Did OKC bombers join TWA 800 plot?

Posted: April 20, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

2004 WorldNetDaily.com

In light of what we know now we need to look back at a whole bunch of

that happened in the 1990s to see if there might be an al-Qaida connection

that would include the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA 800 flight. There

be no connection to terrorism, but boy do we need to take a second look at

- Herbert Meyer, Reagan-era special assistant to CIA director, on "Fox and
Friends," April 15, 2004

In this generation, no single reporter has done more resourceful legwork

Jayna Davis, the author of "The Third Terrorist." For those who have

the fate of TWA Flight 800, one of Davis' adventures has particular

In the summer of 1996, more than a year after the Oklahoma City bombing,

intrepid KFOR-TV reporter received a tip on her unlisted home phone line

check out a certain garage, International Auto Mechanics, located a mile

north of the Murrah Building site in Oklahoma City.

"The Iraqi soldiers had been seen hanging out at the garage,"

the caller told
Davis, referring here to the suspects that Davis had fingered as helping
Timothy McVeigh deliver the fatal bomb. The caller's boyfriend, an illegal
immigrant from Mexico who worked at the garage, had started noticing a

influx of calls from Iran and London in early 1995.

Then, in February 1995, the new owners shut down the garage unexpectedly

let all the workers go, only to rehire them a few months later, "after the

boom downtown."

The new owners, Davis learned, were a pair of Pakistani nationals, one a
full-time student and the other, a New York cab driver. The pair had shown

in November 1994 with $25,000 in cash, bought the garage, and prepaid the

through August 1995. Before the lease was up, the pair abandoned the

and gave it back to its original Iranian owner, himself a questionable
character.

On July 14, 1996, Davis, accompanied by her husband Drew, found her way to

Pakistani student. Unprepared for the interview, he dissembled his way

Davis' questions. He gave no good explanation as to why he would absorb a
$25,000 loss and then hand the keys back to the original owner, a man the
student claimed had tricked him into buying the shop in the first place.

Davis asked about his partner, the New York City cab driver, the Pakistani
student told her that she had better catch him soon as he was heading back

New York.

To her surprise, Davis found the cab driver's name in the phone book. This
time, she had Drew, a trained U.S. Army linguist and Gulf War vet with a

for accents, make a phone call. When the Pakistani cab driver answered,

identified himself as "Mohammed" and ascertained that the Pakistani cab

was indeed leaving for New York City.

In a stunning bit of chutzpah, Drew managed to solicit from the

cab driver his New York phone number. When the cab driver started growing
suspicious, Drew terminated the call, called the number in New York and

for the cab driver by name. "He will be here on Tuesday," a man answered

thick Arab accent. This man, too, grew quickly wary, and Drew hung up.

At 1:17 a.m. on Tuesday morning, July 16, 1996, Jayna Davis got a phone

her unlisted line. "Jayna, don't try to run away. You're not going to get

with this," the caller growled in his foreign accent. "See you in hell."

was Davis' first and only death threat.

Later on that same day, the Islamic Change Movement issued a threat, this

received at the highest levels in Washington. The group's communique

an attack of great "magnitude" to embarrass "the foolish American

The threatened time was "morning dawn."

The next day, July 17, as morning dawned on the Arabian peninsula, and the

set on Long Island, hundreds of Long Islanders - pilots, fishermen,

vacationers - watched helplessly as flare-like objects ascended off the
horizon, zigzagged upward, made last second course corrections and

violently in a bright white light. The Serbo-Croatian word for such a

"bojinka." Some endless seconds later, TWA Flight 800 erupted in an orange
fireball of great magnitude and fell immediately into the sea

That very day, National Liberation Day in Saddam's Iraq, Ramzi Yousef had

standing trial in a New York City federal court. Evidence strongly

that Yousef had conspired with Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols in the
Philippines in the months prior to the Murrah Building bombing. "We do

that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay," writes

Clarke in "Against All Enemies," "and were deadly when he returned."

Although Yousef also oversaw the first World Trade Center bombing, he was

tried in July 1996 for his role in Operation Bojinka, a plot both to blow

American airliners with bombs and to use planes as missiles to attack

targets.


The independent analysts who have looked at the fate of TWA Flight 800 -

this includes scores of airline pilots, safety investigators, munitions
experts, physicists, TWA mechanics, FAA investigators, Boeing engineers

retired military through the ranks of admiral - agree almost to a person

missiles were indeed fired, and that those missiles resulted in the

of the aircraft.

Given the restraints on evidence gathering, these independent

differ on the details. One school holds that terrorists launched the

most likely from the sea and with missiles likely more powerful than the
much-discussed Stingers. In "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack

America," James Sanders and I advance the theory that U.S. Navy missiles

at and struck an explosive-packed terrorist plane in close proximity to

800.

Either of these terrorist scenarios would demand a support team. When

Davis heard of the TWA 800 disaster on July 17, she connected it

her death threat and the cab driver's arrival in New York, both on July

Horrified at the implications, she had to wonder whether she had actually
called the team's safe house.

This connection needs to be explored. If former CIA honcho Herbert Meyer
believes that it is worth a "second look," perhaps the 9-11 Commission

oblige him.