I have wondered if there werent a few co-conspirators, I never thought there was any government involvement, or foreign involvement, I do hope we got the 2 vipers that did it _all_...

I don't think there was anyone inside the gov't who wanted that bomb to go off. I think it might have been a sting operation gone wrong - McVeigh was being an informant, but not telling the gov't all of the information, such as exactly what time the bomb was going off. I think that would explain the reports of bomb squad trucks on the scene that morning, and a few other things.

And that's really my goal here - trying to reconcile as many reports as possible.

About foriegn involvement, this passage is from the newly release 1000 Years for Revenge by Peter Lance. I apologize for the length.

The case for a Mideast connection to the blast is curcumstantial bu worthy of review, given what we now know about Ramzi Yousef's capabilities, and about a curious series of events and conncections leading up to the blast. None of them, in isolation, is conclusive, but as pieces of the larger "mosaic" they raise questions.

On the morning of April 19, while sitting in his cell in New York federal jail, Abdul Hakim Murad made a startling claim. After listening to a radio report on the Oklahoma City bombing, a Bureau of Prisons guard went to Murad's cell. When the guard asked what Murad thought about the bombing, the prisoner shot back, "That was us." "What are you talking about?" Asked the startled guard. "Oklahoma City. The bomb," said Murad. "We did that." ....

[The feds then sent a couple agents to get the story]...In the trial of Yousef, Murad, and Shah for the Bojinka plot a year later, the Feds would point to that [report] as evidence that as late as April 19, 1995, Murad was still involved in a conspiracy....

....Yousef and Shah applied for thier fiinal visas to the Philippines in Singapore on November 3, 1994. The very next day, at the Philippines consulate in Chicago, Nichols got his visa. Trial records and documents from the Philippine National Police show that Nichols was in Cebu City at the same time as Yousef in December 1994 -- staying in a section of the Visayas island group that was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism...

Lance goes on to explain that Terry Nichols married a 19-yr-old Filipina named Marife Torres in 1989, after he divorced his first wife, Lana Padilla. Torres was from Cebu City. Nichols was out of work and broke. He was sued for almost $18,000 in credit card debt. But he was getting money from somewhere.

He made at least 4 trips to the Philippenes from 1990 to 1994, and lived with Torres in Cebu city for a while. Before leaving again for the Philippenes in November '94, Nichols left letters for his ex-wife, Padilla, to be opened if he didn't return within 60 days. One of the letters told cVeigh to empty some storage lockers an "go for it." The postscript said: "This would be for the purposes of my death." Padilla thought he might commit suicide, so she opened her letter. There was a bag hidden in her kitchen with $20,000 in it. Nichols was in Cebu City while Yousef was in Manila, planning the Bojinka operation, an assasination attempt on the Pope, and a plot to fly a plane with explosives into CIA headquarters.

This might be sismissed as coincidental -- except for a sworn affadavit from Edwin Angeles, the former leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group, who later cooperated with the Philippene National Police (PNP.)

During a police interrogation in 1996, Angeles swore that he had met Yousef, Shah, and Murad in Davao City in the southern Philippenes as early as 1991. Present at the meeting, he said, was a man named Terry Nichols, who was introduced to Angeles as "a farmer." Angeles said they discussed "training on bomb makeing and handling." In a summary of the police report on the terrogation, Angeles identified the site of the meeting as the Del Monte labeling factory in Davao City. He later drew a sketch of the so-called "farmer" that bore a striking resemblance to Nichols.

PNP documents show that Murad was training at a Philippenes flight school from Dember 1990 to January 1991. Yousef wa on the sourthern Philippene island of Basilan training Abu Sayyaf terrorists in the summer of 1991....

....after Nichols left Manila, a phone card used by him and McViegh in the name of Darryl Bridges shoed a total of seventy-eight calls to guest house in Cebu where Marife had been staying. The guest house was owned by her uncle, who had once lived in Saudi Arabia. It was reportedly frequented by Muslim fundamentalist students from a nearby college...

...Yousef had fled Manila by the time Nichols left in mid-January 1995, and there's no hard evidence that the two ever met in December 1994. The only time that Yousef was known for certain to be in Cebu during this period was for a few hours as he fled back to Manila following his "wet test" on the PAL flight December 11. But the logbook of the Dona Josefa apartments shows visits to Room 603 by a man named "Nick" while Yousef was in residence.

It's impossible to say whether that "Nick" was Terry Nichols, but the idea that two men connected to the two most notorious bombings on U.S. soil would be in the same remote town in the Philippines seems more than coincidental, especially considering that each of them was connected to a fertilizer-fuel device of enromous destructive power, delivered to its target in a yellow Ryder truck...

....right after that trip Nichols and McVeigh reportedly began building a device of enormous destructive power -- despite the fact that they were relatively inexperienced bomb makers. That point was underscored at trial by Michael Fortier, the government's star witness.

He testified that while the pair experimented with small pope and bottle bombs, McViegh's one attempt at exploding an ammonium nitrate-fuel oil device in a milk jug "didn't work."

"The one time that we know of when McViegh experiments with an AFNO bomb it's a dud," Oklahoma attorney Mike Johnston said in an interview for this book. "Then Nichols goes to the Philippines while Ramzi is there, and after that these guys build an even more sophisticated ammounim nitrate-nitromethane device that takes down the Federal Building. What are the odds.

Stephen Jones, McVeigh's lawyer, asked McVeigh where he got the knowledge to make the bomb. He could only draw a crude sketch of the bomb. He claimed that he got the info from a book at the Kingman, Arizona public library. McVeigh couldn't remember the title. Jones' invesigators couldn't find anything like it in the library. McVeigh maintained until his death that he acted alone.

All of this information was taken from pp. 311-315 of 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI by Peter Lance. It is an excellent book.