THE FRINGE CONNECTIONS

By PATRICK E. COLE/LOS ANGELES, CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER/NEW YORK, JAMES L. GRAFF/CHICAGO AND SYLVESTER MONROE/ATLANTA

Was Timothy McVeigh involved with bank robbers indicted last week in Philadelphia? Was the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta plotted in the Northwest? Last week two of the country's most infamous bombings were tenuously linked to crimes allegedly wrought by white supremacists. The connections, mostly speculative, have intrigued investigators and provided conspiracy theorists with much to ponder:

A Tale of Three Cities: Accountant Glenn Wilburn lost two grandsons in the April 1995 blast that destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building. Since that day, he has collected what he believes are leads abandoned by government investigators, hoping a grand jury will be impaneled to probe further. "All roads to Oklahoma City lead to Elohim City," says Wilburn, referring to a white-supremacist compound in the eastern part of the state. A telephone record he has collected (it was made public by the government) shows McVeigh calling Elohim City two weeks before the bombing. Although he offers no hard evidence, Wilburn contends that McVeigh had visited the camp between June 1993 and the bombing and was close to several residents, including Andreas Strassmeir, a German with alleged neo-Nazi links. Wilburn also claims that McVeigh knew an associate of Strassmeir's, Michael Brescia, who last week was indicted for a series of bank robberies. McVeigh's lawyer denies they had a relationship. Strassmeir, who has returned to Berlin, says he knew McVeigh only in passing.

Brescia was indicted along with Mark William Thomas, one of the more eloquent gurus of the Aryan Nations movement. Thomas is accused of recruiting young men to rob banks on behalf of the Aryan Republican Army. Using handguns, wearing bulletproof vests and, at one point, Santa suits, the gang hit banks in Ohio, Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin in 1994 and 1995. Brescia joined the gang in August 1995, after another indictee, Scott Stedeford, drove to Elohim City to pick him up.

From Spokane to Atlanta? The Aryan Republican Army and the Phineas Priesthood share two things: the ideology of Christian Identity, which holds that northern Europeans are the chosen people of God; and a current round of prosecution for bank robbery. After one of the biggest manhunts in the Northwest, three members of the Priesthood were arrested in October and charged in a string of bombings and robberies that occurred last year: on April 1 masked men robbed the Spokesman-Review, a Spokane, Washington, daily, and minutes later robbed and bombed a nearby bank; on July 12 a local Planned Parenthood clinic was bombed and the same bank robbed again. Last week stories in the Spokesman-Review alleged that the Priesthood may have been involved in the Olympic bombing last July 27. An unnamed Atlanta architect claimed that an hour before the blast, he saw Spokane suspect Robert Berry near Centennial Olympic Park, which was part of the AT&T Global Village at the Games. Berry's co-suspect, Charles Barbee, is a former employee of AT&T who told the Spokesman-Review in 1995 that the company coddles its gay and lesbian workers. The FBI reportedly has records that show someone made collect calls from Atlanta to Barbee's home in the Idaho Panhandle around the time of the explosion. Meanwhile, an FBI informant apparently sold the suspects a backpack similar to the one used in Atlanta.

Burned by the Richard Jewell debacle, the FBI has been cautious about drawing any public conclusions. Even privately, officials at the bureau point to a lack of similarity between the Atlanta and Spokane pipe bombs. Some experts on terrorism, however, believe there are too many potential links to dismiss the Spokane connection. Says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who heads a think tank on hate crimes at Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey: "Some people would say, 'Hey, wait a minute, the Atlanta bomb had a detonator while the Spokane bombs didn't.' But some bombers do show an evolution in their bombmaking techniques." Levin points out that the FBI's informant also said the suspects asked him how to make a detonation device--and how to get fingerprints off the backpack. Says Levin: "We have an intriguing yet inconclusive collection of circumstantial evidence that warrants serious scrutiny."

--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles, Charlotte Faltermayer/New York, James L. Graff/Chicago and Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta