AP: FBI Sought McVeigh Death Row Interview
By JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writer
March 4, 2004, 2:34 AM EST
WASHINGTON -- In a drama played out behind closed doors, senior FBI agents
unsuccessfully sought permission in 2001 to interview Timothy McVeigh to
resolve lingering questions about the case before the convicted Oklahoma City
bomber was put to death, officials say.
The agents wanted to clear up uncertainties about McVeigh's whereabouts on
specific dates that were left unanswered by his public statements and the
evidence, essentially filling in gaps in his timeline before the bombing, the
officials told The Associated Press.
The plan was scrapped when the government couldn't resolve who would attend the
interview or how it would be conducted. Officials also became distracted by the
belated discovery of some 4,000 pages of documents that had not been turned
over to McVeigh's defense during his trial.
That discovery prompted a one-month delay in McVeigh's execution, during which
FBI and Treasury agents continued to press unsuccessfully for access to McVeigh
on death row.
The interview debate was described by several current and former officials.
They said it showed the government didn't know everything it wanted about
McVeigh before he was put to death.
The officials said the potential interview became a primary focus of the
remaining McVeigh investigative team during the spring of 2001 and was the
subject of a high-level meeting in Oklahoma City in March of that year.
The officials said the debate was documented in numerous FBI e-mails, and they
were uncertain whether those e-mails should have been turned over to lawyers
for the upcoming Oklahoma state murder trial of Terry Nichols, McVeigh's
co-conspirator.
Besides filling in the gaps for McVeigh's whereabouts, one senior official said
agents had seen instances in the past where "death row inmates were willing to
give us some of their thought processes as their execution neared, and we hoped
McVeigh might do the same."
The officials would only discuss the interview debate on condition their names
not be used. The Justice Department has ordered its employees not to discuss
the McVeigh case as Nichols' trial begins this week.
New information has been emerging nine years after McVeigh's massive fertilizer
bomb killed more than 160 people at the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma
City on April 19, 1995.
Last week, AP reported that FBI agents in another case developed evidence
suggesting a gang of white supremacist bank robbers might have become involved
in McVeigh's conspiracy, but the agents failed to forward some of the
information to their colleagues in the Oklahoma case. That prompted the FBI on
Friday to reopen portions of the case to determine whether other conspirators
were involved, and the judge in the Nichols' trial warned he might dismiss the
case if defense lawyers provided proof information was withheld from Nichols.
Several officials said the debate over interviewing McVeigh continued between
the FBI, Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms without
resolution, ending when McVeigh was executed in June 2001.
Some called it a missed opportunity, especially because much of the speculation
about additional accomplices in the Oklahoma City case focused on periods in
which there were uncertainties about McVeigh's whereabouts.
For instance, agents never were able to determine where he spent the final
night before he detonated his bomb. They also wanted to inquire about time he
spent in Arizona in February 1995, when he began to finalize his bomb design.
FBI agents determined McVeigh tried unsuccessfully to contact an explosives
expert while in Arizona, and they wanted to know whether he sought help from
anyone else.
An Oklahoma newspaper, the Idabel McCurtain Daily Gazette, and a college
criminology professor, Mark Hamm, have studied McVeigh's movements extensively
and developed timelines showing the white supremacist bank robbery gang was in
the same vicinity as McVeigh several times during gaps in the government's
official version of events.
"You have to use logic here. What is the probability of these things
happening?" said Hamm, an Indiana State University professor who wrote a book
identifying at least four intersections of McVeigh and the robbers between 1993
and 1995.
"If it was one time, you might chalk it up to coincidence. If it is two times,
you might begin to ask some serious questions. But when it gets to three and
four times, that suggests there clearly is an ongoing conspiracy," he said.
For instance, the bank robbers were in Arizona during some of the same time as
McVeigh in February 1995. Just a month earlier, in a videotape the robbers made
they display an explosives manual while bragging about plans to kill government
officials.
Hamm said he placed McVeigh and the bank robbers together in December 1994 at a
gun show in Overland Park, Kan., and again in 1993 when they were in a rural
Arkansas town on the same day.
Another parallel occurred in November 1994: McVeigh was in Ohio, near a bank
the gang would rob a month later, on the day that an Arkansas gun dealer was
robbed to provide the proceeds for McVeigh's bombing.
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