'Missing' FBI files could be dynamite

• Could critical evidence that disappeared during the OKC investigation be among files the FBI claims it "found" recently?

Two pieces of vital information abut the Oklahoma City bombing that were reported exclusively by The SPOTLIGHT may be among documents recently retrieved from FBI files. These reportedly concern the widely-held belief that the terrorist act was a well-planned conspiracy.

The SPOTLIGHT reported April 9 that when Timothy McVeigh was arrested by state police while leaving Oklahoma city after the blast, among personal items taken from him was a roll of exposed film.

Retired FBI Senior Agent in Charge Ted L. Gunderson told The SPOTLIGHT that the film had been inventoried at the time of McVeigh's booking by Oklahoma state police officials.

The information was revealed to Gunderson in an extended interview with an investigator for McVeigh's defense team, headed by Attorney Steven Jones.

The investigator said that when the FBI took custody of McVeigh from the Oklahoma state police and arrested him for the bombing, they took the roll of film.

That film, according to the investigator, was never seen again.

Are the photographs that were on it, Gunderson now wonders, among the documents now handed over to attorneys for McVeigh and his supposed accomplice in the crime, Terry Nichols? Do they contain shots of others, like a "John Doe No. 2"? Is that why the photos were withheld?

Jones has been featured in numerous recent television news interviews insisting, as he had in the 1996 trial of McVeigh, That there was an intricate conspiracy behind the terrorist bombing.

The photographs from that roll of missing film could, Gunderson said, blow the lid off the Oklahoma City bombing once and for all.

Also, Gunderson wonders if the trove of documents includes reports or information submitted to the Justice Department by the late Dr. Louis "Jolly" West, a long-time CIA asset in the field of mind control.

West has been linked to the MK-Ultra mind-control project, which was supposed to have been shut down by the CIA decades ago, but many expect is still active.

Soon after the arrest of McVeigh, Gunderson learned from a colleague that West, who gained public notoriety by killing an elephant with an overdose of the mind altering drug LSD, had visited McVeigh while in custody (SPOTLIGHT April 16).

Gunderson, who had known West for years and had discussed with him on several occasions satanic and religious cults, telephoned the "Dr. Strangelove" of the CIA, but he was not in his office.

Instead, Gunderson spoke briefly with an aide to West and learned that in fact the doctor had visited McVeigh and would be back to see him.

McVeigh had told his friends, the Nichols brothers -- Terry and James -- that he had "a chip" implanted in one of his buttocks.

McVeigh has been granted a request that his body not be ausies. That ausy would have been performed by Oklahoma, not federal pathologists. If a chip exists they could have found it.

McVeigh is not the only high-profile federal prisoner to have reportedly been examined by West.

Others include Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, who supposedly assassinated President Kennedy, and Sirhan Sirhan, who supposedly killed President Kennedy's brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.