The Annals of Unsolved Crime (27 page)

Many of the Japanese who disappeared after Megumi were young couples. In these cases, the police could not discount the possibility that they had run away to Tokyo or another large city to get married. In all of that year, more than a dozen people were reported missing in northern Japan. Then, on August 15, 1978, an incident occurred on a beach outside Takaoka City that suggested that these vanishings might be part of a conspiracy. A twenty-eight-year-old man and his twenty-year old-fiancée, returning from a swim on a solitary beach, were attacked by six men. The man was handcuffed, gagged, and forced into a body bag; the woman had her arms and legs tied and was gagged with a towel. Then, a barking dog distracted the kidnappers long enough for the woman to escape and obtain help. Her fiancée was found still in the bag. Even though the six kidnappers escaped, police discovered equipment at the scene that appeared to be designed to kidnap people without injuring them, including a gag that allowed breathing, ear covers to prevent hearing, handcuffs, binding material, and green nylon body bags. The girl also told police that the men seemed to be speaking a foreign language.

At this point, Japanese security officials suspected that the six abductors were agents for a foreign intelligence service that for unknown reasons had orders to kidnap Japanese youth. Since they fled the beach, they also probably had orders not to allow themselves to be seen or captured.

The next piece of the puzzle emerged nine years later on November 29, 1987, when Korean Air Lines flight 858 blew up in midair, killing all 115 people aboard. The attack had been the
work of the North Korean intelligence service. It dispatched two North Korean agents, a man and a woman, disguised as Japanese tourists, who carried a bomb aboard concealed in a Japanese-made Panasonic radio. They stored it, together with liquid explosives concealed in a liquor bottle (which would intensify the explosion), in the overhead storage compartment. They then deplaned at a stopover in Abu Dhabi and went to Bahrain, where police became suspicious of their forged Japanese passports. They both attempted suicide by smoking cyanide-laced cigarettes. The man died, but the woman survived and confessed. During her interrogation, she said she had been employed by the “investigation department” of North Korea’s intelligence service and had been taught Japanese for the mission by a thirty-year-old Japanese women at its headquarters in Pyongyang. The description that she provided matched that of Yaeko Taguchi, who had disappeared from Tokyo in June 1978 after dropping her young children off at a day-care center. If this story is true, at least one of the abductees was working in Pyongyang for North Korean intelligence.

The next piece of the puzzle fell into place in 1994 with the defecting of a North Korean intelligence officer to South Korea. He told South Korean debriefers about a Japanese girl, used as an instructor by the North Korean intelligence service in Pyongyang, whose age and physical description matched that of Megumi Yokota. In addition, he provided details, such as the fact that she had been abducted after badminton practice, that left no doubt as to her identity, or that these abductions were part of a North Korean operation.

Japan was outraged when this information about Yokota was reported in the press. Even though North Korea categorically denied any involvement for another eight years, the Japanese government blocked any further consideration of World War II reparations until this issue was resolved. It was only in 2002, with a famine-starved North Korea expecting $10 billion
in reparation payments, that its dictator acknowledged that his intelligence service had abducted Japanese citizens. Even so, many questions were left unanswered. For instance, North Korea claimed that it had abducted only thirteen people, yet in Japan alone there were more than one hundred unexplained disappearances and police investigations attributed at least seventeen of them to state-sponsored abductions. Moreover, North Korea said that eight of the thirteen abductees had died, including the two who been previously identified in Pyongyang, Megumi Yokota and Yaeko Taguchi. As proof, it supplied death certificates from a North Korean hospital and the cremated ashes of Megumi Yokota. But when Japanese forensic experts examined the death certificates, they found so many irregularities that they could not preclude the possibility that some of them were forgeries. Even more disturbing, DNA taken from supplied ashes did not match that of Megumi Yokota. The North Korean explanation was further undermined by reported sightings of abductees, including Megumi Yokota, after their supposed deaths.

Once it was unambiguously established that state-sponsored abductions were not a paranoid fantasy, Western intelligence services began to examine missing-person cases outside Japan, and they found that in more than a dozen countries North Korean agents had either abducted or attempted to abduct individuals, including a movie star and director in Hong Kong, a violinist in Croatia, and five businesswomen from Singapore. It was not clear when, or even if, this abduction program has been ended. Intelligence analysts suspect that the vanishing of David Sneddon, a twenty-four-year-old American hiker from Utah, on August 13, 2004, in the city of Shangri-la in western China may have been an abduction by North Korea. If so, the 2002 admission by Kim Jong-Il had not ended state-sponsored abductions.

Since North Korea is a closed society in which even the
movements of foreign diplomats are tightly controlled, the purpose behind this program of international kidnappings remains elusive. One theory is that North Korean agents initially snatched young people abroad to “re-educate” them for intelligence tasks or to use them to force their relatives to cooperate, and then, as the program expanded, found other uses for them, such as language instruction. A second theory, provided by a CIA analyst, suggests that the 2002 return of five language instructors was at best a “limited hang-out” meant to divert attention from North Korea’s employment of unknown abductees for more sinister operations, including assassinations, sabotage, smuggling, and other covert actions.

My own assessment is that North Korea engaged in an extensive program of abductions, of which the Japanese abductions may be just the tip of the iceberg. We do not know how many other missing persons were in fact abducted. During this period, it has been established that North Korea was using its intelligence apparatus for a wide range of criminal enterprises, including counterfeiting money, drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering. I assume that the purpose behind these and other abductions was to supply the country’s criminal networks with false identities. As with many political crimes, the full extent and purpose of these state-sponsored abductions remains a mystery.

What is clear, however, is that because a theory appears to be paranoid does mean that it is wrong. In this case, the parents who believed that their missing children had been kidnapped by an alien government turned out to be right in a spectacular way: The alien government, North Korea, returned some of the victims.

PART FIVE
SOLVED OR UNSOLVED?

CHAPTER 30
THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

At 9:02 a.m. Central Standard Time on April 19, 1995, a huge truck bomb destroyed a large part of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, damaging more than 300 other buildings and killing 168 people, including nineteen children at a day-care center. The building, which housed fourteen government agencies, including the DEA, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Agency (ATF), and U.S. Army recruitment offices, was a symbol of the power of the U.S. government. The truck bomb was a massive device, containing over 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, 165 gallons of nitromethane, and over 100 pounds of Tovex explosives, with a sophisticated dual-fuse ignition device, packed into a truck rented from Ryder under a false name. More than a dozen witnesses recalled seeing the truck driven through Oklahoma City that morning, and at 8:57 a.m it was recorded by CCTV cameras approaching the Murrah building. It was then parked under the day-care center in the building, locked, and vacated minutes before it detonated. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack America had experienced before the 9/11 assault and, understandably, caused a public outcry for justice.

The first conspirator arrested was Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-seven-year-old Army veteran, who had been awarded the Bronze Star during the first Gulf War. As the evidence clearly showed, McVeigh had driven the truck bomb to Oklahoma City
and detonated it. The second conspirator arrested was Terry Nichols, a forty-year-old farmer who had befriended McVeigh in the Army and who had helped him prepare and arm the truck bomb.

Both McVeigh and Nichols were found guilty of a conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. McVeigh was sentenced to death and executed on June 11, 2001. Nichols was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. The only other person charged was Michael Fortier, who pleaded guilty to not warning authorities of the attack. Since he was not involved in the attack itself and cooperated with authorities, he was sentenced to only twelve years and then released into the witness-protection program.

There is no doubt that McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier were guilty. Their convictions, however, do not settle the question of who else, if anyone, was involved in this act of organized terrorism. A decade after the execution of McVeigh, investigative journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles, sorting through more than 18,000 FBI witness interviews for their book
Oklahoma City
, found holes in the investigation that left open the possibility of a wider conspiracy. A major gap proceeds from the fact that no fewer than twenty-four witnesses said that they saw McVeigh, just before and after the crime, while he was either driving the truck or in the truck rental office, with an unidentified man who could not have been either Nichols or Fortier. This man’s fingerprints may have been among the more than 1,000 unidentified latent fingerprints found in the investigation, but that was not established, because, through an inexplicable investigation failure, the FBI did not attempt to match these unknown prints to the computerized FBI database or even to perform a comparison among them to see how many belonged to the same people. Since neither McVeigh nor Nichols had the military training necessary to build the complex bomb that was used, the existence of another conspirator
might have provided some explanation of how the bomb was designed, built, and rigged.

One reason this gap was not plugged, as the ATF and FBI documents unearthed by Gumbel and Charles show, is that there had been enormous pressure from the federal prosecutors to cut off the investigation. The prosecutors’ case against McVeigh and Nichols—who were tried separately—would not necessarily be strengthened by an increased numbers of conspirators. So, once Fortier had agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols, the prosecutors had no need to call many of the eyewitnesses to testify. Yet, even though convictions were obtained, the legal process failed to answer several key questions: How many conspirators were involved, and who, if anyone, was behind McVeigh and Nichols?

On this score, there are three theories worth considering. First, there is the theory of the prosecution: that McVeigh and Nichols, acting by themselves, planned, financed, built, and detonated the truck bomb. In this view, all twenty-four eyewitnesses are mistaken and it is a closed case. Second, there is the theory advanced by Gumbel and Charles in their well-researched book that McVeigh and Nichols were in league with right-wing activists. Their investigation found that McVeigh and Nichols were in contact with dozens of members of militias, armed religious sects, White Supremacist groups, and neo-Nazi cabals that robbed banks and sold drugs to buy guns. They also dealt with individuals at a gun show who were involved in bomb-making. They therefore conclude that the mystery man in the truck came from a right-wing group that was involved in the plot.

Finally, there is an Islamic-terrorist theory. Since Nichols made many trips to Cebu City in the Philippines in 1994, where his Filipino wife was attending Southwestern University, it has been suggested that he may have had contact with Islamic extremist groups based there, including Abu Sayyaf, an affiliate
of al-Qaeda. For example, Stephen Jones, one of the trial attorneys for McVeigh, claimed to have evidence that Nichols attended a meeting with the Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who in November 1994 was on the same campus of Southwestern University as Nichols’ wife. It was Yousef who had organized the first attack of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, using the same modus operandi as was used in Oklahoma City—a truck bomb in the parking lot. In November 1994, when Nichols came to Cebu City, Yousef was in the final stages of the so-called “Bojinka plot.” This scheme to plant twelve bombs on twelve American planes that would simultaneously detonate on January 21, 1995, was aborted in the Philippines in early January by police who arrested Yousef’s co-conspirator Abdul Hakim Murad. In what may have been a coincidence, Nichols meanwhile flew back to America on one of the targeted flights of Northwest Airlines. About four months later, after the bomb went off in Oklahoma City, Murad made statements from prison, verbally and in writing, claiming responsibility for it. Aside from this prison bluster, and the fact that they were both in the same city in November 1994, the only actual evidence cited in this theory is Yousef’s phone records from the months before he detonated the first World Trade Center bomb in 1993, which showed calls placed to a close neighbor of Nichols’ in-laws in New York.

My own assessment of the evidence is that there was another conspirator involved in the plot. Although eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, I find it difficult to accept the prosecution theory that
all
the eyewitnesses’ identifications of a fourth man are wrong. Even though the FBI investigation collected a vast amount of data, including thirteen million hotel and motel records, none of it precludes the possibility that McVeigh and Nichols had help. The al-Qaeda theory, as intriguing as it is, lacks a smoking gun. In addition, if Nichols had such information, I find it difficult to believe that he would
not have used it to bargain with prosecutors to avoid a life sentence. The most plausible theory, in my view, is that McVeigh received assistance from the right-wing activists with whom he was known to be in contact.