FBI Forewarned About Oklahoma City Bombing?

The Daily Mail suggests that the FBI had been tipped off about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The article begins: 

    The FBI received a warning about the Oklahoma City bombing seven months before the 1995 attack took place, but failed to act on the tip-off, a new book reveals.

    Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were told by an informant that an attack was coming and that the Oklahoma City federal building was among the targets.

    The source, Carol Howe, had impeccable credentials and had infiltrated a white supremacist compound which had ties to Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the deadly truck bombing, which killed 168 people and injured around 700.

    But according to Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing, by journalist Margaret Roberts, the federal government ignored the intel, allowing McVeigh to carry out his evil plot.

    She says the FBI hushed up Howe's story after the bombing because it contradicted their own narrative that McVeigh was a 'lone wolf'.

    In fact he had significant links to white supremacist groups who could have been to blame, writes Roberts, a former news director of the true crime TV series America's Most Wanted.

The article goes on to describe how McVeigh and a small clique of white supremacists had picked three federal buildings as possible targets including the Oklahoma City's Murrah Building, and had carried out multiple planning trips. A final warning was given to the FBI five days before the bombing, according to the article. 

    It's hard to gauge assertions like these. Questions will always arise over the quality and specificity of the intelligence. And, of course, hindsight is 20/20, as the saying goes. On the other hand, I could see the FBI dropping the ball and then covering up their fumbles. And there are the reports that the ATF agents were strangely absent from the Murrah Building on the day of the bombing.