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| Home Front: WoT |
| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 10) |
| 2004-04-18 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 On March 11, 1995, Timothy McVeigh furiously informed Michael Fortier in Kingman, Arizona, that Terry Nichols had decided to cease his participation in the plot to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. (A few days later, Nichols informed his ex-wife Lana Padilla in Las Vegas that "Tim and I are going our separate ways.") McVeigh then asked Fortier to replace Nichols, specifying two main tasks. The first task, before the bombing, was to help mix the chemicals. McVeigh had three 55-gallon drums of liquid nitromethane, each weighing more than 400 pounds, in a storeroom in Herington, Kansas. He and his helper would load these drums up into the rented truck’s cargo bay, siphon the nitromethane into13 barrels, where it would be mixed with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. McVeigh especially needed help loading the heavy, awkward barrels up into the truck. The second task, after the bombing, was to pick up McVeigh at the Las Vegas airport, where he would leave his get-away car, and then to drop McVeigh off in some remote desert location. McVeigh wanted to mislead the investigators to think that he had flown far away.Fortier refused to do either task. (Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, pages 200-201, 215). On March 29, therefore, McVeigh offered Fortier’s drug-dealing neighbor Jim Rosencrans $400 to drive with McVeigh, in McVeigh’s car, to an unspecified place"14 to 20 hours" away, to drop McVeigh off there, to drive on to the nearest airport, to leave McVeigh’s car there, and to fly home. By March 29, apparently, McVeigh had altered the second task. We don’t know whether his altered intention was likewise to leave the car there as a decoy or to position the car at the nearby airport for a get-away. We also don’t know how McVeigh now intended to accomplish the first task. Perhaps he intended to use his time driving with Rosencrans to convince him to at least help load the drums onto the truck, perhaps he had convinced Nichols or someone else to help with that task, or perhaps he now thought he could do it alone. Whatever McVeigh’s specific intentions, Rosencrans refused McVeigh’s proposal. Two days later, on March 31, McVeigh moved to a motel on the outskirts of Kingman and apparently remained there until April 12. During that period he phoned to several numbers, including to the number of Richard Coffman of the National Alliance, an organization chaired by the author of The Turner Diaries, and to the number of Andreas Strassmeir, the security chief of Elohim City. It seems that McVeigh was not able to talk with either of those two during those phone calls. McVeigh explained to the authors of American Terrorist that his intention in those phone calls was to explore possibilities of a safe haven after the bombing (American Terrorist, pages 205-206). I think that’s probably true. Reflecting on how hard it had been to recruit and keep a collaborator, McVeigh (I think) decided that it would nevertheless be easier to compel Nichols to follow through on their earlier mutual plan than to try to recruit a new collaborator from scratch in the remaining eight days before April 19. On April 11 he had a phone conversation with Nichols. The next day, on April 12, McVeigh checked out of the motel and said goodbye to Fortier, asking him one last time to help and then saying that he would try to convince Nichols to help. Fortier refused again, and McVeigh became very angry. Fortier then had the impression that McVeigh still did not have a helper, and Fortier therefore expected that McVeigh would completely abandon his plan to blow up the federal building, since there was now only one week left until April 19. (Hamm, Apocalypse in Oklahoma, page 202) McVeigh drove through Texas and Oklahoma (he stopped in Oklahoma City to recheck the site) and arrived in Herington during the afternoon of Thursday, April 13. He checked the storage unit and verified that the materials were still there. He then drove to another storage unit in Council Grove to fetch some gel there, and brought it back to the storage unit in Herington that evening. By that time steam was coming up from inside his car’s hood, and he discovered that he had blown a head gasket. McVeigh’s first idea was to sleep in his car near the storage unit, but then he decided not to risk the possibility that a security guard might identify him. He therefore, he says, drove north of Herington to Lake Geary and slept in his car there. The next morning, Friday, April 14, he drove further north to Junction City and traded in his car for another broken-down car. He switched his Arizona license plate from the abandoned car to the acquired car. After that he called a nearby Ryder truck rental and arranged to rent a truck, promising to drop by to leave a deposit the next day, Saturday, to guarantee the truck for Monday afternoon. Only after that phone call to the truck rental did he phone Nichols, their first contact since their phone conversation on April 11. They had not contacted during Thursday when McVeigh passed through Herington. During that phone conversation, McVeigh indicates, he arranged to meet with Nichols at Geary Lake, between Herington and Junction City, during the mid-day. As McVeigh drove to that meeting place, his recently acquired car repeatedly stalled. When they finally met at the lake, McVeigh had to ask Nichols to jump-start his car and to go buy him a new battery so that McVeigh could continue driving his car. Most people assume that McVeigh dominated Nichols, but McVeigh was certainly in a weak position during that meeting by the lake. McVeigh was almost out of money, and his car barely ran. McVeigh was begging for Nichols’ help, not the other way around. McVeigh needed someone to accompany him to Oklahoma City federal building, a five-hour drive away, to position his car and then to drive him back to Junction City. McVeigh needed someone to help him load three 400-pound drums into a Ryder truck. Nichols had told him five weeks previously that he refused to cooperate. We can be sure that even at this meeting he still insisted that he would not be anywhere near the federal building on April 19. Nichols was in a good position to drive a hard bargain with McVeigh. Nichols was in a position to compel McVeigh to accept a helper of Nichols’ own choice. ========== The next morning, Saturday, April 15, Nichols, McVeigh, and a third man met for lunch at a Herington diner, according to the diner’s owner. That Saturday evening an employee of a Junction City restaurant delivered a Chinese dinner to McVeigh’s motel room. The employee says that the person who opened the door and paid for the delivery was neither McVeigh nor Nichols. Sunday, April 16 was Easter. That afternoon Nichols’ wife Marife cooked an Easter dinner. Nichols seemed to be relaxed and did not rush Marife to prepare dinner sooner. It did not seem, even in retrospect, that he was planning to travel that day. As he sat down to eat at about 3 p.m., McVeigh called him on the telephone. Others in the room could hear that McVeigh was speaking loudly and angrily to Nichols, evidently very upset about something. Following that phone conversation, Nichols spent the rest of that day driving to Oklahoma City and back. McVeigh drive his own car there and then rode back in Nichols’ truck. Perhaps a third person also participated in that trip. ============= Much later, McVeigh explained to the authors of American Terrorist why his get-away car was missing a license plate on April 19, the day of the bombing. On that Sunday evening of April 16, McVeigh explained, when he parked the car in Oklahoma City, he himself removed the license plate and then hid it down the small of his back. (American Terrorist, page 213). Hiding the license plate that way explained why Nichols, who was right there with him, didn’t know that McVeigh had removed the license plate from the get-away car. If a third person had been there too, then maybe that person caused the license plate to be removed, which eventually prompted a policeman to stop McVeigh soon after the bombing. For reasons of his own, McVeigh might have preferred to say that he himself had removed the license plate without Nichols’ knowledge rather than reveal the involvement of the third person. McVeigh further explained that he left the plate in the Herington storage unit. ============== On Monday, April 17, McVeigh was supposed to pick up the Ryder truck at 4 p.m. He had made a point of telling the Ryder employees that he expected the truck to be ready at that time. McVeigh called a taxi cab, which drove him to a McDonald’s restaurant located about a mile and a quarter from the Ryder rental office. When the taxi driver dropped McVeigh off there, it was raining so hard that he could barely see well enough to drive. A security camera in the restaurant recorded that McVeigh approached the counter to order a meal at 3:58. A few minutes later, McVeigh and (the office employees said) "John Doe Two" walked into the Ryder office and completed the transaction to rent the truck. Much later, McVeigh remarked to the authors of American Terrorist the coincidence that the receipt was marked with the time 4:19, numerically coinciding precisely with the imminent bombing date of April 19 (pages 213-214). Since he had just eaten a snack at McDonald’s, there was no need for him to drive his rented truck there now. Instead, he drove the truck back to his motel and rested. ================= Very early, 4:30 a.m., on Tuesday, April 18, McVeigh got up, drove the truck to the storage unit in Herington. Nichols was not there when McVeigh began loading the truck. The 108 50-pound bags got loaded onto the truck and all got poured into the 13 barrels, without Nichols being present. McVeigh said he did all that by himself. Not until the drums needed to be loaded onto the truck did Nichols arrive. It seems that Nichols thought his help wasn’t needed, but it turned out that he did have to help load the drums onto the truck. McVeigh said that he and Nichols then drove to Geary Lake and, just the two of them, spent the rest of the morning mixing the chemicals and finishing the bomb in the back of the Ryder truck. After that, McVeigh said, he alone drove to Oklahoma City and blew up the truck on the morning of Wednesday, April 19. He jumped in his get-away car and sped away. Soon afterwards, a policeman stopped McVeigh for driving without a license plate. Otherwise McVeigh would have disappeared. Exactly one week earlier, on April 12, Michael Fortier assumed that the bombing would not happen, because not even one person would help McVeigh do it. As it turned out on April 19, though, McVeigh had more help blowing up the building than even he knew. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #3 NMM, maybe you're really Bill Crinton. He was the one who blamed it on Christian RW militias and ...Rush Limbaugh! McVeigh's actions have their origins in becoming a Muslim. There's much to suggest that OKC was AQ's first assault on American soil. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-04-19 10:53:49 PM |
| #2 Tim McVeigh's actions have their origin in the Gingrich--right Wing nutz--I think he was a GOP operative if anything |
| Posted by: Not Mike Moore 2004-04-19 10:48:07 PM |
| #1 Without intending offense to anyone living or dead, to my possibly oversensitive nose any such stories about grand conspiriacys (sp?) have the odor of tinfoil beanie about them. At least without a lot more corroborating evidence. One does not need to be an Izzoid or an ally/puppet of the Izzoids to be a homicidal Kook. If you care to remember, people from my end of the political spectrum felt about Clinton about the same way the LLL feels about President Bush. We right wing kooks just happen to be less prone to giant puppets, and more likely to have some real ability. I hope I'm not misusing Occam's Shaving Kit. |
| Posted by: N Guard 2004-04-18 7:32:41 PM |