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| Home Front: WoT |
| Timothy McVeigh, Terrry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 7) |
| 2004-03-28 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 Throughout the 1980s, the Philippines’ Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) sent some of its members to Pakistan to participate in the Afghan war against the Soviet occupiers. Initially the MILF itself paid these members’ expenses. In 1988, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa began traveling to the Philippines to establish a branch of the Islamic International Relief Organization (IIRO). This was a Saudi charity that Saudi intelligence agencies had coopted in order to support various operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Khalifa initially focused on facilitating Philippine Moslems’ participation in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, redirected his focus to fostering a holy war within the Philippines. By 1991 he settled in the Philippines permanently. Khalifa established a wide variety of businesses to employ and move Moslems and to cover the transfer of funds. Various businesses dealt in rattan furniture, travel tickets, manpower services, real estate and construction. The investments intended to promote business growth in Moslem areas, especially in the areas where radical groups operated. (Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, pages 91-95; Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, page 101). During the initial period he was sometimes insufficiently careful about protecting his own terrorist activities from exposure. In December 1991, for example, he personally handed out money to pay for the bombing of a Christian church. In January 1992, he personally handed out money to assassinate a Christian missionary and to bomb a market. In February he personally met with a Moslem group to encourage them to assassinate a radio announcer and to bomb a fort. (Maria Ressa, Seeds of Terror, page 27.) As he developed his organizations, however, he was able to distance from this dirty work and to project a public image as a charitable businessman. Khalifa’s employees, trainees, beneficiaries and supporters were scattered throughout the Moslem population, alert for any threats to the network’s own security. These associates were attentive to any clues that Philippine or foreign intelligence services might infiltrate or spy on its activities. The MILF even kidnaped and murdered foreigners in the regions where it operated. US citizens who resided in these areas were certainly watched with acute attention. In 1993, Khalifa separated out a distinct International Relations and Information Center (IRIC) with a somewhat different mission. To head the IRIC he appointed a Turk, Ahmad al-Hamwi, who had moved to the Philippines after the Turkish government banned him from his studies because of suspected involvement in a bombing in 1986. There he married a Filipina woman who had converted to Islam. Hamwi adopted a new name Abu Omar. He met Khalifa in the Philippines 1988 and arranged for Khalifa to marry his wife’s sister. (Abuza, pages 92, 94, 115). IRIC’s other main leader was a Malaysian named Zubair, who had been recruited into Al-Qaeda in Karachi, Pakistan. I deduce (I have no direct evidence) that Khalifa intended for the IIRO to henceforth limit itself to operations within the Philippine Moslem population, whereas the IRIC would operate within foreign and non-Moslem populations. During 1994 the IRIC funded Ramzi Yousef’s terrorist cell, which planned operations to assassinate the Roman Catholic pope, to blow up US airliners, and to attack government buildings in the United States. (Abuza, page 94). Yousef incorporated the Bermuda Trading Company as a front to purchase chemicals and other supplies for his bomb-making. Most of the materials imported, probably from Singapore (Abuza, page 104). The choice of Bermuda for the company’s name perhaps revealed a future intention to relocate to the Western Hemisphere. ============= In January 1993 Terry and Marife Nichols moved to Marife’s hometown Cebu City, with the intention of settling there permanently. Cebu City is just north of Mindanao island, where the Philippines’ Moslems are concentrated, and historically served as the Catholic forepost against the advance of Islam northward. Marife’s father was a policeman, and the family lived over an international lumber business. In this regard it should be noted that 90% of the Philippines lumber and plywood comes from Mindanao. Already at that time, Terry Nichols had become very vocal in his criticism of the US government, even having renounced his citizenship. He probably was vocal also about Jewish conspiracies dominating the world. Already by that time he had apparently become involved in the business of buying and selling weapons and military supplies. Since he intended to stay in Cebu City permanently, he probably began exploring possibilities of going into the same kind of business there, perhaps making some initial contacts and inquiries with related businesses in the area. As it turned out, the Nichols family returned to the United States after only one month. If he had made some contacts during that month, those people might have been surprised and suspicious about the family’s abrupt departure. Some might have wondered whether his talk was genuine or whether he was some kind of US secret agent whose cover had been blown. This question well might have prompted a decision by his contacts to investigate him and his family. =============== During the months following the Nichols’ departure, the Al Qaeda network in the Philippines made a significant effort to improve its intelligence resources for operations in the United States. In May 1993, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, a US citizen who had converted to Islam, was brought to the Philippines for an orientation tour of the terrorist network there, after which a decision was made that he would resettle from the US to the Philippines to support future operations from that base. During the previous years Hampton-El had been involved primarily in a Saudi program to convert US military personnel to the Islamic religion. During the months immediately preceding this resettlement he had been closely involved in the Al-Qaeda cell in New York City that had helped Ramzi Yousef try to blow up the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Hampton-El’s plans to resettle to the Philippines were interrupted, however, when he was arrested in the United States in June 1993. ================ In December 1993 the Nichols family moved to Las Vegas. During the following three months Nichols activities and whereabouts were mysterious. His family continued to live in Las Vegas, but he (he said) commuted to Junction City, Kansas, to organize some kind of business dealing in "military hardware." His ex-wife Lana, who also lived in Las Vegas, had the impression that he traveled to the Philippines frequently – about four times a year – during the years 1993 and 1994, sometimes while Marife was in the United States. In March 1994, however, he settled on a farm in Marion, Kansas, working regularly as a hired hand on a farm. Then in August, 1994, he gave the farm owner a month’s notice that he would quit. He told his ex-wife Lana that he had accumulated $12,000 and intended to move permanently back to the Philippines. Marife soon did move there and enrolled in a college. Terry eventually followed her there in late November. He confided to his son Josh he probably would not return to the United States. On December 16 Timothy Nichols called Lana and confirmed that Nichols had not returned and that she did not know a telephone number where he could be reached. Based on that phone call, McVeigh apparently determined that Nichols very likely would not be in the United States on April 19, when he intended to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Within a couple days after that phone call, Lana later read, McVeigh began calling around to other acquaintances to arrange for some transportation help in the coming months. McVeigh did obtain Nichols’ mailing address from Lana, however. =============== During this period in the Philippines, Nichols knew a secret that might be very valuable if he planned to establish himself as an arms dealer to Moslems in his new country. He knew that a massive explosion would occur at the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19, 1995. He apparently had a tentative plan to perhaps return to the Unites States by December 16, 1994, but by that date he had decided to stay on in the Philippines, perhaps because his future there looked promising. Although he now no longer wanted to directly help McVeigh with the bombing, he now had an even stronger, personal motivation to help make sure that the bombing would indeed occur. At the end of December or beginning of January, I speculate, Nichols contacted McVeigh and recommended a new collaborator to replace himself in McVeigh’s further preparations. This new collaborator was a Moslem who had grown up in the United States. Nichols assured McVeigh that he knew from his own connections in the Philippines that this collaborator would be trustworthy and might provide new opportunities to attack the United States government after the Oklahoma City bombing. This man’s name was Abdullah Al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |