Oklahoma, April 08: A once-classified FBI memo has revealed that a senior ABC News reporter worked essentially as a mole for the FBI during the 1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City.
The Oklahoma City bombing was aimed at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 which claimed 168 lives.
The secret memo, published in a report by the Center for Public Integrity, showed that the journalist, who worked for ABC News at the time, contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the evening of the bombing.
The reporter’s name is not disclosed in the FBI memo, but the person is described as “a senior official employed by ABC News for over 15 years.”
The memo said that the ABC journalist had “multiple contacts” with the FBI between 1995 and 1996, and had been assigned an informant number.
Christopher Isham — now the Washington bureau chief for another major US network CBS News — had been working at ABC News for 17 years at the time of the bombing, matching the description in the memo.
Isham, however, rejected claims that he was the journalist mentioned in the memo.
ABC also claimed that they do not know who the journalist was and that he no longer worked for the major broadcast network.
Groups representing journalists say the alleged FBI use of reporters to collect information includes court cases where the FBI has tried to obtain confidential sources. In some cases, reporters have gone to jail for refusing to reveal such sources.
——–Agencies