Oklahoma City Bombing: Head FBI agent recalls terror attack 30 years later
The Oklahoma City Bombing on April 19, 1995, took the lives of 168 people, including 19 children, and injured hundreds more. The FBI calls it 'the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation's history.' In the wake of the bombing, investigators conducted over 28,000 interviews, collected more than 3 tons of physical evidence, and followed more than 43,000 leads. Ahead of the attack's 30th anniversary, WATM spoke with retired FBI Special Agent Bob Ricks, who served as the Special Agent in Charge of the Oklahoma City Field Office at the time of the bombing.
Ricks joined the FBI in 1969 after graduating from Baylor University with an accounting degree and Baylor Law School with a law degree. 'That was kind of the chosen path back in those days,' Ricks recalled. '[The FBI] looked for lawyers and accountants…and I went directly into the Bureau.' Throughout his career, Ricks investigated crimes in California, from kidnappings to extortion. His law degree brought Ricks to the Washington, D.C. Headquarters, where he helped to develop and grow the FBI's undercover operations. 'The Director had me train every undercover agent we had in the Bureau,' Ricks noted. 'He wanted to make sure we were comporting legally.' Ricks also served as the Supervisor for Undercover Operations in the Washington, D.C. Field Office.
After serving as Chief Counsel to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Ricks was eager to return to the field. 'I went to the Director and said, 'I don't really want to be a lawyer,' so I got transferred to Newark, New Jersey, as the Assistant [Special] Agent in Charge, in 1984,' Ricks said. During the 1980s, the FBI conducted extensive domestic counterterror operations against groups sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Union. 'The main group we focused on was the May 19th Communist Organization which had a role in bombing the U.S. Capitol,' Ricks recounted. 'We also focused on the United Freedom Front which was another group that was doing probably 50, 60 bombings a year.' To better combat these threats, Ricks formed the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New Jersey to coordinate efforts between federal, state, and local agencies.
In 1986, Ricks left Newark and returned to D.C. as the Section Chief in charge of civil rights and presidential appointments. Three years later, he went to the Oklahoma City Field Office as the Special Agent in Charge. In 1993, Ricks was tasked to support the FBI assumption of the Waco Siege from the ATF. FBI Special Agent in Charge Jeff Jamar asked for Ricks to serve as Assistant Special Agent in Charge and Chief Spokesperson. However, even the events of the Waco Siege couldn't prepare the senior FBI agent for the morning of April 19, 1995.
'I was scheduled for a charity fundraiser. It was a golf tournament in Shawnee, Oklahoma,' Ricks recalled. 'I was gonna play with the head of the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshal, an FBI supervisor, the head of DEA…all the federal agencies, state, and local — we were all there. Our pagers went off; that's when we carried pagers.' Ricks used his 'brick' cell phone to call his secretary at the FBI Field Office about seven miles away from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. With few details aside from the fact there was a bombing, Ricks and the other law enforcement officers caravanned back to Oklahoma City. Standing in front of the federal building, Ricks coordinated with the police and fire chiefs. 'Roughly half of it appeared to have been gone…it was kind of hard to believe anyone was going to survive that,' Ricks said of the damage at the bombing site. 'It was still on fire, there were some [people] that were still struggling to get out, but it looked like a scene…out of Beirut.' Ricks worked terrorism bombings in the Middle East that involved Americans and likened those cases to what he saw in Oklahoma City.
'It was all hands on deck,' Ricks said of the initial response to the bombing. With the fire department taking the lead in rescue efforts, first responders from federal agents to the National Guard all pitched in to help victims of the attack. The day after the bombing, Ricks established a system to control access to the bombing site and preserve evidence for the investigation. 'The first day is pretty much chaos…but we got it under control pretty quickly,' Ricks noted. Fortunately for the investigators, the axle and license plate of the rented truck used by Timothy McVeigh to conduct the attack were found. This allowed investigators to trace McVeigh's steps to the hotel he stayed at ahead of the bombing and positively identify him with a composite sketch. As luck had it, McVeigh was already in custody; just 90 minutes after the bombing, McVeigh was pulled over by a state trooper 80 miles north of Oklahoma City for a missing license plate. The trooper found a concealed weapon and arrested McVeigh.
The Oklahoma City Bombing changed America and affected the National Security field. 'I think part of the reason we did not prevent 9/11 was because we focused so much on domestic terrorism,' Ricks lamented. In the aftermath of the bombing, intelligence sharing between agencies and even within the FBI was severely restricted. 'Sometimes we lose sight of what our real threats are.'
To preserve the stories of the people who lived through the Oklahoma City Bombing and share them with the next generation, National Geographic filmed Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day In America. The three-part series features first-hand accounts like Ricks' and premieres April 2, 2025 on National Geographic and will be available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu the next day.
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