Vindication on the Ramzi Yousef-Terry Nichols connection
On December 22nd, 2006, the House International Relations Oversight Committee, chaired by Cong. Dana Rhorabacher (R-CA) released a report entitled: “The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?” Click for pdf of the Report: The probe, led by Staff Investigator Phaedra Dugan, turned up startling new material on the possible Ramzi Yousef-Terry Nichols connection first detailed in 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE.
That book contained a chapter called “John Doe No. 2” in which I built a strong, but circumstantial, case for a Yousef nexus to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in O.K. City on April 19th, 1995, which killed 168 including 19 children. 1000 YEARS lists multiple links between Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols relating to the Philippines. For example:
• A tour guide named Daisy Gelaspie, had told police that on trip to the Philippines in 1990, Nichols asked if she knew anyone who could build bombs.
• On that trip, Nichols met Marife Torres, a “mail order bride,” from the southern Philippines town of Cebu City. They were married that same year.
• Nichols made additional trips to the Philippines during the early 90’s and was even in Cebu at the same time as Ramzi Yousef in December, 1994. • Within days of Yousef’s Manila bomb factory being raided by police, on January 6th, 1995, Nichols beat a hasty retreat from the Philippines.
• A source had told a U.S. consulate representative that Marife’s father, a former police officer, discovered a book on explosives in Nichols belongings after his exit.
• Ramzi Yousef, the Wales educated engineer responsible for both attacks on the World Trade Center, had begun training members of the Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda splinter group in the early 90’s near the Southern Philippines town of Davao City.
• In a sworn deposition, Edwin Angeles, a top Abu Sayyaf turncoat, stated that in the early 90’s in Davao City, he’d been in a room with Nichols (aka “The Farmer”) along with Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah; an Uzbeki beloved of Osama bin Laden whom the Saudi billionaire called “the lion.” During the meeting Angeles swore that they’d discussed bomb making and handling.
• Prior to the OKC bombing in the fall of 1994 Tim McVeigh’s only attempt to explode an amonium-nitrate/nitromethane IED (improvised explosive device) failed. This according to key Government witness Michael Fortier. But after Nichols and Yousef were in the Philippines at the same time in Cebu City, McVeigh and Nichols took down the Federal building
• On the day of the OK City blast Murad, Yousef’s oldest friend, a pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools, took credit for the blast while in a cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (M.C.C.) the federal jail in lower Manhattan. The FBI even memorialized his confession in a #302 memo.
Click to read Chapter 30 “John Doe No. 2.” The House Subcommittee Report:
In its Report, the House Subcommittee came up with compelling new evidence that: as early in 1992 and 1993 in the months prior to his placement of a 1,500 pound ammonium-nitrate fuel oil bomb, similar to the O.K. City device beneath the towers of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef called a Filipina in Queens, New York, who lived in the same building as Marife Nichols’ relatives.
Here’s an excerpt:
Ramzi Yousef was in the United States for about five months prior to his attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. His cell phone records from that time period show that he placed three phone calls to the residence of a Filipina in Queens, New York named Mila Densing, with one call lasting approximately 30 minutes. At the time of the phone calls, Densing was living in the same row-house apartment building as Adora and Ernesto Malaluan, close friends and neighbors, who were also from Cebu City. Ernesto Malaluan is the cousin of Marife Nichols and owned the boarding house in Cebu City where Terry and Marife lived during their last trip to the Philippines.
This is extremely significant. Prima facie evidence that Yousef had developed a relationship with a Filipina with one degree of separation from Nichols’ wife — and he did it two years before he was in the Philippines in the same town as Nichols.
Identifying the Explosives Book:
The House Report also identifies the explosives book which I first referenced in 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE as reportedly found by Marife Nichols father. It was “The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives” by Tenney L. Davis.
Another excerpt:
On his first trip to Cebu with Shelton Paradise Tours,Terry Nichols was initially introduced to “tour guide” Daisy Gelaspi. They spent about four days together and, in a sworn signed statement to police and investigators, Gelaspi claimed that Nichols asked her if she knew anyone in the military or anyone else who could help him make a bomb. Additionally, on his final trip to the Philippines just months before the Oklahoma City bombing, Nichols had with him a bomb-making book entitled The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives. Nichols’ interest in bomb making during his trips to the Philippines raises some doubt about whether he was genuinely there for a wife, or whether he was there to network with underground criminals and terrorists.
What the report doesn’t say is that notes in a spiral notebook recovered from Yousef’s Manila bomb factory at the time Nichols was in the Philippines, apparently referenced that same Tenney book as a source. The notebook found in room #603 of the Dona Josefa Apartments, following a fire the night of January 6th, 1995, contained notes on the melting temperatures of chemicals used in IEDs.
This connection was made by terrorism analyst John Berger on his website Intelwire.com. As Berger describes this important link:
“During Yousef’s 1995 trial for a plot to bomb U.S. airliners, defense attorneys cited that passage from the notebook and argued that it had been lifted from The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives…”
The significance of these findings: What are the chances that:
a) Ramzi Yousef would know a Filipina close to Terry Nichols’ wife and call her repeatedly in 1992/93?
b) Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols would be in the Philippines in an obscure city at the same time and use the same explosives book as a reference? c) Nichols would be convicted of bombing a building with an ammonium-nitrate-nitro methane IED in 1995 similar in design to Yousef’s urea-nitrate-fuel oil IED detonated at the World Trade Center in 1993 – both devices delivered to their targets in yellow rented Ryder trucks?
In his memoir AGAINST ALL ENEMIES, even former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke admitted that it was possible that Philippines al Qaeda operatives had “taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building.”
Is Samir Khalil un-indicted co-conspirator #88?
There’s another new finding in the House Report that may relate directly to Patrick Fitzgerald, cited in TRIPLE CROSS for negligence in failing to reign in al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed:
The Report discusses one Samir Khalil, a Palestinian who had hired a number of Middle Eastern men to work on his properties in O.K. City prior to the bombing. Khalil’s ex-wife, Carole Sue Khalil, 50 was killed on the fifth floor of the Murrah Building in the offices of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture at the time of the blast. Click for list of OKC bombing victims.
According to his former bookkeeper, Khalil was at the Circus Circus hotel in Las Vegas two days later at a time Terry Nichols phone records show that two calls came to his home in Herrington, Kansas from the Circus Circus. Click for records.
At that time, two days after the Murrah blast, few beyond the police, knew that Nichols had been arrested.
The name Samir Khalil is on a list of 172 unindicted co-conspirators in the “Day of Terror” case co-prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew C. McCarthy. Other names on the list include Osama bin Laden, his brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa and Ali Mohamed.
Appendix X on page 574 of TRIPLE CROSS, lists a Samir Khalil as unindicted co-conspirator #88. Click to download a pdf of the list.
Cong. Rhorabacher. who ran the investigation. asked the Dept. of Justice to determine if this was the “Samir Khalil” relating to the OK City bombing: but he was stonewalled.
This subcommittee asked the Department of Justice to determine if the man’s name on the un-indicted coconspirators World Trade Center bombing list is the same man in Oklahoma City. A letter responding to this request stated that such a task would be too “burdensome.”
But how “burdensome” would it have been for Justice to make that connection for the Congressmen who was in the midst of a bona fide investigation? All DOJ officials would have had to do is ask Patrick Fitzgerald himself, the man identified by Vanity Fair as having a “mainframe-computer brain” when it comes to al Qaeda and the SDNY prosecutions.
Click for Vanity Fair story, “Mr. Fitz Goes to Washington.”
If the “Samir Khalil” on the un-indicted co-conspirators list is not the same man related to the O.K. City bombing – even as the husband of a victim – how difficult would it be for the FBI and Justice Department to say so?
It’s the continued refusal of the Bureau and Justice to come clean on their O.K. City investigation that raises so many questions.
In an interview with me on January 13th, 2007, Mike Johnson, an attorney from Oklahoma City who has represented dozens of bombing victims or family members in a suit alleging a foreign connection to the blast had this to say: “The Rhorabacher Report opens new doors in connecting Terry Nichols’ activities in the Philippines to master terrorist bomber Ramzi Yousef. Yousef’s telephone records should be made available to victims of the bombing to allow for further investigation of his apparent contact with Marife Nichols family.”
The Scarpa Jr. Nichols Connection
On January 9th, a second event occurred that could also lead to the discovery of new evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing.
A Federal judge ruled that the upcoming murder trial of retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio would take place in Brooklyn where the indictments were handed down on March 30th, 2006 and not in Federal court where DeVecchio’s lawyers had sought to move the case.
CLICK FOR the story from the N.Y. Daily News
This clears the way for the trial in which DeVecchio’s alleged ties to former Colombo crime family hit man Gregory Scarpa Sr. (aka “The Killing Machine”) can be fully explored.
As reported first in 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE and later detailed in COVER UP and TRIPLE CROSS, the DeVecchio-Scarpa Sr. scandal led the FBI and Justice Department to bury a treasure trove of al Qaeda related intelligence uncovered over 11 months in 1996-1997 by the killer’s son Greg Jr. who, was located, ironically, in a cell between Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murder in the M.C.C.
Many of the revelations including proof of an active al Qaeda cell in NYC in 1996 are contained in a series of FBI 302 memos which can be accessed on this website:
Click to examine.
But in an epic story fraught with irony, perhaps the most extraordinary irony to date is a nexus with Scarpa Jr. that takes us back to Oklahoma City:
As recounted below in Chapter 39 of TRIPLE CROSS Greg Scarpa Jr. now serving a 40 years sentence at the ADX Florence, the notorious “Supermax” prison was responsible for uncovering a cache of undiscovered explosives buried for ten years. His source this time, was Terry Nichols.
EXPLOSIVES THE FBI MISSED
By February 2005, Scarpa Jr., the Colombo Family wiseguy who had risked his life for eleven months between 1996 and 1997 ratting out the true mastermind of both WTC attacks, was in the middle of the seventh year of a forty-year sentence. Confined to a seven-by-twelve-foot cell in the prison known as “The Alcatraz of the Rockies,” the United States Penitentiary Administrative Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, he slept on a thin mattress atop a concrete slab.
Subject to special administrative measures (SAMs) that limited his number of visitors and phone calls, Scarpa Jr. was literally walled off from the outside world, unable to receive any newspapers or periodicals that would give him a hint of conditions on the other side of the prison’s twelve-foot razor-wire fences.
Along with a number of lone-wolf bombers housed there—such as Unabomber Ted Kazcinski and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph—his fellow inmates now included many of the al Qaeda terrorists who had been convicted in the SDNY and imprisoned on multiple life sentences, including Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, Eyad Ismoil, and Nidal Ayyad.
Despite his solitary confinement, which allowed him only one to two hours outside of his cell each day, Greg Jr. learned in early 2005 that homegrown terrorists might be planning to use a cache of undiscovered explosives from America’s second biggest adjudicated act of terror: the Oklahoma City bombing.
The tip came from Terry Nichols, the disgruntled army veteran who was convicted with Timothy McVeigh of planting the bomb on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building. McVeigh himself had been housed at the Supermax until his execution in 2001. Now, during their limited contact, which included the exchange of “kites” similar to those that Yousef had passed to Scarpa, Nichols was warning that a cache of nitro methane buried at Terry’s old home in Herrington, Kansas, might be retrieved and used to mark the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City blast in 2005.
According to Nichols, the explosive was buried with an ammunition can under a pile of rocks in a crawl space beneath the house where the FBI had supposedly done a thorough search following his arrest ten years earlier.
As soon as he got the word from Nichols, Scarpa Jr. contacted Angela Clemente, the forensic investigator who had been working to get him a lawyer for the past several years. With her partner, a Yale-educated Ph.D. named Stephen Dresch, Clemente contacted staff members in the offices of two congressmen she had dealt with on government reform issues: William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California.
The most significant revelation from Scarpa Jr., according to Clemente, was Nichols’s alleged admission that “others unknown” were involved in the original Murrah Building plot—despite Timothy McVeigh’s insistence up until his execution that he and Nichols had acted alone.
Another startling new allegation Scarpa learned from Nichols was that Roger Moore, an Arkansas gun dealer whose girlfriend testified against Nichols and McVeigh, may have been an FBI informant. Nichols has alleged that it was Moore who supplied the tubes of the high explosive that were buried in the crawl space.
Moore has always vigorously denied any involvement.
“Terry was anxious to have somebody test the boxes the explosive had come in for fingerprints,” says Clemente, “and that’s why he let word of the explosives slip to Greg.”
During McVeigh’s trial, the government had argued that Nichols and McVeigh had financed the Oklahoma City bombing by using the proceeds from a gunpoint robbery at Moore’s home on November 4, 1994. But evidence later showed that on the day of the robbery McVeigh was at a gun show in Kent, Ohio, hundreds of miles away.
Moore alleged that he had been accosted outside of his house at 9:00 or 9:30 a.m. that day by a man wearing a black ski mask and wielding a gun. Moore said that the man then took him inside the house and single handedly tied him up with rope and duct tape before robbing a series of guns, ammunition, coins, and other valuables.
In his book Others Unknown: The Oklahoma City Bombing Case and Conspiracy, McVeigh’s lawyer, Stephen Jones, wondered how Nichols, who “saw poorly” without his glasses and didn’t own contact lenses, could have effected the robbery. As Jones noted, Moore was never called by the government as a witness at McVeigh’s trial, but at Nichols’ trial, when Moore’s girlfriend and/or business associate listed one of the guns as stolen, Nichols’ attorney demonstrated that Terry had purchased that same weapon at a gun show two years before—a revelation described by Jones as “a stunning blow to the prosecution.”
IMPEACHING GREG JR. AGAIN
Now on March 4th, 2005, to test Scarpa’s credibility on the Nichols tip, the FBI reportedly sent a polygraph tech to the Supermax. After a brief examination, he reportedly concluded that Scarpa Jr. had failed. But forensic investigator Clemente insists that the lie detector test was flawed.
“First of all,” says Clemente, “the polygraph specialist sent from D.C. was belligerent to Greg Jr., which violates the protocol. Second of all, he asked about four questions, then abruptly left the test, went into another room and returned, but he didn’t re-inflate the cuff used to measure the subject’s responses. Finally, this man abruptly ended the test, and told Greg Jr. he wasn’t credible.”
And yet, just as he had with Yousef in 1996, Scarpa offered the FBI details of the explosives and their location that only Terry Nichols himself could have known. Clemente and Dr. Dresch reduced Scarpa’s verbatim recitation of Nichols’s account to a memo and sent it to an aide to Congressman Rhorabacher. In it they predicted that if the FBI searched the crawl space they would find: a cardboard box [approx. equal to] 18”x18”x18” wrapped securely in clear plastic wrap containing a full case of the nitro methane (red tinted) liquid portion (component) of the 2-part binary explosive component known as kine-stik (a.k.a. kine-pak). [The liquid is in small clear plastic tubes.] This box is the original box the product came in when delivered to [Roger] Moore’s home at Royal, Arkansas. Thus this is the box which would have his fingerprints on the outside or on the inside flaps . . . There is a 2nd box that’s also a brown cardboard similar in size to the first, possibly a bit larger. It too is wrapped securely in clear plastic and is sitting right next to the first box. This second box contains numerous (a couple hundred) electric blasting caps. And nearby these 2 boxes is a .50 caliber military ammo can ([approximately] 6”W x 8”H x 12”L). It contains at least one non-electric blasting cap, a 16 oz. can of black powder, 2 instructional booklets and some other miscellaneous items.
The details of the location of the explosive were even more specific. According to Scarpa, Nichols even suggested that in locating the kine-stiks the investigator should bring a flashlight and wear coveralls:
Find north basement stairway near bathroom. Near bottom step is a square hole about 2 ft. by 2 ft. through the cement wall to left (east). This leads to the crawl space under most of the house. As soon as you enter into the crawl space both to the right which is south and left north are two piles of rocks. These are up against the wall you just went through.
Note: The two rock piles were part of the foundation wall which was torn down to make other access holes for other parts of the house.
Under the south pile is my ammo can.
Under the north pile are two cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic.
Simply remove the rocks. The north pile probably has some dirt covering the two boxes but not much. There is little light so a drop cord or flashlight would be helpful. And coveralls—the crawl space area is a dirt floor. The box to be fingerprinted, etc., is the one with the little tubes of reddish clear liquid.
Despite the Bureau’s claim that Scarpa had failed his polygraph, enough pressure was brought to bear by Congressional staffers that the FBI finally agreed to a search. A team of agents entered the empty Herrington, Kansas house on March 31st.
Two days later, John Solomon, the Associated Press’s Washington deputy bureau chief, filed this story on the AP’s national wire:
WASHINGTON (AP) The FBI is facing the possibility it made an embarrassing oversight in the Oklahoma City bombing case a decade ago after new information led agents to explosive materials hidden in Terry Nichols’ former home, which they had searched several times before. FBI officials said the material was found Thursday night and Friday in a crawl space of the house in Herington, Kan. They believe agents failed to check that space during the numerous searches of the property during the original investigation of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh. The information so far indicates the items have been there since prior to the Oklahoma City bombing,” Agent Gary Johnson said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma City.”
Solomon reported that McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, “knew that some materials gathered for the attack were never found by the FBI and this discovery could answer some of those questions. But he added that it could also prove to be another black eye for the FBI, which was criticized for causing a delay in McVeigh’s execution after it found new documents in the case.”
“I think it is clearly embarrassing if it turns out to be true,” Jones said in Solomon’s story. “We’ve gone from not producing everything for the defendants to failing to recover from one of the conspirator’s homes evidence that clearly is material.”
In a follow up story on April 14th, 2005, the A.P.’s Mark Sherman reported that “While the FBI found no evidence supporting the idea that an attack is in the works for Tuesday’s 10th anniversary [of the Oklahoma City bombing,] the information that explosives had been hidden in Nichols former home in Herington Kansas turned out to be true.”
Steven Schwadron, Cong. Delahunt’s chief of staff, confirmed in the piece that the congressman’s staff had forwarded the warning to the FBI after receiving a letter about the hidden cache from Clemente and Dr. Dresch in early March. According to Sherman, the Bureau refused to comment on why it took weeks between the initial warning and the search to find the explosives, which had been buried beneath a home in a residential neighborhood.
In the story A.P. reporter Sherman confirmed that “The tip came from imprisoned mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr….an inmate in the same maximum security prison in Florence, CO where Nichols is serving life sentences for his role in the 1995 bombing.”
“Clearly the FBI—particularly Valerie Caproni, the general counsel—has every interest in discrediting Gregory Scarpa Jr.,” says Clemente, who first supplied me with Scarpa Jr.’s trove of intel from Yousef back in 2004. “Keep in mind that Caproni was one of the top Feds who went along with the story that Greg Jr.’s material from Yousef was a ‘hoax’ and a ‘scam,” and supported the four-decade sentence they gave him, even though Greg Jr. hadn’t been convicted of a single homicide. She thought he would be buried forever and they would throw away the key and now, here he was in March of 2005 tipping the FBI to another major embarrassment connected to a massive act of terror.”
BURYING THE MARIJUANA KING
Caproni, the former head of the criminal division in the EDNY, whose career was tied to the successful prosecution of those sixty remaining Colombo war cases, reportedly considers Scarpa’s conviction “one of her proudest accomplishments.” Or so she told Robert Vosper, who wrote a flattering profile of Caproni in the October 2004 issue of Corporate Legal Times.
“The younger Scarpa ran a lucrative marijuana operation in Brooklyn and Staten Island for the Colombo family,” Caproni told Vosper. “Not only was his crew dealing, but also forcing just about every drug dealer in Bensonhurst to pay a ‘street tax.’ When one dealer couldn’t pay off his $20,000 debt to Scarpa, the crew broke his cheekbone and both arms.” “The police said that when they took him to the hospital he looked like a fly,” Caproni told Vosper. “Both of his eyes were black and bloodshot, and his arms were broken. They beat the stuffing out of him.”
It’s true that Greg Jr. was known as “the marijuana king” of Staten Island. “But he has never been convicted of a single homicide,” says his former lawyer Larry Silverman. “So when Caproni and the other prosecutors in the EDNY supported that forty-year sentence, it had nothing to do with anything remotely resembling fairness or justice.”
“It was about the cover-up,” insists Clemente, who pushed to reopen the DeVecchio investigation along with Andrew Orena, the son of Vic Orena, the reputed head of the Colombo crime family, who got a life sentence in 1992. It was Orena’s faction, allegedly pitted against a faction of the family controlled by Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, that DeVecchio claimed had led to the infamous Colombo war between 1991 and 1992.
Back then, when Orena and his capo, Pasquale Amato, were sentenced to life, their attorneys had no idea that Greg Scarpa Sr. had not only instigated the war, but that he’d killed a third of the victims himself—and done so with the alleged support and encouragement of R. Lindley DeVecchio, the FBI’s top New York agent on organized crime.
By early 1992, Christopher Favo, DeVecchio’s number two in squad C-10 of the FBI’s New York Office, had become concerned that key intelligence on the location of witnesses in the Colombo war was finding its way to Scarpa Sr.
In January of that year, Favo gave DeVecchio what was thought to be the address of Orena’s girlfriend where he was believed to be hiding out. He also furnished a mistaken address for one of Vic’s soldiers. Later, a cooperating member of Scarpa’s crew admitted that he’d tried to kill both men by hunting them at the faulty addresses, which Greg Sr. had supplied to him from his “law enforcement” source.
It was that mistake on the hideout address that was one of the eight possible “disclosures” by DeVecchio to the “Grim Reaper” contained in EDNY prosecutor Ellen Corcella’s letter to defense lawyers on May 8, 1995. Corcella worked directly under Caproni, who was found to have withheld a key piece of exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys documenting the alleged corrupt relationship between the hitman and DeVecchio whom the killer referred to in code as his “girlfriend.”
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