56
My job was limited.
12:58
You know, my job was bomb technician and part of the evidence
13:00
response team, there were walking wounded.
13:03
There were people I really couldn't help.
13:05
My job was to determine early
13:07
on, was this even a bomb or not?
13:10
So I think,
13:12
not that I had any special discipline, but
13:16
the quality of training comes
13:18
through in these crisis events.
13:20
You can keep your head straight, do your job, count on
13:24
everybody else to do their job.
13:26
And that's how things tend to work best.
13:29
So how did you determine, Barry, that this was a bomb?
13:33
It could have been a number of other things.
13:35
What techniques did you use to figure that out?
13:39
Well, as I became a bomb technician and through the
13:42
evidence response team training, we had done some
13:45
post-blast training, nothing of this magnitude.
13:49
But when I first showed up, there
13:51
was this 32 foot crater in the street.
13:54
The front of the building was gone.
13:58
Generally, the airplane crash,
14:00
you're gonna see some airplane parts.
14:03
Just nothing like that existed.
14:04
It was evident very early on that this was gonna be not
14:09
only a bomb, but a very
14:11
large, probably vehicle-borne IED.
14:14
And early in the morning, a reserve deputy sheriff called me
14:19
over and my partner, who was the FBI bomb technician,
14:22
kind of my mentor, and he showed us this 300 pound
14:28
twisted piece of metal, which looked to
14:30
be the axle of a vehicle, a large truck.
14:34
It was twisted, it exhibited blast damage, and this
14:38
deputy spit on his finger, wiped some grease away, and
14:40
revealed a confidential vehicle identification number.
14:44
So that CVIN was a very early and critical piece of
14:48
evidence that led us to Junction City,
14:51
Kansas, where that rider truck was rented.
14:53
What kind of bomb was this, to do that kind of damage
14:57
that we described earlier in the interview?
14:59
It's just incredible to think any kind
15:01
of bomb could do that kind of damage.
15:04
Well, sadly, it's very easily made.
15:07
It's called ANFO.
15:08
It's just an acronym for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.
15:12
It's commercially available for blasters and miners.
15:16
It tends to be a heaving explosive.
15:19
It makes big craters.
15:21
The military uses ANFO to destroy enemy
15:23
runways because it'll leave a giant hole,
15:27
but it's very easy to make.
15:28
There's a very forgiving recipe where you take
15:31
fertilizer, mix in a wide variety of fuels, in pretty
15:37
close to the right ratio, and you
15:38
have this material known as ANFO.
15:41
Oddly enough, ANFO is very insensitive.
15:44
ANFO doesn't want to explode, so
15:47
you need something called a booster.
15:49
And that was one of my jobs as the bomb
15:51
tech was where did the booster come from?
15:53
It's another type of high explosive.
15:55
Well, explosives are tools.
15:58
They're dangerous tools, but they're tools.
15:59
And if your tools get stolen, you have to report that to
16:03
another agency, what's called an explosive theft report.
16:07
So we had already traced the area of interest up to
16:10
Kansas, and I found an explosive theft report from a
16:15
quarry that happened to have reported nearly 500 pounds
16:19
of high explosives stolen with some detonators.
16:23
The same time when some of the
16:24
purchases of the ammonium nitrate were made,
16:28
we sent agents and officers there.
16:30
The responding agency, the local agency that had
16:33
responded to that theft, months and months before, said,
16:37
"Well, we were able to recover one of the padlocks.
16:41
"There are usually multiple
16:41
locks on these explosive magazines."
16:43
He said, "Four were gone.
16:45
"We found one left.
16:47
"It had been drilled out from the bottom."
16:49
"Okay, good to know.
16:50
"Do you still have that lock in your evidence locker?"
16:52
And they said, "Sure."
16:54
"Well, can we have that?"
16:54
"Yes."
16:55
So after we made the arrests of McVeigh
16:59
and Nichols, we executed search warrants.
17:01
One of the warrants was at Terry Nichols' home.
17:04
In that home, we found a
17:05
cordless drill and some drill bits.
17:07
Our lab was able to match through metallurgy some
17:11
microscopic bits of metal in the chuck of the drill.
17:14
And then our tool mark analysis unit was able to show one
17:17
of those drill bits had drilled out the lock.
17:19
So that's how we were able to tie Nichols to the theft of
17:22
the explosives that were used in
17:23
the booster to make this giant bomb.
17:26
Now McVeigh drives the truck, this rider truck as we
17:29
later learned, up right next to the building, I guess,
17:33
very close to it, and gets out.
17:36
And I don't understand how he detonates all that
17:41
explosive material and gets away.
17:44
Well, there are a number of ways
17:45
to detonate an IED or any explosive.
17:48
In this instance, we believe he used burning time fuse.
17:52
Basically, if you've used a firecracker as a kid, kind of
17:55
the same theory, you light the fuse and the fuse burns
17:58
down and cause the firecracker to pop.
18:00
In this instance, we believe he had altered that rider
18:04
truck where the burning time fuse
18:06
could be initiated from inside the cab.
18:09
So he pulled a fuse igniter.
18:12
The fuse is burning
18:14
through the cab of the truck into the detonators in the
18:17
rear, and that's what causes the detonation.
18:20
It's called time fuse because you can cut a certain
18:24
length to give you X amount of time.
18:27
So we believe he lit those fuses.
18:29
We have a video from about a block away where the truck
18:33
stops for just a few seconds.
18:35
We believe that's where he lit the fuses.
18:37
Knew how long the fuse would take to burn.
18:39
So he drove that device hot
18:42
through the next intersection.
18:43
As you said, Craig parked in front of the building,
18:46
exited, walked across the street, but he got behind
18:50
another big building that they had
18:51
delivered the getaway vehicle on Easter Sunday.
18:54
And he had told Fortier his getaway route was gonna be behind
18:59
the YMCA, which was a multi-story
19:01
building in case the bomb went off early.
19:05
So he was, it was kind of risky move.
19:07
I mean, he was lighting fuses
19:09
while he was still in the truck, right?
19:12
Yes, I mean, we do that on the range.
19:14
You know how long that fuse takes to burn.
19:17
So you know how much time you have to walk away.
19:23
Yeah, you lose the control in burning time fuse that you
19:27
have with what we call an electrical detonation where you
19:29
push the button and there's instantaneous result.
19:32
But
19:34
yeah, time fuse is called
19:35
time fuse because you can time it
19:38
down really pretty precisely.
19:41
Now Barry, because of this incident at the Oklahoma City
19:46
bombing site and the materials that were used, didn't
19:51
laws change after that in regards
19:54
to obtaining that kind of material?
19:56
There were some attempts to change laws.
19:59
For instance, putting what's
20:01
called taggants in ammonium nitrate.
20:05
Oklahoma is an agrarian state.
20:08
Kansas where they were is an agrarian state.
20:10
It's not unusual for huge farms and ranches to buy
20:14
enormous amounts of ammonium nitrate.
20:18
Now, what we learned in this case, Terry Nichols, who
20:22
bought 4,000 pounds of ammonium
20:25
nitrate, didn't have a ranch or a farm.
20:28
He had a small home with a very small yard.
20:31
And so the question was asked, to the place where the
20:35
ammonium nitrate was acquired, is this an unusual amount?
20:39
And I said, well, it is really the only people that buy
20:42
4,000 pounds of fertilizer from us,
20:46
our golf courses or the public utilities.
20:49
So yeah, it was an unusual event, but it wasn't illegal.
20:53
And this theory of taggants, the jury's out on it.
20:58
It does allow traceable materials to be left over, but
21:02
just it's a matter of volume, how much
21:04
fertilizer is stolen in that example.
21:07
Wow.
21:07
So as we're talking about this,
21:09
let's talk about you for just a sec.
21:11
And then I know Craig's jumping at the bit there to ask
21:14
you a few more detailed questions, but
21:17
here's something that's really interesting.
21:19
So I'm guessing that you were hired by the FBI back in
21:24
the day where almost every FBI agent was either an
21:29
accounting major or a law major.
21:32
And you, in fact, if I'm
21:34
correct, were an accounting major.
21:37
And so you come out of college as an accountant, you get
21:40
hired by the FBI, that was kind of their protocol or
21:45
their requirements at the time, because mostly it was
21:49
white collar crime, but certainly
21:51
the FBI has evolved over the years.
21:54
But how do you go from being an accountant to being a
22:00
SWAT operator, and then of all things, a bomb tech?
22:06
I mean, you went from one extreme,
22:09
being a pencil pusher to a tactical dude.
22:14
Yeah, it was a strange sort of
22:17
path I had through my career.
22:20
To answer your question, I wanted
22:21
to be an FBI agent since I was a kid.
22:23
So I was like 10 years old, and my
22:25
little league coach was an agent.
22:27
So I hounded him, what do I need to do?
22:29
And he was stay out of trouble,
22:31
the whole good advice thing for kids.
22:33
But by the time I got into college, he sort of realized I
22:36
was serious and wanted to pursue a career in the Bureau.
22:40
So he put me in touch with a
22:41
recruiter, and she asked what I was studying.
22:43
I told her I was in engineering,
22:46
and she just said, "Well, we're not hiring engineers, "so
22:49
we're looking for accountants and lawyers."
22:51
So I changed majors, literally changed schools.
22:54
I went down to Tuscaloosa where the better business
22:55
school was, got an accounting degree, solely to enhance
23:00
my chances of getting in the FBI.
23:02
When I ended up with a degree, I was still too young, so
23:05
I actually had to go into the
23:06
public sector, which was not my favorite.
23:09
Public accounting was not what I wanted to do.
23:12
Stayed focused, made the
23:14
application, got in when I was 24.
23:17
I was the youngest agent in my class and was prepared to
23:21
do white collar crime for the rest of my career.
23:25
But my training agent was the head of the sniper team,
23:28
and we spent a lot of time together.
23:30
And if you've been in the military or in your agency, you
23:34
do what your training agent says, you're FTO.
23:37
So every Wednesday, he would shoot.
23:38
So every Wednesday, I would shoot.
23:40
And we became very close friends.
23:43
He suggested I try out for
23:44
the SWAT team and sniper school.
23:45
So I did.
23:46
I made the team.
23:48
First major deployment was the Branch Davidians in Waco.
23:51
While that compound was burning, my team was there, and a
23:54
couple of guys I knew came down
23:56
and my job was to stop people.
23:58
So I stopped these two men, asked them who they were.
24:01
Well, they were FBI bomb techs.
24:03
I didn't know we had FBI bomb techs.
24:05
So I asked, "What do you guys do?"
24:06
And I was still pretty young.
24:08
And I said, "Well, basically we
24:09
travel around the world, blow stuff up."
24:11
I said, "Okay, I want to do that.
24:13
How can I get that job?"
24:14
And again, another mentor, he helped me, somehow made my
24:18
way into the FBI's bomb school, the
24:21
hazardous devices school the next year.
24:25
And then I did all three.
24:26
I was a sniper and white collar and bomb tech, juggling
24:30
all those balls until terrorism kind of took off and then
24:34
spent the rest of my career
24:35
exclusively in the counter-terrorism realm.
24:37
You have literally touched every major
24:42
incident that most people can remember.
24:45
You're talking about Waco, you're talking about Oklahoma
24:49
City bombing, 9-11.
24:52
And I know there's others as well.
24:56
Pretty incredible stuff.
24:58
It was nothing I could have anticipated.
25:01
I was happy working white collar.
25:03
If you're an accountant, putting
25:04
those cases together are puzzles.
25:06
They're international, they're big money.
25:08
I did have a case that was on Unsolved Mysteries, which I
25:10
thought was gonna be the peak of my career.
25:13
But yeah, I had no way to know the twists and turns that
25:16
both my job trajectory and the
25:18
world would take in those 31 years.
25:20
And one last thing before Craig grabs it is at the very
25:25
beginning of this interview, you are on your way to go
25:30
and arrest a white collar criminal that took you two
25:34
years to get that indictment.
25:36
And then the bombing happened.
25:38
So I'm guessing he was a pretty lucky
25:40
bastard that day and he didn't get arrested.
25:44
Did he ever get arrested?
25:46
Yes, so as I mentioned, I had
25:48
a couple of pokers in the fire.
25:51
Once the immediacy of the bombing had kind of quelled, we
25:55
had grand jury ongoing because there
25:57
were other people in the case to indict.
25:59
But yes, he did get arrested.
26:01
And in an odd twist, the morning we picked the jury, his
26:06
son burst into the courtroom and said,
26:10
he died of a heart attack that morning.
26:12
Barry Black had been a bomb technician for 53 weeks when
26:16
the Murrah Building came down.
26:17
Before the day was out, he had a
26:19
serial number off a truck axle.
26:21
What he did not have was a case.
26:23
Proving it would take nearly 900 investigators, more than
26:26
15,000 leads and a million man hours, it would begin with
26:30
a traffic stop 90 miles north of
26:32
town for a missing license plate.
26:34
That's part two.
26:36
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