Working Note 4

Traces

I didn’t expect a reply, but one came after a few weeks. I’d emailed the U.S. Army—why not?—to ask about the bombs they build at the ammunition plant. How McAlester enters the picture.

“Sir,” read the response. “For operational security reasons we are unable to answer these questions.”

O.K.

But they also, I later learned, share photos online. Photos that offer clues. I’m revisiting the issue—Oklahoma’s links to U.S. bombings, to Washington’s aggression overseas—as I seem to every few months. Especially now.

As strikes hit Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, Yazd—what a fucked-up way to learn Iranian geography—the Pentagon has posted photos of its preparations: bombs being loaded onto aircraft: MK-82s and BLU-109s.

But those aren’t the photos I meant.

I mean the one that looks like a still from a Kubrick film: the tunnel of infrared lamps, the worker guiding the bomb body like an offering, washed in the sacred glow of the lamps. The photo is from 2019. An explosives handler at the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (MCAAP), preparing an MK-82.

Another photo, from 2024: MK-82s laid out for stenciling at MCAAP. They’re then “capped off and sent to storage.” Maybe, soon, to be loaded onto aircraft, the moment featured in a future Pentagon press release….

You can find similar shots of BLU-109s. Of how they’re put together at McAlester. Of a new line built to speed their assembly. Of the acoustic mixer used to blend the explosives that fill them.

I know—this is all pretty arcane. But it’s only part of the story.

* * *

On Monday, a friend sent a recent Forbes article: “The American LNG Billionaires Set to Cash In on War With Iran.” It’s about Venture Global, the firm behind two liquefied natural gas megaprojects. Both are in Louisiana: Calcasieu Pass LNG and Plaquemines LNG.

I want to focus on the latter, because there’s a George Kaiser connection there. One of his companies—Excelerate Energy—signed a deal with the Plaquemines project three years ago. The agreement: Excelerate will buy 700,000 tonnes of LNG from Plaquemines. Every year. For twenty years.

I assume the company delivers the LNG to its global network of terminals. Some offshore, others docked at ports. Places like Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Chattogram, Dhaka, and Karachi. Another way to learn the map.

Kaiser controls Excelerate, but you wouldn’t know it from the firm’s website. Through a holding company, he holds 72.6 percent of the voting power. His charity—the George Kaiser Family Foundation—also owns a small stake. Nearly 7 percent.

Strange world. A falling U.S. missile…later, maybe, a small windfall for the Tulsa Community Foundation.

Try finding that mentioned anywhere.

It’s sacrilege, really.

Kaiser is the moral billionaire. A visionary. Tulsa’s brilliant benefactor.

Or he’s a sinister giver.

Most attention lands on the money he donates. The rest of it—how he got his billions—disappears. Lost in the saint-making, the takedowns.

Around the time I emailed the Army, I wrote to an expert on billionaire philanthropy. I wanted to share the Kaiser Foundation’s Form 990s. Its annual tax returns. The documents show the foundation’s giving, its investments, its reach.

She wrote back in bewilderment—the range of energy investments. The global scope of operations. She’d never seen so many related, overlapping, intersecting entities in a nonprofit filing.

It reminded her, she said, of the Koch brothers.