July 6, 1997
(Originally published in The Spotlight)
T
here is growing evidence that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith was closely monitoring the activities of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh long before the tragic April 19, 1995 bombing.What’s more, it appears that the ADL itself may have been manip-ulating McVeigh through an undercover operative in McVeigh’s inner circle.
On July 6, 1997 veteran Spotlight correspondent Michael Collins Piper appeared as a special guest on Tom Valentine’s weekly Radio Free America talk forum and discussed the evidence of ADL involvement in McVeigh’s activities and brought forth con-clusive evidence that the ADL had actively tried to “frame” Liberty Lobby, publisher of The Spotlight, for involvement in the crime.
What follows is an edited transcript of Piper’s appearance on RFA.
Tom Valentine: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith has tried to suggest that Liberty Lobby and The Spotlight were in some way “connected” to Timothy McVeigh and therefore involved in the bombing in Oklahoma City.
Michael Collins Piper: Ironically, the truth is quite precisely the opposite. Liberty Lobby and The Spotlight have firm evidence that the ADL’s so-called “fact finding” division had a source in Timothy McVeigh’s inner circle long before the bombing, and that the ADL (through this source) may well have been directing some of McVeigh’s activities prior to the bombing. Part of the ADL’s manipulation of McVeigh appears to have been a deliberate plan to
implicate Liberty Lobby in McVeigh’s activities. Yet, in each and every case, the fine hand of the ADL can be seen. So the big ques-tion is: “What did the ADL know, and when did the ADL know it?”
It seems pretty clear that Timothy McVeigh was an active participant in the bombing conspiracy. However, it’s also very clear that there were people (specifically the ADL) who knew what McVeigh was doing—and they are as guilty in the bombing as McVeigh if only for the reason that they did nothing to stop him.
What’s more disturbing, though, is that it appears the ADL was even manipulating him for its own insidious purposes.
Although a lot of people like to talk about “government fore-knowledge” of the Oklahoma bombing plot, the fact is that much of that “government foreknowledge” actually came to the FBI and the BATF, and probably even the CIA, from ADL informants active in the “right wing” (and even in the “left wing”) in America today.
Don’t forget that the ADL even had spies following Dr. Martin Luther King, and those ADL spies then turned that information over to the FBI. So it wasn’t really the FBI spying on King (as the media tells us); instead, it was the ADL. So, when you are talking about “government foreknowledge” of the bomb plot, you’re real-ly talking, largereal-ly, about “ADL foreknowledge” of the plot—and that’s something that the ADL doesn’t want people to know about.
So let’s discuss what the ADL did know about Timothy McVeigh.
Tom Valentine: A lot of people across America heard through the mainstream media that Timothy McVeigh was pur-portedly in the possession of a pre-paid telephone calling card purchased from The Spotlight. But you say that there’s much more to the story.
Michael Collins Piper: Let me tell you about that calling card. The Spotlight sponsored a pre-paid telephone calling card.
Many organizations have offered such calling cards. However, we at The Spotlight learned after the Oklahoma bombing that some-body—the FBI says it was Timothy McVeigh—had purchased a Spotlight calling card and made numerous calls all over the
coun-try in furtherance of the bombing conspiracy.
Here we were, sitting in Washington, D.C., getting thousands of orders for calling cards from all over the country. We had no idea who these people were. We processed their orders, sent out the cards, and people used them. These cards are available to the general public. You don’t even have to be a Spotlight subscriber, or even a supporter of The Spotlight’s populist political views, to buy or use this card.
However, here’s a very strange thing about the card that we have been told was purchased by McVeigh: the card was pur-chased by someone using the name “Daryl Bridges.” Based upon the evidence, it appears that the card was actually purchased by McVeigh.
The FBI came to The Spotlight, and we provided every detail and every bit of documentation we could provide. Although, as I said, all we had evidence of in our records was the fact that some-body using the name “Daryl Bridges” had ordered one of these cards. The name “Timothy McVeigh” did not appear in any of our records, although the card was sent to “Daryl Bridges” at an address in Michigan where, we now know, Timothy McVeigh lived.
The FBI says that this card was used to make calls to pur-chase supplies for the bomb that was supposedly used in the Oklahoma bombing (although as many people now know, there’s strong evidence that, more than likely, there was more than one bomb used).
We didn’t have any of the actual records of the calls at our office in Washington. All of the records of the calls are held at the service bureau that handled the calling card program for The Spotlight. We didn’t know where any of the calls originated, where they were directed, or who was using the card. To repeat, all we knew was that a card had been purchased by one “Daryl Bridges.”
Now this is what’s interesting: The FBI came back to The Spotlight and asked us, “Why did The Spotlight make calls using the Daryl Bridges calling card to Timothy McVeigh?” It surprised
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us, needless to say, that the FBI was making this allegation.
Here’s what appears to have happened. An employee at The Spotlight who processed the calling card orders recalls that he received calls here in Washington from somebody who said to them, “Would you please call us back using the calling card to see if the card is working?” (That is, the card registered in the name of “Daryl Bridges.”)
So, a Spotlight employee used the calling card access num-ber registered to “Daryl Bridges” to call that person back to veri-fy that the card was working. Therefore, a record of that call was made—or, as they would call it in intelligence jargon, a “legend.”
In other words, an innocent Spotlight employee used that same calling card access number to call back the person who had called The Spotlight, and then concluded that the calling card was indeed working. In fact, it appears that this scenario happened on more than one occasion with other calling card customers. Our assumption, of course, was that the person using the card was having some problem in using the card and we were simply trying to help the cardholder iron out the problem.
Now, after the Oklahoma bombing took place and we were notified by the FBI that McVeigh had a Spotlight calling card, we obviously told the FBI that we would cooperate in any way we could. However—and this is very disturbing—we learned just recently, in a report from the Scripps-Howard News Service, that the FBI was, even then, trying (behind the scenes and unknown to us) to use the calling card “evidence” to somehow prove that The Spotlight had been helping advance McVeigh’s efforts in the bomb-ing conspiracy.
Tom Valentine: In other words, The Spotlight’s role in this scenario was completely innocent, but the FBI was trying to sug-gest that The Spotlight was in communication with McVeigh, pre-sumably helping him in the bomb plot.
Michael Collins Piper: This is the whole crazy thing about it. We were getting these calls in Washington from somebody. We
get hundreds of calls from people daily. We don’t really know who is on the other end of the line. However, after all of this informa-tion came out about McVeigh’s purchase of the calling card (and his purported use of that card) one of our employees did remem-ber calls regarding the “Daryl Bridges” card.
The bottom line is that whoever called The Spotlight (whether it was McVeigh or somebody else) was trying to get The Spotlight to make outgoing calls using the calling card that the FBI now says was in McVeigh’s possession. In fact, the FBI seems to have been suggesting (although it’s certainly not true) that McVeigh himself had come to The Spotlight’s office in Washington and was using our telephone to make the outgoing calls charged to the pre-paid calling card registered to “Daryl Bridges.” And what’s really interesting, additionally, is that we don’t really know whether or not it was even McVeigh who was calling The Spotlight. For all we know it could have been someone else. All we know is that the caller was making inquiries about the “Daryl Bridges” card.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. It gets much deeper and much more interesting. The one thing that we are certain about is that there are people out there—people with long, close ties to the FBI and the BATF—who deliberately attempted to implicate The Spotlight and its publisher, Liberty Lobby, in the Oklahoma bombing. We are accusing them of having done this because they knew—in advance—that the bombing was going to happen and they wanted people to believe that The Spotlight was involved in this conspiracy.
Tom Valentine: You say that this is only the tip of the ice-berg. What else is there that leads you to the conclusion that there was a deliberate attempt to “frame” Liberty Lobby?
Michael Collins Piper: Well, two days after the bombing, we were sitting here in Washington, minding our own business, and The Washington Post reported—to our surprise, I must assure you—that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith had
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announced that a year before the bombing Timothy McVeigh, using an alias again, this time, “T. Tuttle,” had taken out a classified advertisement in The Spotlight.
Now, we don’t have our classified advertising records on computer, so this was a surprise to us, as I said. We immediately began to wonder how the ADL knew that McVeigh had taken out such an advertisement, particularly since it was under the name
“T. Tuttle.”
Here’s the interesting thing: I made several phone calls to check this out. One of the calls I made was to a friendly source who has very high-level connections. I told him about the “T.
Tuttle” advertisement and he chuckled and said, “Do you know how the ADL knew that McVeigh had advertised in The Spotlight?”
I said, “No, tell me.” He responded, “The ADL had a guy in McVeigh’s inner circle, close to McVeigh.”
So the very highly respected ADL, which calls itself a “civil rights organization,” had somebody running with McVeigh, work-ing closely with him. McVeigh had apparently told this person that he was going to take out an advertisement in The Spotlight or else—and this is probably the case—that ADL operative suggest-ed to McVeigh that he take out the advertisement in The Spotlight.
Only McVeigh and the ADL know for sure what really hap-pened. But if McVeigh is reading these words as they are pub-lished in The Spotlight, he could do a real public service by letting us know what did happen. By this time, I think, McVeigh has ably figured out for himself what really was going on and he prob-ably knows precisely who this ADL operative is.
The “T. Tuttle” advertisement was for a flare gun, yet the ADL reported that it was some sort of weapon—a rocket launcher. It was a simple flare gun modeled to look like a military weapon.
Now at that time, interestingly enough, The Spotlight had a policy that we did not carry advertisements for weapons of any kind.
However, based upon the ADL’s deliberate distortion of the truth, The Washington Post—and subsequently, the nationwide media—
reported that The Spotlight had carried an ad for a rocket launch-er. And needless to say there’s a mighty big difference between a flare gun and a rocket launcher.
Now, as I said, we were trying to figure out how the ADL knew that this advertisement had run, and when our source advised us that the ADL had a “ringer” in McVeigh’s inner circle, that explained a lot of things. However, based upon our own sub-sequent research, we came up with some additional data that con-firms even further that the ADL was up to its neck in McVeigh’s covert affairs for a long time prior to the bombing.
This gets even more interesting, as you’ll see. The Washington Post report regarding “T. Tuttle” (based upon a press release by the ADL) appeared only in the early edition of The Washington Post on April 21—two days after the bombing.
However, that same story ran, almost verbatim, in the later edi-tion that day, but in that later ediedi-tion the Post deleted the refer-ence to the ADL and its allegations regarding “T. Tuttle.”
Now this is my personal speculation, but I think it’s based upon reality: the reason why The Washington Post deleted this information was because within the period immediately after it was reported that the ADL had discovered that their own infor-mation was incorrect, and that they (the ADL) realized by that time that the incorrect nature of their information pointed to one little (or one big) problem: the fact that the ADL had incorrect information actually points toward the fact that the ADL knew, in advance, about Tim McVeigh’s plans to advertise in The Spotlight.
Here’s the evidence which indicts the ADL of having fore-knowledge of Timothy McVeigh’s plans to conduct an advertising campaign in The Spotlight: although “T. Tuttle” (presumably McVeigh) had contracted to run an ad in four consecutive issues of The Spotlight, the advertisement did not run the first week (in the issue of August 9, 1993) in which it was scheduled to run. The ad did not run until one week later in the August 16, 1993 issue.
However, when the ADL went to The Washington Post and
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told them that McVeigh had run an advertisement in The Spotlight, the ADL claimed that the ad had run in the August 9 issue.
Although the ADL knew that McVeigh had contracted to run an ad in the August 9 issue, what the ADL didn’t know was that we had a production problem in-house at The Spotlight and that the ad did not run as initially intended.
What happened was that the ADL, based upon its own pre-knowledge of McVeigh’s intentions to advertise in The Spotlight, eagerly went public after the bombing to announce that McVeigh had advertised in The Spotlight. Then the ADL realized that they had made a mistake and they turned around and went to the Post and evidently told them to “shut up and forget about it,” which the Post did. You won’t even find that early edition of the Post in the Library of Congress. It’s gone down the Memory Hole.
Here’s something else rather interesting. The Spotlight’s managing editor had actually noticed the “T. Tuttle” advertisement and thought that there was something strange about it. He pulled the ad, saying: “We don’t run ads for weapons in The Spotlight,”
and the ad only ran in three issues, rather than in four issues as scheduled. Yet, the ADL had in its records the information that Timothy McVeigh, using the name “T. Tuttle” had—more than a year before the Oklahoma bombing—advertised in The Spotlight.
The FBI need not come to me or to anyone on The Spotlight staff and ask any of us about any association with Timothy McVeigh. I would say to the FBI’s Louis Freeh: “What did the ADL know about Timothy McVeigh, and when did they know it?” The Spotlight didn’t know anything. It’s a very big question.
The Oklahoma City grand jury investigating the bombing could, and should, call as witnesses people from the ADL such as Abe Foxman, the ADL national director, Irwin Suall, the ADL’s longtime “fact finding” director, and Mira Lansky Boland, the “for-mer” CIA officer who runs the ADL office in Washington.
If the grand jury pushed the matter they could actually indict Foxman, Suall and Boland for pre-knowledge of the activities of
Timothy McVeigh and indict them for conspiracy in the bombing.
This is a lot of eye-opening information for people to digest—
information that’s not been reported anywhere except by The Spotlight—but people need to think about it carefully and start asking, “What’s going on here?”
Tom Valentine: But the conspiracy to frame Liberty Lobby goes even further, doesn’t it?
Michael Collins Piper: That’s right. And at this juncture I’m going to relate some rather unsettling facts which prove beyond any question that somebody other than Timothy McVeigh knew that there was going to be a bombing in Oklahoma City. Yet, the federal prosecutors are saying that only McVeigh and Terry Nichols were involved in the conspiracy, and that only Michael Fortier and his wife had any pre-knowledge of the conspiracy. Yet there’s hard evidence that proves that somebody else was also involved.
Now the Oklahoma City bombing happened on April 19, 1995. On April 20—the day after the bombing—a mail clerk at The Spotlight opened an envelope postmarked “Oklahoma City”
that was mailed to The Spotlight on April 17, two days before the bombing. That postmark was put there by the United States gov-ernment—the post office. You can’t get any more “official” than that. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a fact. The Spotlight did not put that postmark there. The post office did it. This enve-lope and its contents were mailed before the bombing.
Inside that envelope was a postcard. Now we received it the day after the bombing when everybody in the country knew that there had been this tragedy in Oklahoma City. The postcard in the envelope was a Depression era photograph which depicted a dust storm over Oklahoma. The caption indicated that the photograph depicted a dust storm approaching Oklahoma and this picture (which is rather famous and which I am sure I had seen before) was entitled Black Sunday.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that there was a popular
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Hollywood motion picture some years ago about terrorism in America, and it too was entitled Black Sunday.
You can imagine how the ladies in our mailroom reacted when they saw this postcard (mailed from Oklahoma City two days
You can imagine how the ladies in our mailroom reacted when they saw this postcard (mailed from Oklahoma City two days