Telephone records, which frequently provide strong circumstantial evidence in criminal investigations, are certain to figure prominently in the prosecution of primary Oklahoma City bombing suspects Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, as well as of co-defendant Michael Fortier, who was indicted on lesser charges after turning state’s witness last year. According to federal prosecutors, the phone records of the defendants during the weeks and months before the deadly blast furnish clear proof of their ongoing collusion in important phases of the planning, preparation, and execution of the crime.
The New American has obtained copies of phone records for the trio, and they do indeed provide prima facie evidence linking the former Army buddies together at critical junctures coinciding with key events the prosecution claims are integrally connected to the terrorist plot. The telephone calls supply important details for a time line, purportedly establishing the whereabouts of the suspects on important dates and their alleged communications concerning the planned bombing and other criminal acts. The records also indicate an association of sorts between the defendants and a notorious white-power group whose leader penned an apocalyptic race-war novel that, reportedly, had a major impact on McVeigh. Even more important, as reported in the June 24th issue of The New American, the phone records also add corroboration to eyewitness testimony and other evidence of a connection between McVeigh, a mysterious German national named Andreas Strassmeir, and a rural “Christian Identity” commune in eastern Oklahoma known as “Elohim City.”
Long-Distance Record
In the federal indictment filed last August 10th, the government charged that “McVeigh and Nichols made calls with a telephone calling card that they had acquired in a false name as a means of concealing their true identities and as a means of preventing calls from being traced to them.”
If the accused duo did truly acquire the calling card in question for the purpose of hiding their communications concerning the bombing conspiracy, they were pitifully ignorant of the means they were choosing. Far from providing anonymity, the calling card apparently has yielded a detailed and incriminating trail of communiques.
The prepaid telephone debit card was discovered in a date book when authorities searched Terry Nichols’ home in Herrington, Kansas. According to a letter of January 17, 1996 from United States Attorney Patrick M. Ryan and his assistant Joseph H. Hartzler, to defense attorneys for McVeigh and Nichols, the phone card was issued through The Spotlight, a Washington DC-based tabloid published by Liberty Lobby, to a fictitious name and was serviced by West Coast Telephone Company and OPUS Telecommunications.
“On or about November 12, 1993,” notes the Ryan/Hartzler letter, “an application for a Spotlight prepaid card was submitted in the name of Daryl Bridges.” The mailing address given for “Daryl Bridges” was the Decker, Michigan address for the farm of James Nichols, brother of Terry Nichols. “The Bridges calling card was activated with an initial payment of $50 in November 1993 and additional payments were made to recharge the calling card thereafter,” write the prosecutors. The “recharge” payments, according to the Justice Department letter, were made with seven money orders “payable to Spotlight and from Daryl Bridges.” Two of the money orders “were purchased in the name of Terry Nichols, one was purchased in the name of Jim Kyle, and one was purchased in the name of Joe Rivers.” The last two names are strikingly similar to “Joe Kyle” and “Shawn Rivers,” two of the many aliases the federal indictment charges McVeigh and Nichols used to rent storage units in Nevada and Kansas to conceal explosives and stolen property.
Plausible “Road Map”
An FBI computer printout of nearly 50 pages of records lists 684 calls placed on the calling card from December 7, 1993 to April 17, 1995. Another hundred pages of FBI printout lists hundreds of calls placed from, and received at, telephone numbers registered to Nichols, McVeigh, and Fortier in Arizona, Kansas, and Nevada.
The FBI computer printout, compiled from telephone company records, reflects the date, time, and duration of both outgoing and incoming calls. The records, while open to interpretation, do admit of a plausible “road map,” identifying the telephone subscriber (business or individual) on both ends of calls by name, city, and state.
This paper trail shows a flurry of telephone calls on the “Daryl Bridges” card placed from pay phones in Kansas during September and October 1994 — six to seven months before the bombing — to companies throughout the state who are suppliers of chemicals, explosives, and auto racing fuel. According to the prosecution, these two dozen calls during the period of September 26th to the 29th, and on October 24th, were made to obtain racing fuel, chemicals, detonators, and plastic barrels used in the truck bomb that exploded in Oklahoma City.
The Bridges/Spotlight card shows that on April 5, 1995, two weeks before the bombing, Timothy McVeigh (or someone using his and Nichols’ card number) placed a 42-second call at 1:43 p.m. from the Imperial Hotel in Kingman, Arizona to the Ryder Truck Rental agency in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. This was the initial call, contends the prosecution, to arrange the rental of the Ryder truck.
Elohim Connection
Interestingly, immediately after that call — at 1:46 p.m. — another call on the same card was placed from the same location to a phone at “Elohim City,” the white separatist commune near Muldrow, Oklahoma founded by Robert Millar, long associated with notorious leaders of the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialists, and other subversive groups.
The phone number called was registered to Millar’s son David, and was answered by Millar’s daughter-in-law, Joan Millar. Mrs. Millar’s account of the call has varied, according to several of the different reporters and investigators who have interviewed her and Robert Millar. The Tulsa World reported her as recounting that the caller “didn’t identify himself as Timothy McVeigh,” but apparently wanted to talk with Andreas “Andi” Strassmeir, a 36-year-old German national who had been living at the settlement for several years.* According to an account from another investigator, Mrs. Millar has said that the caller told her to “tell Andi I’ll be coming through in a few days.”
* Much evidence suggests that Strassmeir, who associated closely with violent KKK and neo-Nazi elements, may have been a federal undercover operative. See “More Pieces to the OKC Puzzle,” in our June 24th issue.
Also interesting is the record of another call later that day on the same debit card from the same location to the National Alliance telephone number in Mohave Valley, Arizona. The National Alliance is led by neo-Nazi William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a racist novel embraced by neo-Nazi and Aryan groups and individuals. (See “Hard Left’s ‘Right-Wing’ Kin” in the June 24th issue of The New American.) The phone records show that the three minute, 36-second call was placed at 8:44 p.m. An additional eight calls to the same National Alliance number were made on April 6th and 7th.
According to Richard Coffman, who operated the National Alliance phone line in Arizona, the caller only identified himself as “Tim Tuttle,” an alias often used by McVeigh, and only left a Kingman mailing address. The National Alliance’s Arizona phone line is now disconnected and Mr. Coffman has made himself scarce.
There are other McVeigh connections, however, to Pierce and the National Alliance. Records for the phone registered under McVeigh’s name in Kingman show a four-minute call to the National Alliance’s telephone number in West Virginia back on May 23, 1993. CNN has reported that McVeigh telephoned Pierce’s West Virginia number shortly before the bombing. However, Pierce denies this and CNN has not produced its evidence. The FBI phone records obtained by The New American do not provide any evidence of such a call.
It should be noted, though, that the absence of a call in the aforementioned records does not preclude a call by McVeigh from a phone not included in the FBI source numbers. For instance, Kirk Lyons, radical attorney for neo-Nazi causes (and for Andreas Strassmeir), has admitted that his office received a lengthy call from Timothy McVeigh the day before the bombing. Significantly, that telephone call does not show up in the phone records this magazine has obtained.
Message of Hate
Attempts by The New American to contact William Pierce were unsuccessful. In a recent call to Pierce’s neo-Nazi telephone number in Oakton, Virginia, we were greeted with a message, apparently recorded by Pierce himself, which said, “Thank you for calling the National Alliance,” and referred us to a post office box in Hillsboro, West Virginia for correspondence. The friendly voice then turned ominous as it delivered this dark message:
It is a crime worse than murder. You have seen it in our shopping centers. You have seen it on the street. You see it every day. The crime is race mixing. It is a crime worse than murder — far worse. You are a witness to genocide. For when a murderer kills, one man dies; one life and all of its potential is ended. But the race mixer slays countless future generations in ever-expanding waves of genetic death….
This “unspeakable act,” this “horrible crime” of miscegenation brings into the world “hybrid young” who destroy the purity of the white race. And, says the Pierce telephone message, “all those who do not speak out against this racial treason are complicit in the crime.”
Pierce’s hate-filled rantings are, of course, repugnant to all genuine patriots and are no more representative of conservative or “right-wing” thought than his socialist political-economic diatribes. In the 1960s, Pierce became top assistant to American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and edited the Party’s magazine, the National Socialist World. Although it should be common knowledge, it is, unfortunately, little known today that the term “Nazi” was a shorthand expression for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler was a thoroughgoing socialist. Ditto for Rockwell, Pierce, and their neo-Nazi disciples. Thus, notwithstanding the frequent and disingenuous expropriation of the labels “patriot” and “Christian” for their odious cause, contemporary Hitlerites — like those before them — are infinitely closer to their Marxist kinsmen on the left than to the principled conservatives, constitutionalists, and Christians whom the left-wing establishment media labor unceasingly to smear with the neo-Nazi label.