OKC Bombing Book Signing Is a Month Late, and Three Decades Short On The Truth

FBI Hatchet-Man and Documented Liar Jon Hersley Promotes His Now 21-Year-Old Book

May 18, 2025

On Wednesday, May 21, 2025, the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum will host a book signing and discussion event in its “Better Conversations” series. May’s subject? The Oklahoma City Bombing, with (former) FBI Special Agents Jon Hersley and Larry Tongate.

The OKC Museum’s Facebook Post Advertising the Event

The timing is curious, as the 30^th anniversary of the bombing came and went in April—would not that have been a better time to host such an event? Hmmm.

Regardless, the upcoming event is set almost one month after the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and about one month after the publication of bombing victim Kathy Sanders' book, Shadows of Conspiracy, and almost one month before the publication of an explosive new book by investigative journalist and former America’s Most Wanted News Director, Margaret Roberts, which reveals never-before-heard details from Terry Nichols. That book is called Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the OKC Bombing.

In the author’s opinion, these two books are why former agents Hersley and Tongate are promoting a now-ancient book nobody can find in any bookstore.

Hersley’s book seems designed exclusively and aggressively to promote the "McVeigh and Nichols and that's it" narrative. However, that narrative contradicts the facts presented in the investigation's 302 reports and Inserts (many of which I published online at the Libertarian Institute and continue to publish exclusives based on those documents to this day).

Hersley’s own FBI colleagues' words differ significantly from his and challenge the narrative presented in his book, Simple Truths (which can only exist if one excludes most of the FBI’s own investigative records — that have never been made public, save for having been filed in various court cases that most Americans haven’t seen.)

For example, the FBI’s OKBOMB On-Scene Commander, Danny Coulson, told the BBC in 2007 that:

“we know there were 24 people that were interviewed by the FBI that said they saw Mr. McVeigh on April 19th with someone else—and they had no reason to, to make it up, they didn’t have a dog in that fight, they didn’t have any reason just to make something up. They told the agents exactly what they saw, and the agents wrote it down. If only one person had seen it or two or three, but twenty four, twenty four people say ‘Yes I saw him with somebody else’? That’s pretty powerful.”^[1]

Coulson made these comments in the BBC documentary in which Simple Truths authors Jon Hersley and Larry Tongate were also featured. Their rebuttal to Coulson’s remarks? It lacked any support from the investigation’s documents, the facts uncovered, so they could only offer a casual and weak response: “I didn’t know Danny had said that.” Really?

Since the publication of Simple Truths, numerous other books have been published, most of which provide more detail on the bombing investigation and raise serious questions that remain unanswered today. One of these books—2012’s Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles—would have been a more suitable choice for those interested in uncovering the truth. Roger Charles tragically passed away in February of 2022, but co-author Andrew Gumbel is still alive and has written extensively about the conclusions found in his book.

Jon Hersley - IMDb — Jon Hersley, OKC Field Office Special Agent who was described by the OKBOMB chief inspector as “trying to stop viable investigations” and that “we had to watch over Jon.”

The Gumbel/Charles book is timely to mention in relation to Hersley—the chief co-writer of Simple Truths—because it reveals that Hersley has a checkered history with the truth, which is documented in several instances within the book. In that book, the head of the FBI’s bombing investigation (OKBOMB), Inspector Danny Defenbaugh, is quoted discussing Hersley, and he made it quite clear what kind of guy he was, saying:

“We had to watch over Jon” and “He’d go around trying to stop viable investigations, especially if they involved other people in the conspiracy. Every time we caught him, I had to bring him in the woodshed to paddle him. Then he’d go right back at it.”^[2]

In addition to Hersley’s evident penchant for stopping investigations, we also have his shameless lying to bombing victims. During the Terry Nichols federal trial, bombing victim Kathy Sanders was upset to learn that the FBI had not “ran” or identified any of the fingerprints—1,034 of them—it had collected in the OKBOMB case.

“Kathy,” she remembered Hersley telling her, “don’t worry about that. We’re not going to give Michael Tigar any more ammunition to point the finger at somebody else. When this is all over, we’re going to run those prints.”^[3]

Of course, that wasn’t true. The FBI does not identify fingerprints after the trials that correspond to its investigations; that would happen before or during the investigation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it never happened. Hersley later told Kathy Sanders that she had “misheard” him, but she replied that he absolutely said that to her, and that “I’d be happy to take a polygraph test.”

Before this, Hersley served as the chief witness for the government under Merrick Garland’s oversight during the April 27, 1995, preliminary hearing on the McVeigh case. Jon Hersley testified at that preliminary hearing, where he described photographs prepared from a videotape taken at approximately 9:00 AM on the morning of April 19, 1995, by one of the Regency Tower exterior surveillance cameras. Hersley provided extensive testimony about the videotapes the FBI had taken into possession, stating under oath that agent Walt Lamar was the key agent responsible for delivering extracted images from those tapes to him for review.^[4]

During the hearing, Hersley clearly and unequivocally testified about the existence of a videotape taken by a camera at the Regency Tower Apartments. His testimony was detailed enough that it was easily discernible that, during the investigation, Jon Hersley had come into possession of enlarged still images taken from the videotape.

Hersley testified at length about these image frames, which were determined to have originated from a camera on the Regency Towers apartments, scanning eastward down Fifth Street in Oklahoma City toward the Murrah Building and across the nearby parking lot. This footage had a perfect unobstructed view of where the Ryder truck parked as it delivered the bomb.

Yet, on July 31, 2014, Mr. Hersley testified in Jesse Trentadue's long-running FOIA lawsuit regarding the FBI’s never-before-seen surveillance tapes of the bombing. During his testimony, he made an astonishing and improbable declaration: he claimed he had merely been “mistaken” in his numerous detailed responses about the videotapes during the preliminary hearing and that no such tapes existed.^[5]

Suddenly, Hersley’s memory seemed to improve. Moreover, Hersley’s later claims do not align with the evidence in the case; multiple reports of the FBI taking videotapes into custody. Some FBI records even show that a Los Angeles-based FBI agent tried to sell the footage to Dateline NBC for $1 million dollars, which the Bureau discovered because it had informants inside the network.^[6] Meanwhile, a Secret Service document states that, based on videotape surveillance, the bomb exploded “3 minutes and 6 seconds after the suspects exited the truck;”^[7] obviously many others were involved. Hersley’s sudden shift in memory—claiming his extensive testimony about the tapes (which included the name of the agent tasked with reviewing them) was all wrong and they never did exist—is, quite simply, improbable. One can easily infer, based on the available evidence, that, like he was with Kathy Sanders, he’s lying again.

Given what we know about Jon’s lies to Kathy Sanders, his established pattern of halting viable investigations, and his shifting testimony on the videotapes, one must question whether a book by Jon Hersley is worth reading or discussing (much less a month ago) tomorrow, or next week.

Meanwhile, you can find the superior 2012 Gumbel/Charles book Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed—and Why It Still Matters, anywhere books are sold. Bombing victim Kathy Sanders has a book that was just released last month—in time for the 30^th anniversary of the bombing—called Shadows of Conspiracy, which is based on her own 30-year journey for the truth.

Meanwhile, on July 22^nd of this year, former America’s Most Wanted News Director Margaret Roberts’s book, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, is coming out. If the reader wants the truth, they’re better off going with these three books rather than trying to track down a copy of the Hersley/Tongate book. I will end with a quote from Oscar Wilde: