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| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 3) |
| 2004-02-25 |
| I wrote this. Part 1. Part 2. Criminologist Mark Hamm has written two books about the Oklahoma City bombing – Apocalypse in Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged (1997) and In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground (2002). In Bad Company (page 173) he recounts that in 2001 he wrote a letter to Timothy McVeigh in prison, asking him who really had robbed gun dealer Roger Moore on November 5, 1994, a crime that had been blamed entirely on Terry Nichols. Hamm received a responsive letter not from McVeigh, but from a fellow prisoner on death row, David Paul Hammer, who named the following culprits: "Richard Lee Guthrie, Peter Langan, Scott Stedeford, Mark Thomas, Michael Brescia, Shawn Kenney, Elohim City, OK, compound, the Aryan Republican Army." This book mainly describes these culprits and their possible relationships to McVeigh and Nichols. In particular, Hamm suggests that Nichols directly arranged for those culprits to rob and also murder Moore. There are several indications that Moore was supposed to be murdered during the robbery. McVeigh visited his sister Jennifer on November 7 and, according to her later statements, "was extremely angry and upset [because] an individual ... was to murder another unidentified individual; however, this murder had not been committed." Later that same day, McVeigh called Michael Fortier and told him that the robbery had not been carried out as planned. McVeigh’s words to Fortier were: "The contract has not been fulfilled" (Bad Company, page 172). The robbery on November 5 occurred a few weeks after McVeigh and Nichols decided to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. McVeigh later told Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, authors of American Terrorist, that the decision was catalyzed by a law restricting assault weapons that was passed by Congress on September 13. In mid-September McVeigh wrote Michael Fortier a letter informing him that McVeigh and Nichols were developing a specific plan to attack the government and asking Fortier whether he would participate. On September 30, McVeigh and Nichols purchased a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. On October 1 they stole a large quantity of explosive materials from a quarry business in Marion, Oklahoma, and then transported them to Kingman for storage. There, on about October 6, McVeigh told the Fortiers that he intended to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh also described the essential details about how the bomb would be constructed inside a rented truck. One month after that conversation, Moore was robbed. The need to obtain money to pay for the bombing might explain the robbery, but what explains the decision to murder Moore? Why was McVeigh "extremely angry and upset" that Moore wasn’t murdered? I suggest that McVeigh and Nichols suspected that Moore was informing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) about their activities. Roger Moore began his career as an employee of the Social Security Administration and then served as the assistant city manager of Sioux City, South Dakota. He then moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he began a very successful business that built boats for the US military during the Vietnam War. After that he created a series of other businesses, including the American Assault Company, which sold unusual weapons. In that latter business he and his girlfriend Karen Anderson networked with a variety of radical individuals and groups that sold and purchased weapons (Bad Company, pages 165-166). The apparent friendship between Moore and McVeigh ruptured in September 1993 at a Soldier of Fortune convention in Las Vegas. The argument began, according to the book American Terrorist (page 143), when a man wearing a police badge on his belt, obscured by his jacket, stopped at the table and talked with Moore for a while. McVeigh eventually noticed the badge and then followed, grabbed and confronted the man after he walked away. Moore rebuked McVeigh for those actions and later that night told him to leave and never come back. In late January or February 1994, McVeigh visited Moore to try to reconcile, but they argued again. On that occasion, Moore’s girlfriend Anderson advised McVeigh to contact a radical, named Steve Colbern, who lived near Kingman. McVeigh followed that advice and apparently collaborated with Colbern in various experiments and activities involving explosives during the following months. As McVeigh pondered his own – and perhaps also Colbern’s – experiences with Moore, he perhaps concluded that Moore was a government informant who endangered his now concrete plan to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. After Moore was robbed, he immediately informed the local sheriff that he thought McVeigh was involved in the robbery. He might have informed other law-enforcement officials in more detail. In the following months, Moore resumed his communications with McVeigh by mail and phone, inviting him to visit, but McVeigh played dumb and stayed away. The culprits who actually robbed Moore – and who subsequently maintained associations with McVeigh and Nichols – also included possible informants. Hammer’s list of the robbers included "Elohim City," a right-wing cult, similar to the Branch Davidians, that was a target of infiltration by the ATF. Other writers have argued compellingly that some Elohim City members – in particular Andreas Strassmeier and Michael Brescia (the latter named on Hammer’s list) – were government agent-provocateurs who informed the ATF about the plan to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building. (See, for example, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s Secret Life of Bill Clinton). In the weeks that followed the robbery, Nichols stayed away from McVeigh and watched carefully for any signs of government surveillance ("heat") of his own activities. Right before Nichols departed for the Philippines, he gave his former wife, Lana Padilla, a sealed envelope that she was supposed to give to McVeigh in case Nichols died during the trip. Inside the envelope was a note that said, "Your on your own now; Go for it!! As far as heat – none that I know." If McVeigh was "on his own now," so was Nichols. He himself was now "going for it" in the Philippines. He had some knowledge that might be valuable – the Federal Building in Oklahoma City would be destroyed by a bomb on April 19, 1995. Although he had conspired in the plans, he felt he had been free of any "heat" during his most recent time in the United States. He certainly did not expect to be under surveillance while in the Philippines. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #2 For some reason, my tinfoil hat detector goes off every time I hear about some "Tim McVeigh and X" conspiricy. I don't mean this in a nasty way or anything, but still... |
| Posted by: N Guard 2004-2-25 6:05:45 PM |
| #1 Not Roger Moore from the Bond films, then? |
| Posted by: Anon and on.. 2004-2-25 5:17:11 AM |