Independent, UK McVeigh sought martyrdom 'to aid co-conspirators' By Andrew Gumbel and Mary Dejevsky 14 May 2001 Timothy McVeigh deliberately encouraged newspaper stories about his guilt in the Oklahoma City bombing from the earliest days of his case to deflect attention from other possible suspects, a new book by his trial lawyer shows. According to Stephen Jones, who represented McVeigh until his sentencing in 1997 and now feels unrestrained by any lawyer-client confidentiality, his client's strategy was always to be the focus of as much public indignation as possible so the world would believe he was some kind of demon terrorist mastermind who acted alone. "If no one else is arrested or convicted," Mr Jones quotes McVeigh as telling him, "then the revolution can continue." As early as May 1995, less than one month after the bombing that ripped apart the federal government office building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, The New York Times reported that McVeigh had confessed his guilt to at least two people. At the time the assumption was that he had said too much to his cell mates. But the new book reveals that it was Mr Jones himself who briefed The New York Times - at the express instruction of his client. The second person cited in the article was another member of the defence team. In the book, Mr Jones reproduces a signed statement from McVeigh written the day after the article appeared making clear that his lawyer had his authorisation to talk off the record. "I have read The New York Times story," the statement says. "It is consistent with what I authorised him to tell NY Times and it is accurate." This revelation is the latest indication that McVeigh and his government prosecutors developed a joint interest in denying the existence of other accomplices in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation initially mounted a search for a second suspect, known as John Doe 2, but after more than a year of fruitless investigation came to insist there was no such person - almost certainly to increase its chances of securing a conviction against McVeigh. The existence of a wider conspiracy, described in detail in The Independent last Friday, is likely to receive renewed attention following the discovery of thousands of pages of prosecution documents improperly withheld from Mr Jones's defence team during the trial. The documents, which have been sent to McVeigh's current legal team, came to light just six days before his scheduled execution. The disclosure embarrassed the authorities and forced the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to postpone the first federal execution since 1963 with just five days to go. A lawyer for McVeigh said yesterday that the defence team could seek a new trial, once it had perused the thousands of pages of evidence handed over by the FBI last week. It is believed the new documents include witness statements taken immediately after the bombing that indicate sightings of John Doe 2 and possibly other suspects too. Asked on NBC television whether McVeigh might seek a new trial, Rob Nigh - one of his two main lawyers - said: "It is certainly possible." But at this stage, he said, McVeigh was still reviewing his options. Responding to some of the popular fury unleashed by his decision to delay the execution, Mr Ashcroft told The Oklahoman newspaper that he would not authorise any new delay. "We feel that ample time has been provided, and I have no intention of further extending this deadline," he said Any decision about what happens next, however, rests not with Mr Ashcroft, but with McVeigh, his lawyers and the courts. Yesterday, few people - politicians, lawyers or the public - were very confident that the 11 June date would be kept. Among the most vocal was Gore Vidal, the writer and ardent opponent of the death penalty, who had been asked by McVeigh to witness his death by lethal injection and planned to write about it for Vanity Fair. Mr Vidal said he believed that the case "would drag on for ever more". And he noted the irony of the latest turn of events. "I have a number of thoughts on this," he said, "and one is that this has a nice symmetry to his story ... McVeigh was reacting to the FBI [the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco in Texas] and now his own case is jeopardised by their actions." Mr Jones, an experienced county lawyer from Enid, Oklahoma, who was widely criticised for botching the trial in a failed attempt to further his own conspiracy theories, first published his book, called Others Unknown, in 1998. For the new edition he has spoken freely about his client, arguing that it was McVeigh himself who broke their confidentiality agreement when he launched a wide-ranging attack on his reputation in a series of interviews with two reporters from his home town of Buffalo, New York. McVeigh insisted throughout his dealings with Mr Jones that there was no John Doe 2. Mr Jones, who did not believe him, persuaded him to undergo a polygraph test. Every time McVeigh was asked about other suspects, he failed the test. --------------------------------- Hunt for McVeigh gang ended within weeks By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 15 May 2001 Accomplice of McVeigh appeals over FBI blunder The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its search for suspects who may have helped Timothy McVeigh bomb the Oklahoma City federal building less than a month after the attack, an internal FBI memo obtained by The Independent shows. Despite witness sightings of accomplices with McVeigh in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing in April 1995, and despite a nationwide hunt for a man the authorities called "John Doe 2", the memo suggests that the search was quietly dropped, at least temporarily, in mid-May 1995. The memo is a report by a field officer in San Francisco, who tells his superiors he has made unsuccessful attempts to track down the landlord of a possible John Doe 2 - known in the bureau's own investigative jargon as "Unsub (for "unidentified subject") #2". "In view of the fact that the Oklahoma Command Post has directed all offices to hold Unsub #2 leads in abeyance, San Francisco will conduct no further investigation regarding this lead," the memo from Special Agent Thomas P Ravenelle reads. The exact day the memo was written is unknown, but it refers to an investigative lead taken up on 3 May 1995 and clearly abandoned shortly afterwards. Why the FBI would have dropped its interest in John Doe 2 so quickly is a mystery, but the decision is in keeping with the line eventually taken by government lawyers at the 1997 trials of McVeigh and his main known accomplice, Terry Nichols - that John Doe 2 did not, in fact, exist. The issue has returned to prominence after last week's revelation that the FBI had withheld more than 3,000 pages of evidence from the defence at the McVeigh and Nichols trials. The revelation prompted John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to announce a 26-day delay in McVeigh's execution, which had been due tomorrow. It is believed that the new documents contain witness statements on John Doe 2 and possibly other suspects. Defence lawyers have accused the US government of holding back evidence pointing to a wider conspiracy. Yesterday, Nichols' lawyers said they had asked the Supreme Court to reopen his case. McVeigh's execution has been put back to June 11, but many legal experts expect a much longer delay. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
