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| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef (Part 8) |
| 2004-04-07 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 During the month of August 1994, Terry Nichols’ wife Marife and Timothy McVeigh came to live for a few weeks with Nichols on a farm in Marion, Kansas, where he was working as a hand. On August 31, 1994, Terry Nichols told farm owner, Tim Donahue, that he would quit at the end of September. Nichols told his ex-wife Lana Padilla he was quitting in order to move permanently to Cebu City, where his wife would enroll in college to study physical therapy. Marife then did move to the Philippines, leaving Nichols and McVeigh at the farm. Before Nichols quit, he told Donahue that he intended to deal at gun shows with McVeigh, predicting he would earn twice as much as he had earned on the farm. It seems therefore that McVeigh dissuaded Nichols, at least temporarily, from moving to the Philippines. During September Nichols and McVeigh developed their plan to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. During the last week of that month they made many phone calls to chemical companies and stole explosive materials from a quarry. During October they purchased fertilizer. McVeigh’s and Nichols’ priorities diverged. McVeigh focused on his big bomb, whereas Nichols also developed plans to sell small packets of chemicals as bomb-making kits. McVeigh was not much interested in developing a profitable business, but Nichols was. At the end of October and beginning of November they planned the robbery Roger Moore, which was then carried out on November 5. McVeigh was in New York, establishing a good alibi and liquidating his recently deceased father’s property. Nichols went to Arkansas to manage the robbery. McVeigh’s friend Michael Fortier, based on his own later discussions with McVeigh, understood that a major motivation for the robbery was to enrich Nichols. McVeigh himself told the authors of American Terrorist that the robbery was not motivated by his own need for money to prepare the Oklahoma City bombing (Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, pgs 175-176). After the robbery, McVeigh was furious that Moore had not been murdered. His fury apparently disrupted his friendship and collaboration with Nichols, who now reverted to his original plan to move to Cebu City. After stashing the loot in warehouses, he returned to Las Vegas on November 16 to part with his son Josh. He stayed with him and his ex-wife Lana Padilla for about two weeks. Every morning McVeigh would phone the home and conduct a long conversation with Nichols. On November 22, when Padilla drove Nichols to the airport, he gave her a package of materials and told her to open it and follow the instructions inside if he didn’t return within 60 days. The instructions basically allocated Nichols’ hidden property among McVeigh, Josh and Marife. Padilla opened the package after only a few days, read the instructions, and interpreted the entire circumstances to mean that Nichols had gone to the Philippines to reconcile with Marife and would kill himself if he failed. If Padilla’s interpretation was correct, then Nichols apparently intended to convince Marife to drop out of school and return to the United States, arguing that he now had enough money there to establish a profitable business. But why should she believe him? He perhaps took along a lot of cash to show her, maybe several thousand dollars. In order to convince her to drop out of school and leave the Philippines again, though, he had to convince her he could turn that cash into a permanently profitable business. This situation suggests the possibility that Nichols counted on someone in the Philippines helping him convince Marife that there really would be such a business. Perhaps, however, Padilla’s interpretation was not correct. When she opened the package, she had no idea that Nichols had been collaborating with McVeigh in a plan to blow up a federal office building on the next April 19. She had no idea that Nichols therefore had a very strong motivation to stay in the Philippines past that date. After that, if necessary, he would be prepared to fake his death, disappearing into a new identity as an international explosives dealer, secretly known to have a rare ability to predict explosions. If McVeigh did succeed in blowing up the federal building and escaping detection, then their international business relationship might develop further, based on the resources that Nichols had left for McVeigh in Las Vegas. The 60-day period that Nichols stated to Padilla was certainly flexible. In case he did somehow die in the Philippines, that particular period fit with his visa, airline tickets, and the storage rentals. Otherwise he could easily extend that period by phoning Padilla and by extending his visa, tickets, and storage rentals. Certainly his visa was no real problem, since he was staying with his Philippine wife and child. If necessary, he could easily extend this period all the way into April. Likewise, though, he might have wanted to shorten the 60-day period. If Nichols managed to arrange his situation in the Philippines more quickly, he might want McVeigh to take away all Nichols’ things as soon as possible. Nichols would want his last association with McVeigh to be as far in time as possible from April 19. The possibility of an early decision along those lines might be related to McVeigh’s phone call on December 16, asking for news about Nichols. =========== Nichols arrived in Cebu City on November 23, 1994. In the following days, the three main members of Al Qaeda’s terrorist cell in Manila – Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Wali Khan Amin Shah – all together flew from Manila to Cebu City, almost 400 miles. There on about the last day of the month they blew up a bomb in a generator room of a shopping mall. They then flew back to Manila and blew up a bomb in a movie theater on December 1. On December 11, Ramzi Yousef boarded a Philippine airliner and flew to Cebu City. During that flight he planted a bomb underneath his seat. After he disembarked in Cebu City, the plane flew on toward Tokyo, and the bomb exploded over the ocean but the airplane nevertheless managed to land in Okinawa. (Ressa, Seeds of Terror, pages 30-31) The inadequate explosion certainly would have compelled Yousef to consider other sources for better explosive materials. ============ On December 23, McVeigh was rear-ended in a traffic accident near Saginaw, Michigan. The accident scared McVeigh, because he had two boxes of blasting caps in the trunk of his car, wrapped up like Christmas presents. Wrapped up for shipment to the Philippines? |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |