Time: Tue Mar 11 07:21:40 1997
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Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 07:19:46 -0800
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: L&J: piml] OKC Building Had Federal Explosives Inside
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>Following is from Kansas City Star, Mar. 11, 1997.> [The Star] [Image]
>
> [Image]
> Home
>
> NEWS [Image] Man's accusations about Oklahoma City bombing are drawing
> attention of the mainstream press
>
> Related sites:
> •Bombing coverage from The Daily Oklahoman
> •Court TV Oklahoma City Bombing case update
> •Oklahoma City bombing news page
> •Denver Post Online: Bomb Trial
>
> By JUDY L. THOMAS Staff Writer
> Date: 03/10/97 21:33
>
> A week after the Oklahoma City bombing, a former banker/small-business
> owner/lawyer sauntered into the McCurtain Daily Gazette office in
> Idabel, Okla., and proposed a story.
>
> J.D. Cash said he had information that federal authorities had been
> illegally storing explosives in the Murrah Federal Building, leading
> to a second -- and possibly deadlier -- blast April 19, 1995.
>
> "I didn't know the guy from Adam, and I wasn't wild about carrying the
> story," recalled Bruce Willingham, editor and publisher of the 6,500
> daily-circulation newspaper. "But then I got it confirmed from a
> reliable law enforcement source that explosives really had been
> carried out of the building after the bombing."
>
> Until recently few in the mainstream media paid much attention to
> Cash's stories. Now -- thanks to The Dallas Morning News -- Cash is
> the subject of national media attention because of his involvement in
> the so-called "McVeigh confession."
>
> "I just talked to Good Morning America; I've got the Tulsa World
> wanting to write my life story; Time is working on something; The New
> Yorker is doing something; and so is George magazine," Cash said last
> week.
>
> Cash's name surfaced after The Morning News reported Feb. 28 that it
> had obtained a defense document that said bombing suspect Timothy
> McVeigh admitted setting off the bomb in the daytime to ensure a
> higher "body count."
>
> McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones, at first called the purported
> confession a hoax. Then Jones said it had been stolen by The Morning
> News.
>
> On March 3, however, Jones said not only was it stolen, but it also
> was a phony document prepared by the defense to lure a potential
> witness into talking. That was the same thing the McCurtain newspaper
> said in a press release it issued -- two days earlier.
>
> Jones also said that the effort to interview the potential witness had
> been aided by two other persons, "one of whom is now deceased, and the
> other is an individual who writes frequently about the Oklahoma City
> bombing case."
>
> That individual was Cash.
>
> Last Tuesday, Cash told reporters that Richard Reyna, a private
> investigator working for the McVeigh defense team, showed him the
> phony document more than a year ago and that "we laughed about it."
>
> And Cash denied that he or Reyna gave the material to the Dallas
> newspaper. Reyna could not be reached for comment.
>
> All this has raised questions about Cash, his articles and his role in
> the bombing case. He's been suspected of being everything from a CIA
> agent to a neo-Nazi to a member of the McVeigh defense team -- all of
> which he denies.
>
> Getting the `real story'
>
> Cash, 44, is an Oklahoma native whose father was a fighter pilot in
> World War II and whose mother once worked for a congressman from
> Oklahoma. He has an undergraduate degree in economics and a law degree
> from the University of Tulsa, but he never practiced law.
>
> For several years Cash worked at a savings and loan near Tulsa. He
> later did real-estate title searches for the federal government. But
> he became disenchanted and moved to southeast Oklahoma in 1992 and
> built a log cabin in the mountains about 40 miles north of Idabel, the
> McCurtain County seat.
>
> He was hunting, fishing and working on a novel about missing Nazi gold
> in the last weeks of World War II, he said, when the Oklahoma City
> bombing occurred.
>
> Cash said he became interested in covering the story for a newspaper
> because a friend of his was killed in the blast and "because the rest
> of the press was missing the real story."
>
> "I knew from my own experiences that law enforcement maintained
> arsenal rooms in federal buildings and often kept raid explosives like
> hand grenades and C-4 explosives in those rooms," Cash said. "I
> learned that people had witnessed agents removing explosives from the
> building."
>
> Cash went to the Gazette, and Willingham gave the information to
> another reporter to check out and then ran the story. Federal
> authorities acknowledged that a small amount of explosives had been
> stored in the Murrah building but denied that they contributed to the
> destruction.
>
> For the last 22 months Cash has worked full time on the bombing
> investigation. His articles include a report that McVeigh made a phone
> call to a German national who lived at Elohim City, a white separatist
> compound in eastern Oklahoma, two weeks before the bombing.
>
> Others reported that McVeigh's sister told authorities that her
> brother had asked her to launder money stolen in bank robberies. Cash
> also was the first to write about an Elohim City resident who he
> believed was the elusive John Doe No. 2 bombing suspect. The man
> tagged by Cash was indicted in January in a series of Midwest bank
> robberies allegedly committed by a band of white supremacists. The man
> federal authorities tagged as John Doe No. 2, a Fort Riley private, is
> no longer a suspect.
>
> And Cash recently wrote about a woman who said she was an informant
> for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms both before and after
> the bombing. The woman said she warned authorities about a plot to
> bomb the Murrah building.
>
> The government has denied most of Cash's allegations, particularly
> those about having prior knowledge of the bombing.
>
> Another issue that has arisen is Cash's association with the McVeigh's
> defense team. Cash said he first contacted Stephen Jones shortly after
> the bombing to talk about a story he was working on.
>
> "I called and told them about it, played them an interview tape, then
> developed a relationship with the defense," he said.
>
> That's how he met Reyna.
>
> "I introduced him to a whole lot of people in the (white supremacist)
> movement," Cash said. "I traveled with Reyna extensively when he did
> some of the interviews."
>
> Why does Cash enjoy such access to the defense?
>
> "One of the reasons is that I've respected Jones' wishes," he said.
> "Some of the things he wanted kept closed, I didn't write about them.
> I even did an off-the-record interview with McVeigh and never wrote
> about it.
>
> "I think they've enjoyed some of the stuff I've written.... But I
> don't think they're terribly thrilled at the witnesses we've found
> that put McVeigh at the crime scene."
>
> Jones defends his working with Cash.
>
> "It's true that J.D. on two occasions has assisted the defense," Jones
> said. "J.D. has access and entree to a number of people that might
> best be described as being in this Aryan Nations, white
> supremacist/separatist movement. But we've never paid him, and we made
> it clear that he was not a defense investigator."
>
> The "McVeigh confession" is one of the occasions the defense worked
> with Cash, Jones said, "and there was an earlier instance in which we
> wanted an entree into someone in the white supremacist movement, and
> he was successful in getting us an interview."
>
> "But we are not working hand in glove."
>
> Far-flung ties
>
> Cash also has developed a close relationship with Glenn and Kathy
> Wilburn, an Oklahoma City couple whose two grandchildren, Chase and
> Colton Smith, were killed in the bombing.
>
> "Now, we're good friends," he said. "They bought me a cemetery plot
> with their family in Oklahoma City, near Chase and Colton's."
>
> Glenn Wilburn said it didn't bother him that Cash had worked with the
> defense team of the man accused of killing his grandsons.
>
> "We've never found any piece of information that's exculpatory to Tim
> McVeigh," Wilburn said. "But it brings others into the picture, and
> that's what we want -- the truth. If it takes working with the defense
> to do that, then so be it."
>
> Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City author who's writing a book about the
> white supremacist movement, said Cash's work was far from objective.
>
> "Anybody that speaks from the same platform as Louis Beam and is
> welcomed as one of the family at a white supremacist meeting can't
> claim to be searching for the absolute truth in the Oklahoma City
> bombing," Zeskind said.
>
> Beam is a key figure in the far right who has advocated violence
> against the government.
>
> Cash acknowledged that he had written articles for Media Bypass, a
> publication that caters to right-wing groups, and Jubilee, a
> publication of the far-right Christian Identity movement.
>
> He also says he spoke at Jubilation, a convention of right-wing
> extremists at South Lake Tahoe, Calif., last April.
>
> "I spoke right after Louis Beam," Cash said.
>
> Still, Cash doesn't believe he's done anything unethical.
>
> "You've got to be willing to say, `I don't care what people say about
> me. We're going to get to the bottom of this.' "
>
> All content © 1997 The Kansas City Star
>
>
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