There is a world within the world

A joint review of Don Delillo's "Libra" and Wendy S. Painting's "Aberration in the Heartland of the Real"

Note: This was originally written for the ACX annual book review contest. It didn’t make it into the set of finalists, so I’m posting it here.

1.

For reasons that still aren’t clear, the years following World War 2 were marked in America by an enormous uptick in UFO sightings. Reports poured in from around the country of strange lights in the sky and, less frequently, direct contact with alien beings. Since the Cold War was already in its early days, the US military initially feared that the sightings were of Soviet spy craft and launched a multi-year investigation called Project Sign. They eventually determined that the reports didn’t detail anything threatening from abroad. Instead, they thought, the sightings were of American experimental aircraft and public reporting on them could give Soviets valuable insight into American military capabilities. They decided to stage a cultural intervention to discredit the nascent community of UFO enthusiasts and keep them from inadvertently leaking the country’s military secrets.

Project Sign ended, and Project Grudge took its place. In its most benign form, Project Grudge used a coordinated network of talking heads who would point to natural phenomena as a way of countering people’s interpretations of the lights they were seeing in the sky. The same project, though, would also attempt to smear UFO contactees by claiming that they were drunk at the time of their sighting or suffered from hallucinations.

Americans didn’t buy it. So, the government initiated a new and more malicious incarnation of Project Grudge after President Truman’s creation of the Psychological Strategy Board, an organization with the goal of “neutralizing” elements of American social and intellectual life that could be used against the country by its adversaries. Intelligence agents began infiltrating the citizen groups that were coordinating and disseminating information about UFO encounters. They didn’t stop there, though. The military actively sought to sow disinformation within these groups that would destabilize them and make them seem insane. They staged flying saucer sightings, then studied the public’s reactions, making special note of how information about the events spread. So-called “mirage men” working with intelligence agencies would target specific UFO researchers and offer them fake classified documents that detailed centuries of secret contact between aliens and humans, as well as updates on an ongoing war in space against a belligerent alien race. At one point, they created a fake alien base on Earth that they allowed UFO researchers to discover. The people targeted for these disinformation campaigns often ended up in mental hospitals, and the UFO communities, increasingly aware of the infiltration, splintered amid flurries of omnidirectional suspicion. Much of their lore, though, still retains traces of what the mirage men reported to them back in the middle of the 20th century.

A military vehicle preparing for launch near Roswell, New Mexico 

For all the government’s effort, American fascination with UFOs and alien races has stubbornly persisted. Over 40% of Americans now believe that aliens have visited our planet. This is down slightly from the half of Americans who believed in alien visitation in the early 1990s. But an entirely new crop of weird beliefs has dethroned UFO theories from their spot at the pinnacle of American paranoia: QAnon believers talking about politicians drinking adrenochrome plausibly swung the 2016 election toward Donald Trump; transvestigators obsess over the angle of Michelle Obama’s pelvis to try to prove that she was really born a man; and Flat Earth theories have gained traction.

In this review, I want to examine two books about times when the stakes of this type of belief couldn’t have been higher. One is a fictionalized account of the conspiracy that led to Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963: Don Delillo’s Libra. The second, Wendy S. Painting’s Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, is non-fiction and looks at the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh – a figure in many ways Oswald’s mirror image. In the process, I’ll be discussing what these books reveal about why Americans can’t seem to get enough of conspiracy theories, how our government and media have fed into them, and how the internet has propelled this style of thinking into new corners of society.

2.

Let me be frank. I picked up Aberration in the Heartland of the Real primarily because of its title. I actually felt a little disappointed when I saw that the book was about Timothy McVeigh, but the temptation of that phrase – Aberration in the Heartland of the Real – was too great to resist. What could it mean? It conjures the image of a map of reality with something weird at its core, something situated like a splinter under a fingernail. It’s not just that the Aberration doesn’t fit. It’s that it creates doubt that what you’re looking at is reality at all. Like the feeling of realness is just an emotion with no grounding in fact, or like The Heartland of the Real is in fact the center point in an impenetrable fog of illusion.

Aberration tells the story of McVeigh’s brief life – he was executed at just 33 years old – beginning in his childhood. But let me start my summary instead with the story of the FBI siege on a homestead in Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. The family that lived there, the Weavers, were part of the survivalist and militia movements that had been rapidly growing since the mid-1980s. Randy Weaver, the head of the household, had worked for years to accumulate a stockpile of guns and had picked up a number of federal weapons charges in the process. US Marshals planned to serve a warrant for these charges but, aware of the Weavers’ arsenal, first set up a surveillance operation on their property. The Marshals were discovered early, though, and a gun fight began that killed one Marshal, the Weavers’ 14-year-old son, and their dog, Striker. This was the beginning of what was to be an 11-day standoff. The second day brought another exchange of fire that wounded Randy Weaver and killed his wife, Vicki. Protestors arrived to support the Weavers and, with them, the media. The massive coverage that the incident received only stoked fears among survivalists that they needed to prepare to defend themselves from a government attack. 

A couple days before the standoff ends peacefully, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh quits his security job in Western New York. In a letter referencing R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, he announces to his friends and family that he’s “dropping out of the system.” He spends the next year on the road, following a circuit of gun shows where he sells modified weapons, 2nd amendment bumper stickers, and copies of the Ur-text of late 20th century white separatism, The Turner Diaries. During this time, McVeigh builds for himself a network of connections in the right-wing underground. At one point he lives in Arizona with a disgraced genetics researcher from Cedars-Sinai who made meth and tried to break into the UFO scene as an expert in alien implants. At another, he stays in the white separatist community of Elohim City, Oklahoma. But the mainstays of his peripatetic life are the Michigan homes of the men who would be later convicted as his assistants in the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh’s Army buddies Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. 

This continues for a year until McVeigh is further galvanized by another federal standoff against a fringe community. In the spring of 1993, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives secures a warrant to raid the property of a church on the outskirts of Waco, Texas that’s been accused of stockpiling and illegally selling weapons. The raid goes badly, leaving several dead on both sides. A 51-day standoff proceeds, and ends on April 19, 1993 with the church’s destruction by fire and the deaths of nearly all its adherents. Just ten days into the standoff, though, McVeigh arrives in Waco and, with a number of others, protests the siege. After weeks in Texas, he goes to Michigan to pick up Terry Nichols with the intention of returning to the standoff, only for the two to find themselves watching the final siege live on television before they could set off together. The event reverberates through popular culture. Classes pause at the Texas middle school I was then attending while we watch endless replays of the church’s final collapse into flames. Concept albums are made, most notably by electronic musicians Boards of Canada. Conspiracy theorists launch a cottage industry of books and documentaries tying the Waco siege into a hundred different stories of government mind control, Zionist conspiracy, and covert weapons sales to dictatorships in third-world countries.

The final siege on the Branch Davidian church near Waco, Texas

The following two years of McVeigh’s life look similar to his first year on the road, but all the while he’s quietly building toward the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In early March 1995, his planning accelerates. McVeigh is seen on a bus from Kansas to Colorado, where he’s later spotted with two or three other men before heading back to a town he frequents in Arizona. There, he visits a dentist and spends his days making phone calls all around the country. His whereabouts are unclear for about a week, though there are conflicting reports that he’s seen during this time in Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, including inside the Murrah Federal Building. He definitively resurfaces in Junction City, Kansas five days before the bombing. There, he rents a moving van under the name Robert Kling and receives multiple visitors at a hotel. He’s spotted with two other men at a restaurant in Oklahoma the night before the bombing, and later at a convenience store accompanied by two men and a woman who witnesses suspect is a prostitute. On the morning of April 19, 1995 – exactly two years after the final siege on the church in Waco – he parks the moving van near the Murrah Federal Building and, at 9:02 AM, explodes the bomb that had been waiting inside the van’s cargo area, killing 168 people. Nineteen of these are children in a daycare center directly over where the van was parked. The government launches a hunt for two men associated with the bombing, whom they call John Doe #1, who turns out to be McVeigh, and John Doe #2, who is never definitively identified. Seven Middle Eastern terrorist organizations simultaneously claim responsibility for the bombing.

McVeigh is arrested 90 miles north of Oklahoma City that same day, where he’s pulled over for driving without a rear license plate. Two years later, he’s sentenced to death for murder, among other charges. Two of his co-conspirators, Nichols and Fortier, receive lesser sentences. McVeigh is imprisoned for nearly four years after his sentencing, during which time his physical and mental health deteriorate. About a month prior to his scheduled execution, the FBI releases documents it had previously withheld about his case. McVeigh, though, instructs his legal team to drop all appeals and is executed in June, 2021.

3.

I didn’t realize it when I picked up that book that its haunting title was taken from Don Delillo’s book about Lee Harvey Oswald, Libra. I was intrigued by the idea that Painting would tie her non-fiction book so closely to a fictional book – a move that would usually delegitimize a story. Instead, I saw her point in doing so once I realized the context of that phrase, Aberration in the Heartland of the Real.

There’s a character in Libra who occupies a strange space in the story, a bit like how the chorus in classical Greek theater articulates the audience's feelings. Nicholas Branch is a (fictional) retired intelligence analyst who, decades after the Kennedy assassination, is asked to write a complete history of the event from the perspective of the intelligence agencies. He’s enabled by the government’s endless archives, from which seemingly random items arrive regularly at Branch’s home. 

When we meet Branch, he’s clearly despairing of making any sense at all of the events around Kennedy’s assassination. He’d started out with a framework for the project, but material just keeps coming. It starts with the Zapruder film’s “six point nine seconds of heat and light”, then pulls in endless details from the lives of those involved, never offering any clue about what’s important and what’s not. By the time he’s sent a plastic baggie of Oswald’s pubic hair, Branch feels like he’s been set up to fail. He throws up his hands and thinks to himself:

“Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur [in the Zapruder film]. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams. Elm Street. A woman wonders why she is sitting on the grass, bloodspray all around. Tenth Street. A witness leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car. A strangeness, Branch feels, that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.”

Nicholas Branch’s role is to mirror the confusion of anyone trying to make sense of the stories surrounding the Kennedy assassination. By extension, Painting is herself the proxy for Branch in Aberration. The point this linkage makes is that fiction in the midst of truth is unavoidable, that separating meaning from coincidence is impossible. That, even if we somehow stumble upon the exact sequence of events that led up to these fateful events, something will always stick out and make us question whether we’d really gotten it right. Another story is always possible.

Libra reflects this undecidability in the highly nonlinear fashion in which it’s told and in how it mixes fiction with fact. Delillo starts with Lee Harvey Oswald’s childhood, first in the Bronx, then in New Orleans. Again, though, let’s skip forward a bit to the lead-up to the infamous event for which he’s known. Oswald is a defector from the US to the Soviet Union, and he bartered Soviet citizenship for confidential knowledge about the U-2 spy plane that he’d picked up while in the US military. Not knowing what else to do with this seemingly random American who’s come pleading for citizenship, the Soviet government sends Oswald to Minsk, where he works at a radio factory and meets his future wife, Marina. The USSR loses its shine for Oswald pretty quickly though. He’s rejected from Moscow State University, where he wanted to study Marxist economics, and he decides to return to the US with Marina and their newborn.

Back in the US, the couple lives an unsettled life. Oswald shifts from job to job, Marina doesn’t speak English, and they end up staying in the homes of Russian emigres in Dallas. Oswald is restless and feels that he needs to act decisively to insert himself in the proletariat's struggle like he’d long dreamt of. He hatches a plot to assassinate a segregationist politician, Edwin A. Walker. Oswald then purchases a rifle under the name A.J. Hidell and fires into Walker’s home one night, missing but filling his mark with enough paranoia that his career effectively ends.

Oswald in his backyard with a rifle and communist newspaper, shortly before his assassination attempt on Edwin A. Walker

After this, Oswald follows a job lead to New Orleans, where he sets up an unofficial solo chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (chapter president: A.J. Hidell). He bases the chapter’s operations in the back of private investigator Guy Manning’s office, which also serves as the nexus for a community of anti-communist agitators. Manning watches Oswald for the anti-communists, who had taken notice of Oswald’s public protests and pamphleteering on behalf of Cuban causes. Oswald, meanwhile, has been connected to the FBI by one of Marina’s Russian emigre friends, and he watches the anti-communists as an informant for them.

At this point, two strands of narrative connect. Throughout the broadly factual retelling of Oswald’s life, Delillo tells another, more heavily fictionalized story about a group of men who’d been involved in the Bay of Pigs incident. Mostly, they’re disillusioned intelligence agents, arms dealers, operators of paramilitary training facilities, and Cuban counter-revolutionaries. They all share a particular resentment towards President Kennedy for his lack of commitment to the cause of overthrowing Fidel Castro. Two of these men, T-Jay Mackey and Win Everett (both fictional), develop a plot to raise the profile of the ongoing Cuban threat by staging an intentionally failed assassination attempt on President Kennedy in Miami. 

This sets them on the search for a “patsy” – a term meaning someone to take the blame, which I might’ve known before these books if I’d watched more old crime movies. Fortunately for the conspirators, Lee Harvey Oswald is working out Guy Manning’s office and one of the anti-communists knows about his assassination attempt in Dallas on Edwin A. Walker. The (real) pilot and arms runner David Ferrie is tasked with recruiting Oswald to the cause. He succeeds by pumping Oswald full of the idea that he’d be avenging the Cubans by taking a shot at Kennedy. The plot gets out of hand, though, when T-Jay Mackey decides to make the assassination attempt real. He takes advantage of Oswald’s move back to Dallas and his job at the book depository to pin the assassination on him, while also positioning a (fictional?) second gunman on the grassy knoll. Oswald badly mistimes his shots, and the assassination only succeeds because of the second gunman.

Here, Jack Ruby enters the picture. He’s portrayed as an absolute mess of a man who runs a strip club and stays on the good side of the law by bringing sandwiches to the police station, where he gets misty-eyed about freedom and the officers’ role in protecting it. In the middle of the general cloud of chaos that hangs over him, Ruby has fallen behind on his taxes and is negotiating loans with various shady figures as a way to pay back the government. After the Kennedy assassination, his ship comes in: (fictional) mob boss Carmine Latta, who runs drug operations out of Cuba that finance many of the counter-revolutionaries, offers to cover Ruby’s tax bill if only he’ll get rid of Oswald, who might expose the anti-communist underground. Ruby does it. The end.

4.

It makes sense that two men who committed decade-defining acts of domestic terror might be cut from the same cloth, but the similarities between Oswald and McVeigh go beyond even those expectations. 

Both men grow up in single parent households. Both men, too, harbor simmering resentments toward their parents. Oswald’s mother is barely able to provide for the two of them and blames this on Lee’s father, whom he never knew. (Lee’s father was named Edwin A. Ekdahl, which is a strange parallel to the politician he’d later try to assassinate, Edwin A. Walker.) She moves him around the country, each time exposing him to a new cycle of bullying and alienation. McVeigh, meanwhile, is born into a two-parent household that collapses when his mother leaves with one of Tim’s “uncles.” Even prior, McVeigh grew up with his mother masking her paranoia and mental illness with alcohol, and overall doing very little to hide her cheating on his father. When she leaves, McVeigh’s sister chooses to go with her mother, leaving McVeigh and his father alone in western New York. The contempt he develops for his mother is matched by a quiet estrangement that settles over the home he shares with his father.

Both Oswald and McVeigh turn to media to escape from their situations. Oswald, despite being dyslexic, reads Communist literature ranging from theory to history to pamphlets on contemporary problems. McVeigh’s tastes are for lurid, Rambo-type stuff, mixed in with his anomalous favorite, Star Trek. Through these media, the two build their conceptions of the world and their places within it – at one point, Painting describes McVeigh as “sponge-like” for his apparent ability to be influenced. Strangely, both Oswald and McVeigh have a penchant for passing out their preferred media to others, which gets them both in trouble. Oswald is arrested in New Orleans for disturbing the peace while passing out “Hands Off Cuba!” pamphlets. This incident also brings him onto the radar of anti-Communist private investigator Guy Manning, who later introduces him to the men who would involve him in the Kennedy assassination. McVeigh spends his adult life passing out copies of The Turner Diaries to anyone who would take one. This predictably creates tension with many of his fellow soldiers and aids the investigation against him after the bombing.

A scene from Red Dawn, one of McVeigh’s favorite movies

Neither man seems to know where women fit into the world they build for themselves from books and TV. Oswald marries the first woman he dates after only six weeks. She knows him under the assumed name “Alek,” which he uses during his time in Russia and which he took from his first contact in the Soviet intelligence community. (Russians complained that “Lee” sounds Chinese.) Even once they get back to the US, Oswald never seems to have time for his wife. He resists her pleas to teach her English, and they often live apart – Oswald in a boarding house near wherever he’s working at the time, Marina in the homes of Russian emigre friends. They fight all the time when they’re together, and Oswald is often violent. 

McVeigh is marginally more successful with women, but only perhaps because he avoids formal relationships with them. He’s known to have dated one woman just before he graduated high school. Most of his sexual history, though, is with married women. This starts with a short affair with an older married woman whom he works with at Burger King as a teenager. With this brief tryst, McVeigh begins a lifelong pattern of sleeping with married women, extending even to the wives of probable co-conspirators in the bombing plot. 

The blundering sexuality of both men leads Delillo and Painting to speculate about their subjects’ sexual orientations. In Libra, Delillo invents an episode where Oswald and David Ferrie, the man who induced Oswald to join the plot against Kennedy, have a strange and furtive one-time dalliance. (The real Ferrie was very likely gay.) Oswald, whose curiosity is apparently piqued, later visits a gay bar in New Orleans, but nothing more comes of it. And in Aberration, we read the testimony of an Arizona man who claims to have picked up McVeigh as a hitchhiker and started an 18-month-long sexual relationship with him. A cellmate of McVeigh’s on death row who later wrote a biography of him also claims that McVeigh expressed confusion about his sexual orientation. Painting hints, too, that the number of HIV tests in McVeigh’s medical records is unexpectedly high for a heterosexual man who’s only intermittently sexually active. Who knows.

Both men are shaped by their time in the military, although they approach their enlistments differently. Oswald is an indifferent soldier at best, while McVeigh works hard to master all aspects of his role. Oswald spends time in a military prison after accidentally shooting himself in the arm with an unlicensed weapon. McVeigh’s closest brush with trouble in the military is a series of relatively minor spats, especially with black subordinates whom he accuses of being disrespectful towards him. 

The real role of the military in their stories is in bringing both men overseas. The counterfactual is pretty powerful: neither man comes from a family of even middle class means, and it’s unlikely they would have been able to travel outside of the US without joining the military. And without their time abroad, it’s questionable whether either man would have ended up radicalized. Oswald’s time on a base in Japan exposes him to confidential knowledge about the U-2 spy plane, which he uses as a currency to bargain his way into the Soviet Union. It also enlarges his sense of global Marxism, as he meets Japanese and Russian Marxists who introduce him in turn to the underground network of agents struggling to usher in the communist golden age. McVeigh’s time in the Gulf War solidifies his hatred towards the government. If he had previously shifted blame for governmental dysfunction onto politicians, he starts to see that the rot penetrates even the military. Between witnessing deadly friendly fire incidents firsthand and contrasting official reports of Gulf War events with his own experience, he leaves his time overseas without any faith left in the US government. 

5.

The above is a straightforward version of how Oswald and McVeigh end up shaped by their time overseas. One gathers intel, one gathers resentment, and the rest of their stories follow from there. But remember that we’re dealing with the subjects of conspiracy theories. Libra details a false defector program recruiting soldiers around the time that Oswald defects. Trainees learn Russian and develop backstories that give them plausible reasons for defection to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Oswald tells his Russian intelligence agents about it:

“They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life. This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact his own way. They’d train him intensively. He’d be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.” 

We’re led to believe that Oswald probably isn’t part of this program, but it’s ultimately left undetermined. At one point, Oswald writes to the military in an attempt to get his discharge status changed to “honorable” and considers claiming that he was part of the false defector program. His mother too believes that he was a false defector. She explains Oswald’s gray hair when he returns from the Soviet Union as a side effect of shock treatments and brainwashing that she believes he went through after being found out. Delillo doesn’t make it clear how credible we should consider this and even has Oswald say later on, “There are gray areas in the [Office of Naval Intelligence]. I’m one of those areas.”

Whatever happens to him in Russia, Oswald is visited by the FBI, who hopes to recruit him as an informer. At their first meeting, the agents imply that US intelligence had arranged for Oswald and Marina to be allowed to leave the Soviet Union: “How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don’t let people out just by asking.” He’s approached by a different agent in New Orleans where he’s handing out pamphlets for his private chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This agent approaches Oswald with the idea that he could keep an eye on the anti-Castro right wing operating out of Guy Banister’s office. 

It’s implied that this is all the work of George de Mohrenschildt, one of Marina’s Russian emigre friends and Oswald’s handler for the FBI. Another of his handlers is David Ferrie who, once Oswald embeds himself in the Banister offices, introduces him to the assassination plot. Likewise, there are plausible stories in which McVeigh has handlers that bring him into the life of a covert agent – though whether his service is willing or unwilling depends on which story you believe.

One story goes like this. After McVeigh returns from the Gulf War, he tries out for the Special Forces. Military records state that he withdrew on the second day, citing a painful blister that developed on one of his feet. In one version of this story, though, he doesn’t really withdraw. Instead, he’s inducted into a secret program that has him rooting out neo-Nazi and far right elements both within the military and in the general public. His handler is a man he knows from the Gulf War whom he refers to only as “The Major.” This man instructs him to withdraw from the Special Forces tryout and to gradually adopt the persona of a disaffected soldier radicalized by his experiences overseas. He’s to learn the lingo and ideology of the radical right as a way to blend in with his future marks.

When McVeigh leaves western New York, he tells some people that it’s because he’s had second thoughts about the mission that The Major gave him. At first, he tries to ignore The Major’s occasional contacts with him, he says, but then “a mysterious man” arrives at his house and threatens criminal charges if he doesn’t stay on the mission. Rather than making contact with The Major again, McVeigh goes on the run. (Painting points out that this is roughly the plot of The A-Team.)  He writes much of this in a letter to his sister, saying that he’s “trying to keep [his] path cool, in case someone is looking to shut up someone who knows too much.” Wiretapped phone calls between McVeigh’s sister and his mother after the Oklahoma City bombing show that they’re both familiar with this version of events and that they believe them. 

One possibility is that McVeigh becomes a kind false defector at this point, using his story about recruitment into covert operations as a backstory for why he’s hiding in the survivalist underground. This version of events sees The Major instructing McVeigh to take part in bank robberies designed to finance anti-government operations and even to take part in the Murrah Federal Building bombing. This is apparently what McVeigh told his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, who signed a sworn statement in 2007 about the FBI’s coordinating role in the bombing. Some people speculate too that McVeigh’s nonchalance at his arrest and at his trial was because he believed that the agency that recruited him would come to his rescue. 

There’s a second version of how McVeigh gets involved in covert operations with the government and, with it, a different handler. In this story, McVeigh is implanted with some sort of behavior modification device, led to believe he’s been implanted with such a device, or hypnotized into becoming a kind of sleeper agent. (The latter is the basic plot of The Manchurian Candidate, Painting observes.) In reality, McVeigh makes multiple visits to Veterans Affairs clinics claiming that he’d been implanted with some kind of microchip during his service. His military service is also marked by literally dozens of non-routine visits to doctors and dentists for a broad range of vague complaints. The two stories of McVeigh’s involvement in covert intelligence operations plausibly intersect in that he seems to have claimed to some people that the implants were designed to track him rather than to control him. 

The handler in this version of McVeigh’s story is one Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Dr. Jolly West was a psychiatrist who took part in the CIA-funded MKUltra project that investigated brainwashing techniques from the late 1950s into the 1970s. Dr. West’s work particularly revolved around a purported Soviet technique for brainwashing that he called DDD: debility, dependency, and dread. These elements for systematically breaking and remaking individuals were of interest to US intelligence agencies, who saw their application not only for use in counter-intelligence but in the training of covert operatives. While you might expect such a researcher to keep a low profile, West seems to have popped up regularly in the media. Two especially notorious incidents stick out. First, he accidentally killed an elephant named Tusko with a massive overdose of LSD in the early ‘60s, while he was the head of the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine. And second, he became a subject of protest in the 1980s when he tried to set up the UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. This center was West’s pet project, and he used it to bring together the foremost experts in behavioral prediction and control, many of whom were his fellow MKUltra alums. As plans became public for testing implanted radios to track parolees and electrodes to control the behavior of potential criminals, pressure mounted on state politicians to pull funding and the Center failed to launch.

The US government, though, clearly trusts West to advise on cases of possible brainwashing, as he’s brought in to assess some of the 20th century’s most memorable criminals like Jack Ruby, Sirhan Sirhan, and Patty Hearst. Ruby’s conviction in Texas, for instance, is overturned when West determines that he had been in a fugue-like state of mental illness when he shot Oswald. West is also retained as an expert by McVeigh’s legal team. During one call, he makes explicit connections between Ruby and McVeigh. While stressing the similarities between the two, West says about Ruby that, “There is no doubt about what he did, but the question [remains as to] why and the circumstances under which he became mentally deranged, which he wasn’t before. He was not a normal person before but he wasn’t psychotic either, but he did become psychotic afterwards.”

It’s unclear whether Dr. West and McVeigh ever interacted one-on-one, but there are enticing coincidences. For instance, the day after McVeigh is transferred to a military prison in Oklahoma City, Dr. West arrives, purportedly to coordinate the psychiatric response to the bombing victims’ trauma. As you can imagine, the possibility that a mind control expert met a behavior-controlled covert agent has been red meat to conspiracy theorists, and they’ve been eager to speculate that West might have removed McVeigh’s behavior control implant at that time. One of the stranger pieces of evidence that the conspiracy theorists point to is that on the night of the bombing, while the government was still looking for two suspects, Dr. Jolly West went on Larry King Live and denounced the “lone nut” responsible for the bombing. Painting herself can’t resist seeing the potential for conspiracy with the late Dr. West, whom she refers to as “villainous”, “spectral”, “ubiquitous”, and an “ace practitioner in all things creepy.” 

Whatever their differences, it’s easy to see both Oswald and McVeigh as patsies. In Libra, Oswald takes the first shot at Kennedy but doesn’t make the fatal one. Soon after his arrest, Oswald declares as much to reporters: “I’m just a patsy.” Oswald’s death at the hands of Ruby means that he can’t tell anyone about his multiple allegiances and the people he’s been in contact with. It becomes easy to pin the blame on Oswald and Oswald alone. McVeigh goes to his execution claiming sole responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing, which the government seems very happy to accept. They called off the search for the second suspect soon after McVeigh’s arrest and have failed to this day to release evidence that might implicate additional conspirators, such as security camera footage from the morning of the bombing. 

6.

The grand unifying theory of personality for Oswald and McVeigh doesn’t lie in any specific facet of their life stories, so much as it does in their driving desires to lose themselves in the stream of a larger force like an ideology or historical movement. Their personal lives are mysterious, but their public acts mark major turning points in America. The Toronto Star put it this way: both Oswald and McVeigh are “blank slate[s] on which the nightmare side of American life can be projected.” 

Both men are prolific letter-writers and make their aims explicit in epistolary fashion. Oswald writes to his brother, “Happiness is not based on oneself, it does not consist of a small home, of taking and getting. Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general.” Amidst McVeigh’s grandiose statements about his place in history, you find things like, “When I go people will know I’ve been here.” It might be a sign of this willingness to give themselves over larger forces that we see similar acts of self-erasure like the use of alternate names. Oswald regularly uses names like O.H. Lee, A.J. Hidell, and D.F. Drictal. McVeigh’s list of alternate names is even longer: Daryl Bridges, Steve Murphy, Robert Kling, Mike Havens, Shawn Rivers, Tim Tuttle… the list goes on and on. 

As enticing as it is to interpret their actions as the unconditioned expression of self-sacrifice to a greater cause, we have to consider that what they’re doing is simply fitting their actions into a narrative form that had been prepared for them by the media they consumed. That is, the Kennedy assassination and the Oklahoma City bombing aren’t about ideology – about a protest of how America treats Cubans or weird weapon-hoarding cults – but about shaving away excesses of personality until each man becomes the perfect embodiment of a specific type of narrative.

There’s a concept called “agency reversal” in anthropology that I think applies to how Oswald and McVeigh shape their actions to a narrative form. Agency reversal is the idea that humans are not always the ones acting upon an environment, but are sometimes the medium upon which other forces act. In religious and military rituals, for example, the group acts upon the individual through dance, music, or highly scripted and coordinated movements, increasing group solidarity in the process. We see it in individual creative endeavors too, where we tend to call it “flow.” 

For whatever reason, humans seek out agency reversal. It’s a healthy enough impulse if you’re talking about losing yourself in ping pong or ceramics for a couple hours a week, but it’s bound to end in tragedy when you’re talking about the narrative forms that Oswald and McVeigh seem obsessed with, which make them feel as if history is acting through them. These forms are, after all, created by the media and the government, and they have their own commercial and ideological interests. In Libra, this narrative form can be seen in both the grand histories of proletarian struggle that Oswald reads and in the grand dream of liberation that fuels the anti-communists. Both of these stories are the same: justice wins over evil through individual sacrifice to a greater cause, although the names are changed depending on who tells it. Think too of spy stories, where simplicity is revealed to underlie a complex web of misdirection and apparent coincidence. All these stories share a tidy ending: good wins over evil, and the master spy uncovers the plot. 

But how can we achieve that sort of narrative closure in real life? The easiest way is to set up events such that everything that follows becomes inevitable – so that the narrative acts on the human, instead of vice versa. David Ferrie muses at one point that, “There is a tendency of plots to move towards death.” And indeed, the conspirators are able to recruit Oswald as the patsy thanks to his desire to move the plot of his life towards some defining act: “[T-Jay Mackey] knew Oswald wanted to be the lone gunman. This is how it is with solitaries, with men who plan eternally toward some total moment. Easy enough to make him believe it.”

The narratives we see in Aberration are similar in scale, but tend to be about a rugged individual surviving the threat of a malign and conspiratorial government. Many of the movies and books McVeigh fixates on like Red Dawn, WarGames, and The Turner Diaries depict individuals taking down the government through a radical heroic act. It’s easy to see the narrative forms that McVeigh is drawn to and how he also “plan[s] eternally toward some total moment.” 

Something strange happens when the commercial media encounters the passing of stories like Oswald’s and McVeigh’s into real life. They develop a series of themes that actually strengthen the form of the story that’s playing out. These include a fixation on lone nuts – a type of story that can reduce anxieties about the number of people who contemplate domestic terrorism. The story of the lone nut is in turn reinforced by visual tropes like the “perp walk.” Oswald’s walk past reporters on his way out of the Dallas police station turned fatal, but authorities still chose to parade McVeigh in front of the Perry, Oklahoma courthouse where he was first held after his arrest. One of McVeigh’s attorneys later says that it would have been much safer to discreetly usher him into a van in the middle of the night, and that the court’s willingness to act otherwise shows the importance of producing a scripted event for the media. McVeigh’s death too becomes a media event, even before it actually happened. On McVeigh’s originally scheduled execution date, Weekly World News produces a cover photo claiming to show his corpse at the prison morgue. What they can’t have known is that McVeigh’s execution is delayed after a last-minute release of documents from the FBI. McVeigh himself sees the cover photo and sends it to a few friends from prison.

Cover of "Weekly World News" after McVeigh's originally scheduled execution date. McVeigh saw this after a delay in his execution and sent copies to friends.

The media’s visual tropes tend to be played over and over so that they lose a sense of connection to the event that they depict. For instance, the Zapruder film takes on a reality that seems to eclipse the actual Kennedy assassination. In 1975, the art collective Ant Farm reenacts the footage captured in the Zapruder film over and over again on the streets of Dallas in a piece they call “The Eternal Frame”. Note that they’re not reenacting the Kennedy assassination: there’s nobody poised in the sixth floor of the book depository, no fake blood. Instead, they’re reenacting the Zapruder film.

Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the “hyperreal” is relevant here. It refers to states in which simulation and reality become indistinguishable from one another. He famously wrote about this idea in the context of Disney World, with all of its country-specific areas. The reference for the Disney World version of France isn’t France itself, but a cartoon version of France that’s more recognizable to visitors in its Frenchness than the actual country would be. There’s no reality that’s being simulated in the France of Disney World. Instead, it’s simulations all the way down. 

We see the hyperreal everywhere in the cases of Oswald and McVeigh, where a media image shapes reality that is then fed back into the media. One example is the parallel perp walks. Another example is the phenomenon of placing walls of stuffed animals at the sites of tragedies: this started after the Oklahoma City bombing, when Americans from around the country sent teddy bears to the federal building. This could have passed without notice, but the media broadcast images of the plush memorials. This practice has spread around the world as the media has simultaneously covered and shaped what public mourning looks like. With each round of mourning for each new tragic event, the practice seems more and more natural. (Many of these tragic events are school shootings, and the media’s treatment of these events has created a script for them that the perpetrators act out with great self-awareness.)

Parallel perp walks in Dallas and Perry, Oklahoma

Of course, Oswald and McVeigh themselves were highly influenced by hyperreal depictions of the characters they wanted to imitate. Oswald tried to become a heroic member of the working class who shifts the capitalist world on its axis. But there is no specific individual that Oswald is imitating: as in Soviet Realist art, he seems to be working off the reference of an anonymous and imaginary proletariat. The same goes for McVeigh, of course. The rugged individual survivalists that he imitated weren’t people he knew or even real people whom he was able to learn about through the media: these were characters in fictional works. If it weren’t for Red Dawn and The A-Team, who would Timothy McVeigh have been? And what would the media landscape have been like if the government’s gaslighting of UFO fans in the 1950s hadn’t planted the seeds of the paranoid culture that rose up towards the end of the Cold War?

7.

One of the media’s most persistent tropes is that all stories can be brought to an end, that as Don Delillo writes, “there [is] something else poised at the edge of revelation, some hard clear provable reality.” For this reason, the media tends to prune away possible narratives that would make equal sense, while going all in on a single narrative. In Aberration, Wendy S. Painting catalogs some of the possible narratives of McVeigh that are prematurely closed off, either by government investigators or the media. Both of these parties predictably settle on what Painting calls the “Lone Wolf” story, where McVeigh planned and conducted the bombing with minimal help acquiring supplies from Nichols and Fortier. 

The Lone Wolf narrative is unique in this narrative taxonomy in that it allows closure, while the other possibilities are characterized by what they leave unknown. One of these others is the “Wolf Pack” narrative. Here, a group of conspirators is behind McVeigh’s actions. This would explain the men he traveled with in the months before the bombing and the second accomplice initially sought by the government. One of the reasons why this narrative would be shut down, Painting suggests, is that it would reveal the full scale of government surveillance of the survivalist and white supremacist movements in the early and mid 1990s. There are multiple indications that informants embedded within far right groups knew about the Oklahoma City bombing weeks in advance of the event. Just one day prior to the bombing, the Murrah Federal Building is evacuated due to a bomb threat. Half an hour before McVeigh detonates the bomb that rips the building in half, a still-unknown man calls the US Department of Justice and claims that the Murrah Federal Building had just been bombed. Revealing that the conspiracy is much bigger than McVeigh alone would show the government’s incompetence at handling the known threat of the bombing while also endangering the intelligence community’s many informants.

Painting mentions two other possible narratives, which she calls the “Guilty Agent” narrative and the “Experimental Wolf” narrative. In the Guilty Agent narrative, McVeigh is a covert operative involved in a plot that gets out of hand. As the intelligence community pivoted from the Cold War, Painting explains, they needed a new target for their massive spying apparatus. To justify their ongoing existence, they launch an initiative to infiltrate far-right groups within the US in an operation called PATCON (from “Patriot Conspiracy”). This involves recruiting a network of informants, many of whom are brought into the program with the offer to drop standing criminal charges. This incentivizes the informants to prove themselves useful to their handlers, eventually leading to a pattern in which the informants incite some violent act and then turn in their co-conspirators. Some former informants claim that they would provide not only the ideas but also the weapons involved in planned attacks against the government. Lack of coordination between agencies means that informants for one agency are not always known to other agencies’ informants, and so many of them end up primarily spying on each other. In this environment, it’s easy to imagine how a plot could go awry. At one point, McVeigh tells an attorney that this is precisely what happened: that he was embedded on behalf of the government in a group that was planning an attack and that the explosives provided were “supposed to blow out a few windows of the Murrah” rather than killing 168 people.

The Experimental Wolf story operates through the mechanism of implanted microchips, hypnosis, and/or other brainwashing techniques outlined above. But it’s worth pausing on this story for a moment to highlight its purported motive – that is, why a secretive part of the US government would program McVeigh to bomb the Murrah Federal Building. Painting uses the story of the UFO community I outlined at the beginning of this review to explain why: if McVeigh was brainwashed or otherwise under the influence of behavioral control when he committed the bombings, it would be to discredit the right-wing survivalist movements that had surged in popularity after Ruby Ridge and even more so after the standoff in Waco. And this is pretty much what happened: the militia movement died down a lot in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, as it came under more and more scrutiny.

8.

One piece of evidence for a second gunman in the Kennedy assassination is a recording from a motorcycle cop’s dictation device that was accidentally left on for several minutes surrounding the shooting. In that recording, there are noises that acoustics experts have claimed indicate four gunshots – three from Oswald, and one from a second gunman. This finding has been contested ever since the 1970s, and the most recent analyses seem to find that the sounds are more likely to be mechanical noises from the policeman’s motorcycle than gunshots.

Still, this is the only recorded audio from the Kennedy assassination. Don Delillo wrote of the possibility of further analyses of this recording:

“[After the analysis], maybe, there will be a number to attach to the flurry of gunshots. Three or four – or will it be five? This latest number was advanced as a result of an acoustical study in 2001. Can any number be definitive? [W]here, finally, is the truth in this matter? Can some scattered noises in a crowded outdoor setting in 1963 be recovered from an old damaged dictaphone belt, its grooves 75 microns wide, five microns deep? Recovered, copied, deciphered. We want to believe they can. [W]e want to believe we are dealing with science, not metaphysics.”

If the possibility of truth is lost forever, why do we bother trying to find it? Why are people still fascinated by these stories if they simply prove not to be, as Delillo writes, “open to the thrust of reasoned analysis and haunted speculation”? The reasonable thing to do is simply admit defeat and learn practical lessons where you can (for instance, don’t let presidents ride through downtown areas in convertibles). 

I think that the reason these stories still circulate, along with others that are equally susceptible to conspiracy theorizing, is that they help people form communities. Being in the know is always a marker of community membership. Think of how groups adopt vocabularies that signal insider knowledge – rationalists certainly have their own set of linguistic community markers, like “priors” or “Moloch.” In Libra, we see this urge in how members of the intelligence community always look for deeper levels of insider knowledge as proof of their privileged position. One agent reflects on the name of a training facility at the center of many MKUltra experiments, “It was possible to say that the closest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the crypt lists, who devised the keys and digraphs and knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the Farm, and the Farm was ISOLATION, and ISOLATION probably had a deeper name somewhere, in a locked safe or some computer buried in the ground.”

The draw of insider knowledge isn’t just for intelligence agents. Us ordinary people on the outside have to create our own shibboleths since we don’t have access to the names of secret facilities or operations. Conspiracy theories provide the perfect occasion to do this, since so little about them can actually be resolved. David Ferrie says in Libra, “History is all the things they don’t tell us.” And there’s the spectral presence throughout the book of a paranoid DJ called the Weird Beard whom we hear speaking through car radios, saying things like:

“I know what you think. You think I’m making it up. I’m not making it up. If it gets from me to you, it’s true. We are for real, kids. And the question I want to leave you with tonight. Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them.”

It’s not even clear what the “it” is that the listeners supposedly think he’s making up. But that’s kind of the point – when it comes to conspiracy theories, we’re not believing to get at the truth, we’re believing to belong. 

Belief in conspiracy theories and other types of metaphysical oddness increased substantially in the 1990s and don’t show any sign of going away. Painting points out that, a year after the Kennedy assassination, 87% of the American public believed the government’s official story that Oswald had acted alone. By 1995, the ratios had flipped, and 90% believe that he was part of a wider conspiracy. Many of these believers implicate the government itself in the conspiracy. Maybe this air of conspiracy is why the government bars fans of The X-Files from the jury in McVeigh’s trial: the risk is just too high that they’d see him as a member of their own epistemic community.

Why do people adopt this paranoid style of thought at that particular time? There are two factors that I think should be considered as we answer that question. First, the early ‘90s mark the end of the Cold War. Americans can no longer identify a great adversary to unite against, but still feel besieged. The attitudes that sustain us during the Cold War turn inward, so that people imagine themselves united against their own government, for lack of a better enemy. Second, the internet becomes widely available in American homes and businesses at this point. With it, a whole world of weird beliefs is suddenly free for the taking. 

Both Libra and Aberration drip with anxiety about what technology does to individuals and communities. In the former, an intelligence agent says to his wife, “I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.” There’s substantial evidence that McVeigh was incredibly paranoid about having been implanted with some kind of microchip. It’s not hard to see why he’d resent technology: it’s very unlikely he’d be able to get away with his false names today, nor would he have been able to purchase the equipment for the bomb. 

The internet means the collection, coordination, and dissemination of unprecedented amounts of data about each one of us. This has made us all less likely to trust each other. As Richard Posner writes, “Trust, rather than being something valued for itself and therefore missed where full information makes it unnecessary, is, I should think, merely an imperfect substitute for information.” I think he’s only half right about this. The difficulties of trusting each other in an age when it’s so easy to research people online has meant that it’s much harder to form communities. People do miss this. And, as they grope for something to build a community around, people have resorted to conspiracy theories. But it’s never nakedly stated that you have to believe a certain thing in order to belong. Instead, we usually see it in the now-infamous words, “Do your own research.”