Book Review

Essential Reading
Growing Evidence of Long-Term Iraqi, Iranian and Other Islamist Cooperation in Attacks on US Targets

The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing. By Jayna Davis; foreword by David P. Schippers, former Chief Investigative Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee. Nashville, Tennessee, 2004: WND Books. ISBN: 0-7852-6103-6. 355pp, hardcover. $24.99.

Reviewed by Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. 

Evidence continues to mount of how effectively the former US Administration of Pres. William Clinton misdirected key elements of the US intelligence community (IC) for political purposes. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is the fact that this distortion of the IC for such purposes left a legacy which contributed directly to the environment which allowed the successful terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and to subsequent failures by the IC in effectively assessing ongoing terrorist threats. Only belatedly are elements of the overall picture becoming clear in such a way that they may, even now, be of importance in reassessing the overall threat environment facing the US and the West.

Given the fact that so many careers in the US IC were forced along politically-directed paths, it is surprising that Jayna Davis' outstandingly-researched book, The Third Terrorist: the Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing, was even published. The painstaking original field collection of data from primary sources is overwhelmingly conclusive in highlighting how the April 19, 1995, terrorist bombing occurred which demolished most of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the United States. Significantly, as the book appears on US bookstore shelves, the second of the two US-born accomplices in the bombing, Terry Nichols, continues his trial in the US courts, nine years after the bombing. His co-accused in the bombing, Timothy McVeigh, now executed for his rôle in the bombing which killed 186 people and injured some 500 more, is now clearly seen in his true colors as one of the least-significant of the perpetrators of what was, at that time, the biggest single terrorist attack on US soil.

Davis, a journalist with Oklahoma City television station KFOR, was assigned to cover the bombing as soon as it occurred, and she became aware, from the beginning, that there was a visible, documentable link with Iraq. But it also became clear within several hours of the bombing that US Federal law enforcement organizations " most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) " had been told to suppress any evidence of, or even discussion of any Middle Eastern involvement in the bombing and to assign blame to US right-wing militia activity, who had been encouraged by the conservative radio talk-show hosts who had bedeviled the Clinton Administration. The exact or detailed motivations for the Clinton Administration actions can only be surmised at this point, but it is clear that Clinton's Attorney-General, Janet Reno, acted rapidly and decisively to suppress any honest and meaningful pursuit of the perpetrators of the bombing.

It is possible "even probable" that Pres. Clinton wanted to use the opportunity to blame the violence in the US heartland on his conservative political opposition to take the momentum out of the politically-powerful conservative talk-radio programming which had become his bête noir. Indeed, as Davis points out in her book, the Clinton Administration immediately did, in fact, lay the blame for the bombing at the door of these radio hosts.

But it is more probable, given the speed with which Attorney-General Reno acted in the few hours following the bombing, that the Clinton Administration leadership was anxious to avoid any recognition of Middle Eastern involvement in the bombing because such an event would automatically call for "at US popular insistence" a military response against the perpetrators of the crime. Essentially, the Oklahoma City bombing would have been the “9/11 trigger” which did not come for another six years.

Jayna Davis, however, is careful to document only what she can prove. She does not ascribe motives to the US intelligence or political leadership for actions taken at the time of the bombing an din the subsequent investigations. But the conclusions are inescapable.

She documents, through formal enquiries and on-the-record witness recordings, the multiple observations of Iraqi nationals " mostly ex-military " engaged in events leading up to and including the bombing. She documents the links of these men to McVeigh and Nichols, and to other Middle Eastern figures linked, for example, to Palestinian movements. She documents the travel of Nichols on some 20 occasions to the Philippines and highlights the connections between Nichols and key Islamist terrorists, including key Abu Sayyaf bomber Ramzi Yousef and others. The links were there, too, with other such Osama bin Laden followers as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the key architects of the September 11, 2004, attacks on the US and others involved in planning the (failed) 1995 series of attacks on trans-Pacific airliners, codenamed Project Bojinka. 

What Jayna Davis points out is something that had been overlooked by many analysts: "Bojinka" is Serbo-Croat for "big noise"; the bombings were to take out a dozen US-bound airliners within a 48 hour period. Once again, the linkages begin to emerge: with Iraq, with Palestinian groups, with the Bosnia-based (Serbo-Croat speaking) terrorist networks, with Iran, and, ubiquitously, with the groups which included Osama bin Laden and which conducted the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center. 

Unbeknownst to Davis during most of her enquiries was the fact that her research mirrored intelligence flowing into the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, led by Yossef Bodansky. It was, to a large extent, only when her enquiries led her into contact with Bodansky that she realized that what she thought she had perceived in the pattern of information was also being perceived by others.

In 1999, before Jayna Davis' book was written, Bodansky was to document in his book, Osama bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, the presence in Sydney, Australia, for an Islamist terrorist organizational structure which mirrored the Oklahoma City network; both were staffed with Iraqi ex-soldiers, but had links into Islamist operations. The advance knowledge of the Sydney operation helped to ensure that the group was unable to cause problems for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

Significantly, Davis' work " with its unimpeachable legal documentation of witness reports and other research " highlights, supports and makes more clear the importance of a range of other known factors, including " as Bodansky outlined in his bin Laden book " the 1995 visit to the US, and to Oklahoma City, of the number two man in the bin Laden al-Qaida network, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri. Bodansky's earlier (1994) book, Terror! The Inside Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America, had already paved the way for an understanding of the 2001 al-Qaida attacks on the US and should have paved the way for an understanding of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

As Davis and Bodansky have consistently pointed out, the bomb used in Oklahoma City was absolutely patterned on devices created by the known Islamist groups for operations in Argentina and elsewhere. 

Jayna Davis' The Third Terrorist is compelling in its disingenuous and transparent honesty and its attempt to bring important evidence into the public and policy arenas. And yet there are many in the US intelligence community who are not anxious to admit that they were forced to follow a political line in their investigations of the Oklahoma City bombing, and that this political expediency meant that earlier action was not taken to stop a wider terrorist and counter-terrorist war. Still others cannot yet grasp the fluidity and global nature of the terrorist threat, its links between seemingly disparate groups and seemingly antagonistic governments.

The reality now is that the evidence is now becoming available, through such books as The Third Terrorist and Bodansky's books. The Third Terrorist is absolutely essential reading for intelligence professionals, those engaged in counter-terrorism, and in the media, which plays such a key rôle in both the viability of terrorism as a tool of psycho-political warfare and in the counter-terrorism wars.