THE STATE VERSUS MCVEIGH

By Richard Lacayo

NO ONE IS SURE WHEN THE trial will begin. Maybe this fall, maybe early next year. First there are the months of pretrial motions. Depending on whether it's your side that makes them or theirs, the motions are either essential preliminaries or cynical delaying tactics. But as the nation marks the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the locus of that bitter and confounding episode is shifting to the eventual trial scene in Denver. Since federal courts don't ordinarily permit cameras, some families of the victims who won't be making the almost 600-mile trip from Oklahoma City are petitioning for special closed-circuit coverage. The defendants, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were moved last month from Oklahoma to a medium-security prison about 16 miles from the Denver courthouse. McVeigh told TIME that he prefers the new accommodations.

Meanwhile, the ceaselessly humming brain center for McVeigh's defense is elsewhere still, in Enid, Oklahoma, 68 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. On the 11th floor of the Broadway Tower, the tallest building in Enid's unhurried downtown, are the offices of Stephen Jones, McVeigh's court-appointed attorney.

Though Jones likes to call himself a "county-seat" lawyer, he spent part of his career in New York (as a young lawyer working for Richard Nixon) and another part in Washington as a congressional aide. His thinking doesn't stop at the county line. Prosecutors, led by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Hartzler, plan to lay the crime squarely at the feet of Nichols and McVeigh, two Army buddies immersed in the furies and paranoia of the extreme right wing. Jones plans to go global, arguing to the jury that his client is just a pawn in a conspiracy so vast that even he's not sure yet just what it is.

Outside the defense team, the common view is that the mind-boggling scope of the case is allowing Jones to fashion theories of whatever kind. Federal investigators have already turned over to the defense more than 21,000 witness statements, more than 400 hours of videotapes from various surveillance cameras and even satellite photographs of 20 sites in Oklahoma and Kansas that were taken by intelligence agencies. "It's the largest criminal investigation in the history of the U.S.," Jones points out. "Larger than Kennedy's death, larger than Oswald by any standard."

He means to make it even bigger. Over the past three months, Jones and a team of investigators have traveled in the U.S., Asia, the Middle East, Mexico and Europe to find evidence and experts of their own. (Because Jones is court-appointed, he conducts his research at the taxpayers' expense, just as the prosecution does. Records showing how much he has spent will remain sealed until after the trial.) What Jones is after is support for a conspiracy theory--or is it several theories?--in which Middle Eastern terrorists, German rightists and homegrown white supremacists are all brought onstage. And where Tim McVeigh gets lost in the crowd scenes. Jones appears to hope that he can persuade the jury that even if his client was involved with the crime, he bears diminished responsibility because he was no more than the triggerman in a larger plot.

For the record, McVeigh maintains his innocence. But if Jones should fall back upon the argument that his client played a part in the crime, but only a lesser one, he might at least spare him the death penalty. As a matter of law, if McVeigh committed the crimes with which he is charged, he would still be guilty even if he acted as an underling in a larger conspiracy. But if Jones can promote sufficient doubts and sympathies within the minds of the jurors, what the law directs may not matter.

In the indictment it handed down in August, the grand jury that charged McVeigh and Nichols with murder and conspiracy acknowledged that the pair may have worked "with persons unknown." Prosecutors are confident, however, that the two men were the prime movers behind the bombing and that the government has ample evidence of their involvement.

Witnesses identify McVeigh as the man who rented a Ryder van under a false name on April 17. During the days leading up to the blast, they place him and his truck at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kansas, about 200 miles from Oklahoma City, where he was registered under his own name. Other witnesses say that in the moments before the explosion they saw McVeigh, a Ryder truck and the beige Mercury in which McVeigh was later arrested all in front of the Alfred P. Murrah building.

The prosecution case will depend mostly upon physical evidence. McVeigh's fingerprints were found on a receipt for 40 one-fifth-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer--the chief ingredient in the Oklahoma bomb--that the FBI discovered at Nichols' home in Kansas, where they also found detonator cords with blasting caps. After McVeigh's arrest, traces of explosives were detected on his clothing and in his car. Prosecutors will argue that McVeigh and Nichols stashed the fertilizer in rented storage facilities, then mixed and assembled their bomb in a park near Nichols' farm. To clinch its case, the prosecution does have one star witness: Michael Fortier, another Army buddy of McVeigh's arrested in connection with the case. Last summer Fortier cut a deal to testify against his friend in return for lesser charges. He says he and McVeigh cased the Murrah building several months before the bombing.

Nichols' lawyer, Michael Tigar, is not talking as much to the press as Jones is, and he is expected to conduct his case in a less grandiose fashion, playing down Nichols' involvement in the plot without constructing a worldwide conspiracy. After hearing on the radio that he was sought for the crime, Nichols turned himself in and allowed agents to search his farm, a fairly grave mistake. But Fortier told investigators that McVeigh asked him to join the plot after Nichols got cold feet. And while prosecutors have significant evidence that he took part in the planning stages, no witness has so far placed Nichols at the scene.

While members of the prosecution team are convinced they have a powerful case, they know the jury is still likely to wonder whether Nichols and McVeigh had accomplices. Just who was John Doe 2, the dark-haired man who may have been with McVeigh when he rented the Ryder van? And among the many sightings of McVeigh, some are of no help to the prosecution. Mike Moroz, an employee at a service station in Oklahoma City, says that moments before the explosion McVeigh and another man pulled up to ask directions, which would be odd if the pair had studied the building frequently in advance, as the prosecutors allege. Jones claims that on April 19 there were as many as three Ryder trucks in Oklahoma City and that the one McVeigh was driving may not have been the one involved in the blast.

Jones has it in mind, however, to do much more than point up a few conflicts in the testimony about trucks. This week U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch, who is presiding over the case, will hold a hearing to rule on a defense request that the government turn over a mountain of classified information that was gathered right after the blast. Jones says he needs to see all the data the government gathered about possible foreign terrorist involvement. Prosecutors warn that granting the request could delay the trial for years. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, every intelligence officer and law-enforcement agent in the U.S. and around the world was checking up on groups under their surveillance. The information pipeline to Washington was clogged with tips leading nowhere.

Or everywhere. Jones sees a complicated plot with tentacles stretching around the world, a scenario suitable for Oliver Stone's next big picture about the Big Picture. Jones starts from the assumption that McVeigh and Nichols could not by themselves have built an ammonium nitrate bomb as powerful as the one that demolished the nine-story Murrah building.

Who, then, were their associates? One key to the answer, Jones thinks, is a white supremacist named Richard Wayne Snell. On the evening of the Oklahoma bombing, Snell was executed in Arkansas for the 1983 killing of a pawnbroker he mistakenly believed to be Jewish. In the early 1980s Snell and some associates conspired to blow up the Murrah building. His last words before his death were, "Look over your shoulder; justice is coming." Aha! says Jones. "Why would Snell think that unless he knew? One hypothesis is that a group of people decided to give the old man a going-away gift. Just blow up the building that he had wanted to blow up."

Snell's words might seem more prophetic if the blast had not happened 12 hours before he died. In any event, what would connect McVeigh to Snell's avengers? For that, Jones reaches to Andreas Strassmeir, 36, the ultra-right offspring of a politically prominent German family. In 1988 he came to the U.S. to indulge his fascination with the Civil War, racial politics and guns. In 1991 Strassmeir began to live on and off in Elohim City, a far-right religious community in eastern Oklahoma, where patriarch Robert G. Millar preaches his own variation of white-separatist ideology (northern Europeans are the real chosen people, with a "divine right to authority," and so on). Millar acted as Snell's "spiritual adviser" on death row. After Snell's execution, his body was brought back to Elohim City for burial.

According to one of Jones' more insubstantial theories, the Oklahoma bombing may have been a government sting operation that got wildly out of hand. Strassmeir, he hypothesizes, may have been an FBI informant who attempted to entrap McVeigh in a phony bombing scheme, only to see his intended victim carry the plan to its conclusion. Two weeks before the bombing, McVeigh placed a call to Elohim City, and Jones believes that McVeigh was trying to reach Strassmeir. McVeigh isn't saying whom he was calling. Strassmeir says in any case no one told him about the call or summoned him to the phone.

Strassmeir left the U.S. in December, after being approached by one of Jones' investigators, and surfaced later in Berlin. Reached there by phone last week, he denied any role in the bombing. He acknowledged that three years ago he bought some secondhand clothes from McVeigh at a Tulsa gun show and "probably" gave him an Elohim City business card. Otherwise, Strassmeir insists, they have not been in touch. "The only connection between me and McVeigh," he says, "is that I bought an old pair of pants from him in 1993."

Is that the cement of a conspiracy case? Well, says Jones, Strassmeir also knows Dennis Mahon, late of the Ku Klux Klan, now a leader of the White Aryan Resistance. Mahon sometimes spent weekends at Elohim City in a trailer he kept there, and Strassmeir sometimes stayed at Mahon's home in Tulsa. Jones says he has turned over to the prosecution statements that Mahon has made "to people assisting the defense" in which Mahon linked himself to the bombing. What were those statements? Jones won't say, claiming that as potential trial evidence they must remain confidential. Jones also says either Mahon or his brother Daniel owns a brown pickup truck that resembles the one witnesses say fled the Murrah building minutes before the bombing.

Mahon denies any direct role in the bombing. He does admit knowing Strassmeir but rejects any suggestion that his German friend was a government informant. "When you get drunk with a guy over a period of days, you get to know him," says Mahon. "Andi never pried into my activities; we just sat around talking about how much we hate the government."

For good measure, Jones has also tried to rope in some right-wing Britons. He has asked the court to allow him to talk to Kenneth Tyndall and Charles Sergeant, both of whom are active in ultra-right politics in England, and to David Irving, the British historian connected to circles of Holocaust deniers, whose new biography of Goebbels was canceled last week by a mainstream publisher (see page 103).

If those don't pan out, Jones is also hinting at a Middle East connection. For one thing, he is floating the idea that on the day before the bombing, Vince Cannistraro, the retired head of CIA counterterrorism operations, tipped the FBI to a terrorist attack planned by a Middle Eastern nation, possibly Iraq, against a U.S. facility, possibly the Murrah building. Not quite, corrects Cannistraro, who says the tip came to him on April 19, after the bombing, from a Saudi Arabian source he considered untrustworthy. Although he passed it on to the feds, it was with the warning that it was problematic. "Jones called me about this," says Cannistraro. "I pointed out to him that it came to me on the 19th and told him that the person didn't appear to have any credible information."

That aside, Jones still complains that neither of his chief targets, Strassmeir and Mahon, has been interviewed by the FBI. (Mahon says his lawyer has talked to the FBI, and Strassmeir has volunteered a 13-page statement to German police.) "My point," Jones says emphatically, "is that the investigation is incomplete."

One of the prosecutors' biggest challenges is to sit in silence while Jones sounds off--federal rules oblige them to avoid pretrial publicity--but this argument really brings out their exasperation. They want to know why, if McVeigh is the fall guy in a conspiracy, he hasn't told his own lawyer who the masterminds are. Why should Jones have to cast about for theories when McVeigh knows very well whom he talked to and when?

But the job of a good defense lawyer is to open questions, not close them. And in the jury deliberation room, unresolved questions have a way of growing into "reasonable doubt." Federal investigators know that, so they say they are still working leads. Jones wants them to know one more thing. He's still working them too.

--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Oklahoma City, James L. Graff/ Elohim City and Elaine Shannon/Washington