Key Witness Against Nichols Takes Stand

The government’s pivotal informant in the Oklahoma City bombing case--Michael Fortier--testified Wednesday that convicted bomber Timothy J. McVeigh had dropped a series of hints that Terry L. Nichols had conspired with him to blow up a federal office building.

Specifically, Fortier testified that McVeigh wrote him that he and Nichols were planning a “positive offensive action” against the government after the FBI’s raid on a religious cult near Waco, Texas, in 1993 in which about 80 people died.

For Fortier, 28, it was the second time that he has served as a government witness in the April 1995 bombing case. Earlier this year, he was the government’s chief witness against McVeigh in a trial that resulted in McVeigh’s conviction and death sentence. The blast at the Alfred P. Murrah building killed 168 people.

On Wednesday, Fortier took the witness stand much as he had before, wearing a tan suit and tie, looking much different from his unkempt appearance as an anti-government radical in Kingman, Ariz., before the 1995 bombing.

He testified for 45 minutes late in the afternoon and is to return to the witness stand this morning.

Fortier, Nichols and McVeigh became friends in the late 1980s when all three served in the Army at Ft. Benning, Ga., and later at Ft. Riley, Kan. While Fortier and McVeigh became close friends (McVeigh was best man at his wedding), Fortier said he and Nichols were merely “acquaintances.” At one point, Nichols was Fortier’s platoon leader.

Sometime after August 1994, Fortier said, he received a letter from McVeigh.

In the letter, Fortier said, “Tim was asking me if I would help him and Terry in taking some type of action. I believe it said they were going to take a positive offensive action.”

Fortier said he refused to help. Instead, he testified, he wrote McVeigh. “I told him I was curious about what he was talking about,” Fortier said.

Soon afterward, he said, McVeigh “showed up at my house” and they discussed McVeigh’s plans during a conversation in Fortier’s frontyard.

“He told me that what he meant by taking action was that they were planning on bombing a building,” Fortier said.

But Fortier said McVeigh “didn’t say specifically” whom he meant by “they.”

“He just asked me if I wanted to be a part of it,” Fortier said. “I said no. I said I would never do anything like that unless there was a U.N. tank in my frontyard.”

Fortier was referring to his and McVeigh’s suspicions that the United Nations was planning to form a “new world order” and take over the United States.

Several weeks later, Fortier testified, he accompanied Nichols and McVeigh to a storage locker near Kingman, Ariz., where they showed him a box of explosives. The government contends that Nichols and McVeigh stole the explosives from a Kansas rock quarry.

“Tim and I pulled in and parked behind Terry,” Fortier said. “Tim or Terry opened the locks, I’m not sure which, and we got in and Tim showed me some explosives.”

At the same time, he said, Nichols “was going from the storage locker to his truck and back and forth. He was loading stuff into his truck.”

Fortier said he was angry at the time about the FBI’s 1993 raid on the Waco compound, believing “at the very least, they committed manslaughter, that they had started the fire themselves” that razed the compound. Federal officials believe that the cultists started the fire.

McVeigh, he recalled, “said it was murder.”

Fortier said he and McVeigh often talked about their shared far-right ideologies, even to the point of discussing forming their own anti-government militia. But he was not asked by prosecutors about Nichols’ far-right political leanings.

Fortier pleaded guilty two years ago to four federal charges, including lying to the FBI about his knowledge of the bombing and transporting stolen weapons that the government says were sold to pay for the bomb components.

As part of his agreement to testify in the two trials, Fortier said, the government has promised that “they would bring no further charges against me.”

Prosecutors have indicated that they might ask for a prison term reduction for Fortier, who faces a maximum of 23 years when he is sentenced after the Nichols trial.