Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1

Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring. He retired a master bomb technician and a master instructor who trained NATO and allied special forces on every continent but Antarctica. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma, and he had held the certification for fifty-three weeks.

That morning he was seven miles from downtown, sitting in an unmarked Oldsmobile with another operator, waiting to arrest a fugitive on a white collar case that had taken him years to indict. He felt the detonation before he understood it — 3.2 on the Richter scale, felt sixty miles away in Stillwater. He drove toward the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a small kit bag in the trunk, not yet knowing whether he was looking at a plane crash, a gas main, or a bomb.

The response was never abstract for him. His wife was a federal officer who worked in the building; she walked out at nine o'clock, two minutes before the blast, and he would not learn she was alive for ninety minutes. The payroll clerks he handed his check to every other Thursday, women his own age, were all killed. Craig Floyd reads the names of the eight federal agents who died, each of them since added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

Barry also explains the mechanics without ceremony: how he determined this was a vehicle-borne device rather than an accident, what ANFO is and why it needed a booster, and how an explosive theft report filed months earlier at a Kansas quarry would eventually tie Terry Nichols to the bomb through a cordless drill and a drilled-out padlock.

Part 1 ends where the case breaks open — a 300-pound truck axle in the street, and a reserve deputy who spits on his finger, wipes away the grease, and reveals a confidential vehicle identification number. Part 2 follows that number to Junction City, Kansas, through fifteen thousand leads and nearly nine hundred investigators, to a traffic stop ninety miles north of town for a missing license plate.

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