Iraqi connection to Oklahoma bombing: America's Arab allies do not agree with the president's inclusion of Iraq in the `Axis of Evil.' But new information about Saddam Hussein's involvement in the bombing of the Murrah Building may tip the balance

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 15, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

At one meeting in late 1994 in Davao on the island of Mindanao, a hotbed of Muslim extremism, the group discussed specific terrorist targets in the United States, including the federal building in Oklahoma City, as INSIGHT reported last November (see "Iraq Connection to U.S. Extremists," Nov. 19, 2001). Angeles then made a sketch of The Farmer that he gave to the investigators. Says Jones: "The man it depicted was a dead ringer for Terry Nichols."

According to Jones, as well as new witnesses uncovered by Johnston and his investigators working on the ground in the Philippines, Nichols went to the Philippines to learn bomb-making techniques in late 1994 after he and McVeigh had attempted unsuccessfully to build an explosive device. "In October," Jones says, "Tim couldn't blow up a rock. Then Terry goes to the Philippines, and Tim says he builds the bomb." Despite repeated demands from his lawyers for the truth, McVeigh "never accounted for how he learned to build the bomb," Jones says. Jones and Johnston believe it was Nichols who brought back that expertise from the Philippines after extensive meetings with bomb expert Youssef.

Nichols' father-in-law, a Filipino policeman named Torres, told Philippine-government investigators that he had found bomb-making manuals in Nichols' luggage in late 1994 when Nichols stayed at the family's home in Cebu City, at precisely the same time Angeles placed Nichols in meetings there with Youssef. The FBI claims Torres retracted these statements, but Jones says he reaffirmed them in subsequent depositions with Philippine authorities. "To me, that increased his credibility," Jones tells INSIGHT.

And then there's the strange package Nichols left with his ex-wife in the United States before making the last of his many previously tranquil trips to the Philippines. In the package, which he instructed her to open only if he didn't return to the United States within 90 days, Nichols included a letter to McVeigh ("You're on your own," he wrote). He also left what amounted to a will, instructing his ex-wife in the event of his death to reclaim gold bars, $20,000 in cash and other monetary instruments from a hidden cache.

"We have reason to believe that Terry Nichols was planning to take part in Project Bojinka [the plot to attack U.S. airliners]," Johnston tells INSIGHT. "He only returned to the United States after Ramzi Youssef's plans were foiled and Youssef fled the Philippines for Pakistan." Youssef was arrested by Pakistani authorities in February 1995 and promptly extradited to the United States to stand trial for the 1993 bomb attacks on the World Trade Center.

Youssef's past has proved elusive. When he was brought to trial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he was presented as a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Kuwait and traveled to Afghanistan in the late 1980s to join forces with bin Laden.

But new evidence uncovered by Johnston and his investigators suggests that Youssef may have had direct ties to Iraqi intelligence all along. "We have sworn witness statements and affidavits from court cases that predate the Oklahoma City bombing that directly tie Ramzi Youssef to Dr. Ihsan Barbouti," Johnston tells INSIGHT. "The witnesses say Barbouti introduced Ramzi Youssef as an `explosives expert for the Iraqi National Oil Company,' and that Youssef was working in Kuwait for Barbouti prior to the Iraqi invasion." Johnston says that he believes Barbouti was married to a member of Saddam Hussein's al-Tikriti clan. In tribal Iraq, such ties create bonds of absolute loyalty.