Fortier’s Statements Define His Role in Bombing Trial

OKLAHOMA CITY —  From his unique vantage point, Michael Fortier had the clearest picture of what was happening inside Timothy J. McVeigh’s head.

They had soldiered together and, after the Army, he watched as McVeigh drifted across the country in search of the next gun show. Together they were enraged by the federal assault at Waco, Texas. And when Fortier last saw him early in April, driving away from the Kingman, Ariz., trailer home they shared, he knew McVeigh was once again leaving “for parts unknown.”

So when the FBI asked him about McVeigh and the April 19 explosion in Oklahoma City, Fortier tried to explain the fury inside his friend, struggled to tell the disbelieving agents how McVeigh might justify something like that in his own mind.

“If he did indeed blow up the federal building,” Fortier said, “Tim would simply consider it to be a rational act on his part.” Fortier’s descriptions come from sealed FBI reports of interviews the agency conducted with him in the days after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. These are his first explanations to law enforcement, at a time when the FBI was still learning how wide and how deep the bombing conspiracy had grown.

Later Fortier would admit to much greater knowledge of the attack than he did in these sessions and plead guilty to charges as part of a plea bargain. In prison today, he is beginning a 23-year sentence for running stolen weapons that federal agents believed helped finance the bombing.

But even his reluctant early words, when he was still trying desperately to escape the dragnet, provide a clear view of the crucial part he will now play in determining whether the two men accused of the terrorist attack, McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, are judged responsible for the deaths of at least 168 people.

In these confidential reports Fortier appears, at different times, in each of the conflicting roles the prosecution and defense will cast for him in the bombing trial later this year--the plot insider who is taking the stand to finally tell all he knows, and the scared, self-contradicting witness possibly willing to say anything to save his skin. Which one the jury believes may help decide the outcome of the case.

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From the beginning of his negotiations with the federal government, the reports show, Fortier was under tremendous pressure to cooperate.

The statements show a confused, conniving young man, a 26-year-old father suddenly thrust into a panic as agents descended around his home, his family, his friends and his employer in Kingman. Over and over, they demanded clues into the life of McVeigh in the days and months before the bombing.

In language sure to bolster the government’s case, he described for them McVeigh’s transformation from loyal Army sergeant to antigovernment fanatic. According to the interrogators, he talked of McVeigh’s extraordinary love of guns, their excursions delivering weapons, and their exploits test-firing explosives in the desert.

But he also often contradicted himself, and sometimes came across as someone defense attorneys could attack as shifty and unreliable when he faces cross-examination on the witness stand.

In the reports, Fortier at first maintained that he had lost contact with Nichols after the Army, then later admitted he had not only spoken with him but had given him money.

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He insisted that he had no inkling that McVeigh or Nichols was involved in the bombing. But later in his plea bargain, he confessed in court that he knew about the bombing plans and failed to alert authorities.

And much like McVeigh and Nichols, he railed against big government, taxes and the deadly 1993 FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco. When agents challenged him and suggested that the bombing had nothing to do with Waco, Fortier blurted out:

“I strongly disagree. . . . Tim believed that the federal government committed the murder of 80 or so people who were killed there.”

The intensity of the questioning and his attempts to dodge blame repeatedly pushed Fortier into brambles of contradictions, the reports show. This process helped bring him to his final decision to cooperate, but also can be used to discredit him.

At one point, Fortier told the agents that McVeigh “did not appear to be fanatical about the [Waco] issue.” On the other hand, he said, McVeigh strongly believed that the government never really conducted an investigation into the Waco incident.

“If in fact it was conducted,” Fortier said McVeigh told him, “it would have shown the federal government to be at fault.”

And then, like an aside or somehow an explanation, Fortier suddenly added: “Tim also has a general feeling that there are too many taxes in this country.”

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In separate FBI reports on interviews with Fortier’s wife, Lori, she appeared exasperated that McVeigh had been arrested. She said she “seriously doubted that he would be involved in the bombing.”

“Tim left sometime during April, stating that he was just going to move on,” she told the FBI. “Tim never talked about explosives and never talked about bombs. He never said anything to [make her] believe that he could be capable of carrying out such an act.”

But she also later told the FBI that she, her husband and McVeigh had gone out into the Arizona desert and “carried out an experiment” with explosives.

It was not long after McVeigh was arrested on a highway north of Oklahoma City after the bombing that both federal agents and reporters followed the trail of his previous residences and travels back to Kingman and to the Fortier home.

The agents who conducted the interrogations drove past Fortier’s flagpole, from which flew a U.S. flag and a second flag bearing the inscription “Don’t Tread On Me,” and knocked on the door of his single-wide mobile home. He had been keeping the window curtains drawn tightly to block out the barrage of reporters, cameras, spectators and law enforcement officers assembled outside.

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In a brief, early interview with The Times, Fortier had declared: “Honestly, I do not believe Tim blew up any building in Oklahoma. There was nothing for me to look back on and say, ‘Yeah, that might have been.’ . . . There is nothing like that.”

But to the FBI questioners, Fortier was more forthcoming, gradually and begrudgingly, about his frequent guest.

He told of meeting McVeigh in the Army and at first thinking he was a “jerk” and then later becoming “good friends” and bunkmates with him.

After they left the Army, McVeigh became “more or less a drifter,” Fortier said. McVeigh moved to Fortier’s hometown of Kingman in April 1993--the same month of the Waco assault.

“Tim likes the freedom of the West,” Fortier explained, according to the report. “He would make frequent trips to parts unknown. He supported himself as a ‘horse trader’ and he would frequently follow the gun-show circuit where he would buy electronics, clothing, guns and other equipment.”

He described McVeigh as “smart, intelligent and extremely knowledgeable concerning weapons,” but sometimes unmotivated. By the early part of last year, he said, “Tim was generally lazy and hung around the house reading Soldier of Fortune magazines.”

At first, Fortier told the FBI that McVeigh never mentioned Nichols and that the two “never had a long-standing relationship.” But he later acknowledged there had been telephone calls and that he himself had sent Nichols $1,000.

Fortier insisted that he knew nothing about the bombing and at one point criticized the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

But the agents increased the pressure, scouring his home for evidence and having him subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury.

They confronted him with information about a phone call made from his home to the Michigan home of Nichols’ brother, James. And they pressed him about an illegal gun-running trip he made with McVeigh to Kansas.

According to the reports, Fortier described driving with McVeigh from Arizona to Kansas to pick up some guns for sale at gun shows. Fortier said he was told the weapons, along with coins and silver bars, “came from a robbery in one of the Southern states.”

While McVeigh took the guns out of a storage unit, Fortier said, he stood “watching to make sure no one walked up on them.”

Soon after he told the authorities about his part in the robbery, Fortier and his wife were brought to Oklahoma City to testify.

And according to sources, it was here that they told more of what they knew about the bombing plot, and here that Michael Fortier agreed to become a witness for the government that he and his friends hated so much.