Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.

Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve,” to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. “Every time I showed up her door was open,” said Chryson. “And that policy continued when she became governor.”

When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn’t really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE’s founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin’s birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin’s election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.

But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.

The AIP was born of the vision of “Old Joe” Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska’s oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage — “The United States has made a colony of Alaska,” he told author John McPhee in 1977 — Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska’s political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. “There’s gold under there!” he exclaimed.

Vogler made another failed run for the governor’s mansion in 1986. But the AIP’s fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon’s former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party’s banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.

Hickel’s subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe’s long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.

Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler’s death and didn’t run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill’s campaign to succeed him as the AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election to Democrat Tony Knowles.

Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years. When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP’s success with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.

Unlike some radical right-wingers, Chryson doesn’t put forward his ideas  freighted with anger or paranoia. And in a state where defense of gun and property rights often takes on a real religious fervor, Chryson was able to present himself  as a typical Alaskan.

He rose through party ranks by reducing the AIP’s platform to a single page that “90 percent of Alaskans could agree with.” This meant scrubbing the old platform of what Chryson called “racist language” while accommodating the state’s growing Christian right movement by emphasizing the AIP’s commitment to the “traditional family.”

“The AIP is very family-oriented,” Chryson explained. “We’re for the traditional family — daddy, mommy, kids — because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don’t care if Heather has two mommies. That’s not a traditional family.”

Chryson further streamlined the AIP’s platform by softening its secessionist language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.

Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. “The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world,” Chryson exclaimed. “And Alaska is not the only place that’s about separation. There’s at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States.”

This has meant rubbing shoulders and forging alliances with outright white supremacists and far-right theocrats, particularly those who dominate the proceedings at such gatherings as the North American Secessionist conventions, which AIP delegates have attended in recent years. The AIP’s affiliation with neo-Confederate organizations is motivated as much by ideological affinity as by organizational convenience. Indeed, Chryson makes no secret of his sympathy for the Lost Cause. “Should the Confederate states have been allowed to separate and go their peaceful ways?” Chryson asked rhetorically. “Yes. The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States — however you want to refer to it — was not about slavery, it was about states’ rights.”

Another far-right organization with whom the AIP has long been aligned is Howard Phillips’ militia-minded Constitution Party. The AIP has been listed as the Constitution Party’s state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has endorsed the Constitution Party’s presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.

The Constitution Party boasts an openly theocratic platform that reads, “It is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations.” In its 1990s incarnation as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, it was on the front lines in promoting the “militia” movement, and a significant portion of its membership comprises former and current militia members.

At its 1992 convention, the AIP hosted both Phillips — the USTP’s presidential candidate — and militia-movement leader Col. James “Bo” Gritz, who was campaigning for president under the banner of the far-right Populist Party. According to Chryson, AIP regulars heavily supported Gritz, but the party deferred to Phillips’ presence and issued no official endorsements.

In Wasilla, the AIP became powerful by proxy — because of Chryson and Stoll’s alliance with Sarah Palin. Chryson and Stoll had found themselves in constant opposition to policies of Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, who started his three-term, nine-year tenure in 1987. By 1992, Chryson and Stoll had begun convening regular protests outside City Council. Their demonstrations invariably involved grievances against any and all forms of “socialist government,” from city planning to public education. Stoll shared Chryson’s conspiratorial views: “The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order took over,” Stein told a reporter.

Chryson did not trust Palin when she joined the City Council in 1992. He claimed that she was handpicked by Democratic City Council leaders and by Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, John Stein, to rubber-stamp their tax hike proposals. “When I first met her,” he said, “I thought she was extremely left. But I’ve watched her slowly as she’s become more pronounced in her conservative ideology.”

Palin was well aware of Chryson’s views. “She knew my beliefs,” Chryson said. “The entire state knew my beliefs. I wasn’t afraid of being on the news, on camera speaking my views.”

But Chryson believes she trusted his judgment because he accurately predicted what life on the City Council would be like. “We were telling her, ‘This is probably what’s going to happen,’” he said. “‘The city is going to give this many people raises, they’re going to pave everybody’s roads, and they’re going to pave the City Council members’ roads.’ We couldn’t have scripted it better because everything we predicted came true.”

After intense evangelizing by Chryson and his allies, they claimed Palin as a convert. “When she started taking her job seriously,” Chryson said, “the people who put her in as the rubber stamp found out the hard way that she was not going to go their way.” In 1994, Sarah Palin attended the AIP’s statewide convention. In 1995, her husband, Todd, changed his voter registration to AIP. Except for an interruption of a few months, he would remain registered was an AIP member until 2002, when he changed his registration to undeclared.

In  1996, Palin decided to run against John Stein as the Republican candidate for mayor of Wasilla. While Palin pushed back against Stein’s policies, particularly those related to funding public works, Chryson said he and Steve Stoll prepared the groundwork for her mayoral campaign.

Chryson and Stoll viewed Palin’s ascendancy as a vehicle for their own political ambitions. “She got support from these guys,” Stein remarked. “I think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice.”

“They worked behind the scenes,” said Stein. “I think they had a lot of influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning.”

Indeed, Chryson boasted that he and his allies urged Palin to focus her campaign on slashing character-based attacks. For instance, Chryson advised Palin to paint Stein as a sexist who had told her “to just sit there and look pretty” while she served on Wasilla’s City Council. Though Palin never made this accusation, her 1996 campaign for mayor was the most negative Wasilla residents had ever witnessed.

While Palin played up her total opposition to the sales tax and gun control — the two hobgoblins of the AIP — mailers spread throughout the town portraying her as “the Christian candidate,” a subtle suggestion that Stein, who is Lutheran, might be Jewish. “I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn’t seen until then,” recalled Phil Munger, a local music teacher who counts himself as a close friend of Stein.

“This same group [Stoll and Chryson] also [publicly] challenged me on whether my wife and I were married because she had kept her maiden name,” Stein bitterly recalled. “So we literally had to produce a marriage certificate. And as I recall, they said, ‘Well, you could have forged that.’”

When Palin won the election, the men who had once shouted anti-government slogans outside City Hall now had a foothold inside the mayor’s office. Palin attempted to pay back her newfound pals during her first City Council meeting as mayor. In that meeting, on Oct. 14, 1996, she appointed Stoll to one of the City Council’s two newly vacant seats. But Palin was blocked by the single vote of then-Councilman Nick Carney, who had endured countless rancorous confrontations with Stoll and considered him a “violent” influence on local politics. Though Palin considered consulting attorneys about finding another means of placing Stoll on the council, she was ultimately forced to back down and accept a compromise candidate.

Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire Wasilla’s museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper’s position in short order. “Gotcha, Cooper!” Stoll told the deposed museum director after his termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. “And it only cost me a campaign contribution.” Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin’s mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper’s departure.

The following year, when Carney proposed a local gun-control measure, Palin organized with Chryson to smother the nascent plan in its cradle. Carney’s proposed ordinance would have prohibited residents from carrying guns into schools, bars, hospitals, government offices and playgrounds. Infuriated by the proposal that Carney viewed as a common-sense public-safety measure, Chryson and seven allies stormed a July 1997 council meeting.

With the bill still in its formative stages, Carney was not even ready to present it to the council, let alone conduct public hearings on it. He and other council members objected to the ad-hoc hearing as “a waste of time.” But Palin — in plain violation of council rules and norms — insisted that Chryson testify, stating, according to the minutes, that “she invites the public to speak on any issue at any time.”

When Carney tried later in the meeting to have the ordinance discussed officially at the following regular council meeting, he couldn’t even get a second. His proposal died that night, thanks to Palin and her extremist allies.

“A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything in government, including taxes,” recalled Carney. “A lot of it was a personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by Steve Stoll and the mayor.”

Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, he replied: “I know it was.”

By Chryson’s account, he and Palin also worked hand-in-glove to slash property taxes and block a state proposal that would have taken money for public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed Chryson’s unsuccessful initiative to move the state Legislature from Juneau to Wasilla. She also lent her support to Chryson’s crusade to alter the Alaska Constitution’s language on gun rights so cities and counties could not impose their own restrictions. “It took over 10 years to get that language written in,” Chryson said. “But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting it.”

“With Sarah as a mayor,” said Chryson, “there were a number of times when I just showed up at City Hall and said, ‘Hey, Sarah, we need help.’ I think there was only one time when I wasn’t able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting.”

Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for an interview.) While Palin has been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.

When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced reformer determined to crush the GOP’s ossified power structure, she made certain to appear at the AIP’s state convention. To burnish her maverick image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin, hailing her support for an “all-Alaska” liquefied gas pipeline, a project first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel stood beaming by her side. “I made her governor,” he boasted afterward. Two years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin’s bid for vice president.

Just months before Palin burst onto the national stage as McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, she delivered a videotaped address to the AIP’s annual convention. Her message was scrupulously free of secessionist rhetoric, but complementary nonetheless. “I share your party’s vision of upholding the Constitution of our great state,” Palin told the assembly of AIP delegates. “My administration remains focused on reining in government growth so individual liberty can expand. I know you agree with that … Keep up the good work and God bless you.”

When Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, her attendance of the 1994 and 2006 AIP conventions and her husband’s membership in the party (as well as Palin’s videotaped welcome to the AIP’s 2008 convention) generated a minor controversy. Chryson claimed, however, that Sarah and Todd Palin never even played a minor role in his party’s internal affairs. “Sarah’s never been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party,” Chryson insisted. “Todd has, but most of rural Alaska has too. I never saw him at a meeting. They were at one meeting I was at. Sarah said hello, but I didn’t pay attention because I was taking care of business.”

But whether the Palins participated directly in shaping the AIP’s program is less relevant than the extent to which they will implement that program. Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman Dexter Clark announced that his party would seek to “infiltrate” the Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its hard-right, secessionist agenda. “You should use that tactic. You should infiltrate,” Clark told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and libertarians. “Whichever party you think in that area you can get something done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right now that is the only avenue.”

Clark pointed to Palin’s political career as the model of a successful infiltration. “There’s a lot of talk of her moving up,” Clark said of Palin. “She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the Republican Party … She is pretty well sympathetic because of her membership.”

Clark’s assertion that Palin was once a card-carrying AIP member was swiftly discredited by the McCain campaign, which produced records showing she had been a registered Republican since 1988. But then why would Clark make such a statement? Why did he seem confident that Palin was a true-blue AIP activist burrowing within the Republican Party? The most salient answer is that Palin was once so thoroughly embedded with AIP figures like Chryson and Stoll and seemed so enthusiastic about their agenda, Clark may have simply assumed she belonged to his party.

Now, Palin is a household name and her every move is scrutinized by the Washington press corps. She can no longer afford to kibitz with secessionists, however instrumental they may have been to her meteoric ascendancy. This does not trouble her old AIP allies. Indeed, Chryson is hopeful that Palin’s inauguration will also represent the start of a new infiltration.

“I’ve had my issues but she’s still staying true to her core values,” Chryson concluded. “Sarah’s friends don’t all agree with her, but do they respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely.”

All of which raises a new and troubling possibility: that last week’s attacks were not just the insane acts of a small fringe fundamentalist network, but the completion of unfinished business — and that their ultimate intent is not merely terror, but revenge for the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent military actions against Iraq.

The case against Iraq is also being made against the political backdrop of a split among Bush advisors, reported in the New York Times — pitting hard-liners like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has long advocated action against Iraq, against more cautious officials, like Secretary of State Colin Powell. And the hypothesis of an Iraqi connection may be being pushed by conservatives who, long irritated that the U.S. did not push on to Baghdad during the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein, see an opportunity to conclude that unfinished business.

The specter of Saddam’s involvement in the series of hijackings and subsequent attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was raised officially this week by administration sources who told reporters at CBS News and the Boston Globe that one of the known hijackers, Mohammad Atta, may have met with Iraqi intelligence officials during his travels to Europe this past summer. Those sources were quick to say the connection was not a “smoking gun,” and Iraqi officials immediately denied their government’s involvement.

This was not, however, the first indication of Iraqi complicity. A number of intelligence experts have questioned whether bin Laden’s organization possessed the intelligence capacity required to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. They say that even though bin Laden may well have provided the personnel, the most likely suspect behind the logistics of the disaster is Saddam Hussein’s intelligence operation.

According to Woolsey, who was CIA director from 1993 to 1995, the model of terrorism currently at play in the media — in which a “loose network” of Islamic fundamentalists is solely to blame for the attacks — may well be incomplete, since it obscures the possibility of state sponsorship, and ignores the possibility that these small terror groups may in fact be useful front organizations for larger entities.

Woolsey and other intelligence analysts say that although the Sept. 11 attacks themselves were a relatively low-tech affair involving box cutters and knives used to hijack jets and convert the airliners themselves into potent bombs, the entire operation was in fact extremely sophisticated. The logistics, the planning, the coordination, the ability to apparently provide new identities for a large team of operatives and to hide them effectively within U.S. borders — all these point to the greater likelihood of a state-operated intelligence agency’s complicity.

“Unless it is bin Laden himself or one of his senior colleagues, this attack, this whole thing says to me that there was some integrated plan,” says Woolsey, who also wrote of Iraq’s possible involvement in the New Republic. “Terrorist groups are not — I mean, driving a truck bomb into the Marine barracks in Beirut is one thing, but an integrated plan is not the first thing you think of when you think of a terrorist group. Even a relatively wealthy terrorist group.”

The highly visible media campaign that has given bin Laden the widespread image as the world’s top terrorist strikes Woolsey as disinformation: “I mean, if you look at bin Laden sitting over there issuing fatwahs and making video tapes and reciting poems, sound bites about attacking the United States, and having his lieutenants talk openly and loudly and often on open telephone lines about attacking the United States, you begin to think that there might be somebody sitting back there who is just as happy as bin Laden is for him to be front and center, because he likes the fame and being the pin-up boy. And somebody else — possibly the Iraqis — may like the fact that somebody else is getting the attention rather than them,” Woolsey says. “They care about the damage, not the attention.”

If Iraqi intelligence is involved, Woolsey does not believe that necessarily absolves bin Laden. “I’m not comfortable with the formulation of one or the other having done it,” he says. “I’m more comfortable with the formulation that it was a partnership, and each one was doing what he does best. Who knows? It may have been that Iraqi intelligence handled part of the logistics, and bin Laden’s group provided the people.”

Woolsey and other intelligence analysts point to a number of other pieces of evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to Islamic terrorists, ranging from regular gatherings of such groups in Baghdad, to the way Saddam — whose ruling Baath Party is avowedly atheistic — has altered the Iraqi flag to include an Islamic blessing. But the trail of evidence most starkly goes back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The similarity of that attack to the Sept. 11 disaster extends beyond the target itself. Perhaps the most striking point is that the mastermind of that plot, when arrested two years later, had been in the process of organizing a highly coordinated mass hijacking of airliners.

And as it happens, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this man — contrary to the contention of the Clinton administration at the time — was an agent of Saddam’s elite intelligence unit.

A man who calls himself Ramzi Yousef is currently serving a 240-year sentence in federal prison for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which six people died, though even his trial judge noted at sentencing: “We don’t even know what your real name is.”

What is known about him is that he entered the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing Yousef’s name, and then promptly sought political asylum. Shortly afterward, he began organizing a group of Islamic radicals in the Jersey City, N.J., area who had been planning to pipe-bomb government officials and Jewish leaders in retaliation for the imprisonment of one of their martyrs, Meir Kahane assassin El Sayyid Nosair. However, Yousef promptly escalated the plot into one with a bigger target — namely, the World Trade Center.

Yousef’s real identity has been the particular obsession of intelligence analyst Laurie Mylroie, whose 2000 book, “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America,” which reads now like a prophecy about the Sept. 11 attacks, and is referenced by many, including Woolsey, who question whether bin Laden was solely responsible for the attacks. Mylroie has an extensive background in Middle East intelligence, and her book is largely based on a thorough examination of the trial documents in the World Trade Center cases.

Mylroie says Yousef’s operations were a classic “false flag” in which actions are carried out in a way that makes others look responsible — and Yousef, she believes, was almost certainly an Iraqi intelligence operative. She points particularly to the circumstances around his flight from the United States after his team of bombers set off their device in 1993 — which had been intended to kill 250,000 people, toppling one tower into the other and releasing a deadly cloud of cyanide, but which only created a ball of flame that instead burned up the cyanide — and in short order were arrested.

Yousef fled the country and flew to Karachi, Pakistan, with the passport of a Kuwaiti named Abdul Basit Karim. For the next two years he remained at large, but resurfaced in Manila when a batch of chemicals he was mixing for his next bombing plot caught fire. Forced to flee, he was apprehended a month later in Pakistan, thanks to information on a computer he left behind in the Philippines.

The details of the plot contained on that computer were chilling. Investigators found that Yousef was planning to plant bombs, comprised of a liquid explosive that could get past metal detectors, in coordinated fashion aboard a series of 11 American airliners scheduled to fly at roughly the same time over the Pacific Ocean.

Mylroie believes that even though Yousef was captured, at least some of the logistical planning behind this plan may have lived on with whomever his cohorts might have been, and may well have provided the groundwork for the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

“I don’t know if these attacks are part of the same plan — I haven’t seen any evidence of that — but there are clearly echoes of the logistical side of Yousef’s plot in it,” she says. “Even more striking is that he plotted to destroy the Trade Center as well. “I don’t think it’s hard to see the hand of Iraqi intelligence at work here. It’s clear a state was involved in the attack because it was so sophisticated, and Iraq is the most likely candidate. They are the only state we are at war with.”

The penultimate piece of evidence linking Yousef to Iraqi intelligence, Mylroie says, is his assumption of the identity of Abdul Basit Karim. There really was an Abdul Basit, who was a Kuwaiti educated in Britain, but who was living in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990. He also was four inches shorter than Yousef, who generally bears little resemblance to the man.

Despite that, Yousef’s fingerprints appear in Basit’s official Kuwaiti file. Mylroie collected an array of evidence, including missing pages and a strikingly out-of-place notation, that the file was tampered with extensively, all indicating that Yousef had assumed the identity of someone killed during the Iraqi invasion. Creating such identities is common for agents involved in “wet” operations by Soviet-style intelligence agencies.

And in the case of Yousef/Basit, the only such organization that could have done so was Iraq’s.

Saddam Hussein rose to power through the ranks of Iraqi intelligence, and consolidated his grip on the nation in the 1970s by dramatically expanding the power and scope of his intelligence and security forces. Over the years, that power has if anything grown and intensified, particularly in the wake of Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War.

Today’s Iraqi intelligence agencies cover a broad range of activities, from Saddam’s personal protection force to handling political dissent. But by far the most powerful and feared of these is the Iraqi Intelligence Service, or Mukhabarat. Its powers range from electronic surveillance to counterintelligence and special operations; notably, its mysterious “Office Sixteen” exists solely for training agents for clandestine operations abroad, including lessons in the use of terror techniques.

The Mukhabarat received considerable notoriety in 1994, when U.S. intelligence uncovered proof that Iraqi agents had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait. In retaliation, President Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.

The missiles found their mark, but the response was nonetheless inadequate in impressing Saddam, since few of the spy agency’s personnel were lost. “The only thing the Clinton administration did was launch a few cruise missiles at an empty building in the middle of the night,” says Woolsey, who was CIA chief at the time. “That probably made him laugh even harder.”

Woolsey believes Saddam was already laughing at the Americans because of their failure to uncover his likely involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. At the time, the plot’s mastermind, Yousef, was still at large, and investigators were still focusing on the sacrificial lambs he had left behind — one of whom, desperate for airfare, had actually attempted to redeem his deposit on the truck used in the bombing.

The FBI’s chief in New York at the time, Jim Fox — who had a background in counter-terrorism — was in fact doggedly pursuing the likelihood of Iraqi complicity in the bombing. Several of his agents had uncovered what he believed were strong indications that Mukhabarat agents had enacted the plot, including information from foreign intelligence agencies.

But Fox was replaced in mid-1994 for ostensibly bureaucratic reasons, and his successors chose not to keep pursuing the state-sponsorship angle, saying they had found no evidence of it. Instead, they focused on convicting the perpetrators they had in hand, including a second set of bombing conspirators associated with a blind Muslim cleric in Jersey City named Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

Mylroie believes the Clinton administration made a conscious effort to downplay the Iraqi connection because it was wedded to a policy designed to “contain” Saddam rather than confront him. Woolsey demurs, suggesting that the problem was more a pragmatic one, given the American system of justice and the difficulty often associated with obtaining conspiracy convictions.

Despite their often overlapping interests, a high bureaucratic wall exists between American security and law-enforcement agencies, and that wall proved crucial in the World Trade Center cases, particularly Ramzi Yousef’s. With the Justice Department firmly in charge, national security concerns such as the possibility of state sponsorship of the terrorism took a back seat to the reality of prosecuting the case in U.S. courts.

“There’s nothing nefarious about that,” says Woolsey. Conspiracy cases in particular can be quite complex and difficult for obtaining convictions, and he thinks the prosecutors were mostly intent on trying to keep the case simple for the sake of putting the men behind bars: “They were only doing what good prosecutors do.”

But in the process, the chance of establishing whether or not Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence agent carrying out Saddam’s orders was lost. If the Iraqi dictator was in fact involved, then the message he got was clear: He could sponsor covert terrorism in America and get away with it.

It might still be possible to determine whether or not Ramzi Yousef is really Abdul Basit Karim; the latter had friends in London who could identify him, and Scotland Yard possesses papers with Basit’s fingerprints from 1988. If those prints match those in the tampered Kuwaiti file, then it would confirm he is indeed Basit. If they don’t, then it means within a high degree of certainty that he is an Iraqi agent. However, that simple test has never been conducted by U.S. agencies.

“I think that there are very good indications that [Saddam] was involved in ’93, and it’s a testable hypothesis by looking at the fingerprints that Scotland Yard has,” says Woolsey. “And if he was involved in ’93, that substantially enhances the possibility that he was involved Sept. 11 — because it means he was sitting over there for eight years laughing at us because he got away with the first one, and continuing to undervalue us, as he did in 1990 when he invaded.”

It is difficult to say whether or not the Bush administration, in its seemingly single-minded pursuit of bin Laden, will take the time to examine the matter, despite assurances it is investigating all potential aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks. So far, officials have shied away from connecting Saddam to the disaster, though there are indications that may change soon.

On last Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Cheney was asked if there was any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks, and he flatly stated, “No,” adding: “In the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida [bin Laden's organization] and the most recent events in New York. Saddam Hussein’s bottled up, at this point, but clearly we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.”

The only rumblings to the contrary have come from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who paused for five seconds at a press briefing this week when asked about the possibility of “state sponsorship” of the attacks. He finally answered that he would leave the question to Justice officials, but added: “I know a lot, and what I have said … is that states are supporting these people.”

The chief reason intelligence analysts have given for dismissing the notion of a specific Saddam/bin Laden connection has been the supposed enmity between the two men, based on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which bin Laden violently opposed. But Mylroie is skeptical, pointing out that the invasion occurred more than 10 years ago, which is an aeon in diplomatic years. Woolsey, too, has his doubts.

“First of all, that may be a cover story,” he says. “Secondly, they have the same chief hatred, which is for us. Thirdly, bin Laden is Sunni, so there’s not any of the Sunni-Shi’a tension that there would be if the allegation were that he was working with Iran.

“And finally, Saddam has gotten reasonably close in the last few years to some of the fundamentalist terrorist Sunni groups. They have meetings in Iraq — I can’t point to any personal meetings or any personal link between bin Laden and Saddam, but if you just look at his relationships with the terrorist groups generally, and particularly the fundamentalist Sunni ones, it’s striking. Some of them call him ‘the new Caliph’ [an Islamic term for a temporal and spiritual leader].”

Certainly, identifying Saddam Hussein as one of the co-perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack would drastically change the landscape of the “crusade” Bush has proposed against terrorism. Making such an identification would require an all-out response. Instead of focusing solely on capturing bin Laden and crushing his organization, U.S. forces would simultaneously be faced with the far more formidable task of a full-scale military assault on Iraq.

That daunting prospect might intimidate the Bush team into withdrawing from pushing the issue, preferring to continue the current course of “containing” Saddam. Laurie Mylroie says a number of key intelligence players within the administration are fighting to bring the Iraqi issue forward, but she fears that politics may ultimately hold them back.

“My main concern is that the administration will put this off and choose to just focus on bin Laden, for policy considerations,” Mylroie says. “I think we run the risk of focusing on the individuals and not looking at the states — forgoing security concerns for the sake of prosecuting criminals. If the states go untouched, we’ll just have more of the same.”

Woolsey contends that even if no further evidence links Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration should at least look into the evidence now in hand, and determine if he was behind the 1993 bombing. “If they determine that Iraqi intelligence was behind ’93, that should be enough. We got Al Capone not for the many murders that he contracted for, but for income-tax evasion.

“In the ’93 bombing, although six people died, it was certainly not as major a thing as what happened on Sept. 11. There’s no statute of limitations on terrorism, and as far as I’m concerned, if he did the ’93 bombing, that’s enough to get him on the list of folks who need to have their regimes changed.”

Van Buren didn’t pay any particular attention to them at first. Another clerk waited on the men, but when they tried to pay for their meal with a large bill, she took notice.

“As soon as the $50 bill came up, I had to go to the safe to get the change,” says Van Buren today. “And when I gave them the change and they got their sandwiches, I remember them going back over to the corner, sitting down. And when they left, I remember three people getting into the truck. There were three people at the table.”

The clerks she worked with later told FBI agents that two of the men matched the descriptions of McVeigh and his cohort, Terry Nichols. The third was a shorter, dark-haired and muscular man with an olive complexion: a perfect fit for the figure destined to be known as John Doe 2.

Luckily, the Subway shop actually had a video camera recording that day’s events. When Van Buren contacted the FBI, agents interviewed everyone working in the shop on April 18. And when they were done, they confiscated the video recorded that day.

But if that tape showed a third co-conspirator with McVeigh and Nichols, no one outside the FBI can say. No one beyond the agency ever saw it. In the waning days of Nichols’ trial, his defense attorneys discovered the details of Van Buren’s story — which had only been described in generic terms in the FBI’s report, omitting her contention that two men accompanied McVeigh — along with information contained in some 43,000 other “lead sheets” that the FBI until then had failed to turn over to them.

Michael Tigar, who led the Nichols defense, tried in 1999 to use the FBI’s failures to produce all relevant documents to gain a new trial for his client. But U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch refused, saying the withheld material would not have altered the trial’s outcome.

He likely was right. In fact, Nichols’ jury had already refused to give him the death penalty largely because of some jurors’ belief that more people were involved in the bombing than merely McVeigh, Nichols and Michael and Lori Fortier, the Arizona couple who were acquaintances with the two men and who were the prosecution’s chief witnesses. That belief is also shared by thousands of conspiracy theorists who remain convinced the whole truth about the Oklahoma City bombing has not been told. Nichols’ verdict stands as nearly the sole validation that the bombing may not have been the product of two lone bombers.

And when the FBI admitted it had failed to turn over another 3,100 documents to defense attorneys, fresh fuel was thrown onto those fires. McVeigh’s execution was delayed a month as lawyers for both men started combing through the withheld information to see if it might give them an opportunity to overturn at least their sentences, if not their convictions. His execution is now scheduled for Monday.

But just as he hovered in the background of numerous eyewitness accounts like Joann Van Buren’s, the figure of John Doe No. 2 almost certainly lurks within those withheld documents — and he will continue to haunt the Oklahoma City case after McVeigh is executed. And, in an era that has seen more FBI foul-ups than any other time in history, the bureau’s inability to explain away the repeated accounts of additional participants in the bombings has raised legitimate questions about the quality of its own investigation — as well as fueled thoughts of larger conspiracies that will live beyond McVeigh.

Even the simplest investigations of seemingly straightforward crimes — let alone a massively complex one like the Oklahoma City case, in which some 35,000 witnesses were interviewed — can be complicated by the randomness and unrelated coincidences of real life. An unattached stranger who wanders onto a scene at some point can become a suspected accomplice for no reason other than bad timing.

The FBI has maintained that coincidence is the best way to explain John Doe No. 2, whose character sketch was drawn mainly from the account of an eyewitness at the Junction City shop where the Ryder truck was rented. That witness, the FBI says, mixed up his recollections and mistakenly identified a man who came in the next day to rent a truck — a 23-year-old soldier named Todd Bunting — as an accomplice of McVeigh’s. Bunting, who was cleared of any connection to the crime, vaguely resembled the composite drawing and wore clothes similar to those in the drawing, including a Carolina Panthers ball cap.

There is a kind of logic to the FBI’s conclusion. The Oklahoma City case was anything but straightforward, and the agency was hit with a near-apocalyptic flood of tips about the possible perpetrators of the bombing. The vast majority of them turned into time-wasting dead ends and wild goose chases, and the investigators were forced to turn to Occam’s Razor — the maxim that the simplest explanation for a mystery is most often the correct one — to shave down the possibilities.

McVeigh, a dead ringer for the John Doe No. 1 sketch, had been captured, and Terry Nichols (who looked nothing like John Doe No. 2) had turned himself in to authorities. The Fortiers were quickly tracked down and confessed to their relatively minor roles in the bombing as sympathizers who gave McVeigh a temporary base of operations and listened avidly as he planned the attack. And though there was no shortage of theories about the identity of Doe No. 2, no one who resembled him emerged as a possible co-conspirator.

Ultimately, investigators were forced to conclude that John Doe No. 2 was a phantom who never really existed. And that was the case they chose to take to the courts in their prosecutions of McVeigh and Nichols.

“There’s nothing there,” says FBI spokesman Steven Berry. “It’s a case where every avenue we went down, there’s nothing there. And we’re certainly not going to get behind it and say there’s something there or put it out that there is something when there’s nothing there. It’s chasing ghosts.”

Indeed, McVeigh himself steadfastly denies there was any John Doe No. 2. He told the authors of “American Terrorist” that he and Nichols alone had built and detonated the bomb and vehemently denied that anyone else had been involved. He also denied the existence of Doe No. 2 in a May 2 letter to the Houston Chronicle.

But even McVeigh’s own trial attorney, Stephen Jones, never believed him on this count. Jones believes McVeigh had substantial motive to lie about the involvement of others: For one, it covers the tracks of his cohorts, and it heightens his own role in the drama. Certainly “American Terrorist” captures McVeigh’s desire for martyrdom — he manipulated his appeals to expedite his execution — and admitting anyone else into the scenario would certainly diminish his starring role.

Jones also told reporters that McVeigh failed a lie-detector test when asked about John Doe No. 2. And McVeigh, he says, frequently covered up any traces of potential co-conspirators. Once he insisted he had not accompanied Nichols to a farm co-op to buy ammonium nitrate, but after learning that a clerk at the store identified Nichols and said there was a second man with him, McVeigh flip-flopped, telling Jones he had been the man there after all. The clerk, on the other hand, insisted that it hadn’t been McVeigh.

But when Jones’ defense team attempted to track down Doe No. 2, it ran into the same dead ends as the FBI. Nonetheless, Jones himself came to believe McVeigh was associated with a gang of white supremacists operating out of an enclave in rural Missouri called Elohim City.

That theory is also a favorite of conspiracists who see the Oklahoma City investigation as a massive coverup. Many of them go well beyond Jones’ relatively modest conjectures about the nature of the bombing to argue that the government itself was somehow involved in the bombing, as part of its plan to discredit the militia movement. The theory that McVeigh was set up looms large in the voluminous conspiracy theories that are the metier of the far-right Patriot movement. The Militia of Montana, for instance, continues to claim that there was a second blast — a charge set by federal agents, they say — recorded within seconds of the truck bomb (there was not; the seismic reports that form the basis of this claim actually recorded the impact of the mass of debris from the Murrah Building hitting the ground).

Others argue that a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil could not have delivered enough force to cause the extraordinary damage of the Oklahoma City blast, and cite a study at a federal laboratory as proof. They are right. But then, the explosion set off by McVeigh actually was a high-octane mix of jet fuel and fertilizer, and the Murrah damage was entirely consistent with the force of that kind of bomb.

The theories that have gained the most currency among the conspiracy set are traceable to an Oklahoma journalist named J.D. Cash, who has built a minor career out of linking McVeigh’s activities back to Elohim City and other violent supremacist factions. The core of Cash’s theories revolve around McVeigh’s connections to a handful of people at Elohim City who shared anti-government (and deeply racist) views, suggesting that McVeigh and his co-conspirators were actually dupes of a federal informant acting as an agent provocateur.

However, Cash’s theories crumble in the face of a careful examination of the facts of the case. Cash makes much of the shadowy presence of a German neo-Nazi named Andreas Strassmeier and McVeigh’s attempts to contact him at Elohim City in the days before the bombing. But Strassmeier had little contact with McVeigh and was nowhere near any of the activities that produced the bomb, and he steadfastly denies any connection. Cash’s chief witness, an ex-debutante turned white-power pinup girl named Carol Howe who eventually worked as a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms informant, has constantly changed her story in a way seeming to indicate that she was tailoring it to suit the needs of the conspiracists who promoted her tale.

These theories reached a kind of apex in the work of a British journalist named Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose 1997 book, “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton,” postulated that the former president covered up the government’s complicity in the bombing as part of a larger career of perfidy that included drug-running and murder. Though Evans-Pritchard’s work gained some favor among mainstream conservatives — Robert Novak, for instance, wrote a column extolling his theories — nearly every aspect of “Secret Life” has been roundly debunked.

Cash’s work surfaced again recently as a source for a report by the British newspaper The Guardian that linked McVeigh’s activities to those of the Aryan Republican Army, a gang of Midwestern bank robbers whose whereabouts eerily paralleled those of McVeigh at key moments in the run-up to the bombing. However, like nearly everything proceeding from Cash, the piece was built on a fabric of coincidence and speculation.

Indeed, there has been no shortage of candidates for the identity of John Doe No. 2, but nearly all of them lead to the same kind of factual dead ends. And it is precisely those failures that tend to bolster the government’s contention that the man in the sketch never existed as an actual conspirator in the bombing.

But the FBI’s explanation of the John Doe No. 2 theories is nearly as full of holes as the conspiracists’ scenarios — or at least, it leaves dangling a long list of unanswered questions. When it is examined, a troubling portrait emerges of an agency eager to tailor its investigation for the purposes of prosecuting a criminal case, rather than doggedly seeking out the truth.

Joann Van Buren is far from the only person in Junction City and Oklahoma City in the days before the bombing who says she saw McVeigh in the company of someone besides just Nichols. And she is far from the only person whose tip seems to have gone ignored by the FBI for just that reason.

The most definitive claim of a John Doe No. 2 sighting came from Tim Kessinger, an employee of Elliott’s Body Shop, where McVeigh rented the Ryder truck used in the bombing. Kessinger’s description provided the basis for the sketch that the FBI circulated of the suspect, and he later testified that he had probably mixed up his recollections of McVeigh with Todd Bunting’s rental the next day.

There were four employees present when McVeigh rented the truck, however, and all four continue to insist that a second man arrived and left with McVeigh. The shop’s owner, Eldon Elliott, and a clerk testified in court to this effect during the Denver trials.

Likewise, nearly all of the 12 reasonably credible witnesses who saw McVeigh in Kansas, and whose accounts have been made public, say he was in the company of other men, sometimes two or more, and only a few of these identified Nichols as one of them. A Herington convenience-store clerk said McVeigh came in two days before the bombing with a second man who was not Nichols. The manager of the McDonald’s across the street from Joann Van Buren’s Subway shop said McVeigh and “his associates” frequented the restaurant.

It is similarly telling that the prosecution in McVeigh’s trial never called a single witness who could place McVeigh in Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing — largely because they too saw McVeigh with other people. A substantial number of these sightings include a man who fit the description of John Doe No. 2.

The most striking of these accounts come from a pair of highly credible witnesses who contacted the FBI early in the investigation and provided a description of the muscular, dark-haired man with McVeigh well before the FBI released the sketch of John Doe No. 2. One of them told an Oklahoma City grand jury that he saw Timothy McVeigh fleeing the scene of the bombing with such a man — and reported it to the FBI the night of the bombing.

“I saw two individuals, Timothy McVeigh and John Doe No. 2, cross Fifth Street just minutes before the blast,” said Rodney Johnson, 34, in his testimony. Moments later, the bomb blew out the windows of Johnson’s truck.

Johnson said McVeigh and John Doe No. 2 “were in step, one behind the other. They were definitely together.”

A similar account turned up in the withheld “lead sheets” turned over last month to defense attorneys. Morris John Kuper Jr. called the FBI two days after the bombing to urge the bureau to look into activities he witnessed in a parking lot a block away from the Murrah Federal Building an hour before the bombing. Kuper testified at Nichols’ trial that he saw McVeigh with a man fitting John Doe No. 2′s description getting into a light-colored car similar to the battered Mercury in which McVeigh was later caught. Kuper also said he called the FBI to suggest they check cameras at a nearby library and phone-company offices on the chance they might have caught something on video, “but they took my name and phone number and never contacted me again.”

Almost as striking was the testimony, in McVeigh’s trial, of a woman who lost her leg and her family in the bombing. Daina Bradley, who was standing in line at the Murrah Building’s Social Security office that morning with her mother, sister and two children, saw the Ryder truck pull up to the front of the building. And she said she saw two men, not one, get out of the truck’s cab. She got a clear view of only one of them, describing him as an “olive-complexion man with short hair, curly, clean-cut. He had on a blue Starter jacket, blue jeans, and tennis shoes and a white hat with purple flames.”

However, Bradley’s testimony was severely undermined when the 21-year-old admitted she had previously told investigators she had seen only the olive-skinned man get out of the truck. When prosecutors pointed out that she had self-admitted mental problems that affected her memory, some of them related to the trauma she suffered during the bombing — all of her family members with her were killed, and Bradley herself had to be cut out from the rubble, by a doctor who amputated her leg with a knife — she broke down on the stand.

The problem with all these accounts, as any criminologist can attest, is that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, the breadth of the 20 or so people who saw the man fitting the description of John Doe No. 2 — including those whose accounts preceded the wide distribution of the police sketch — is striking .

John Doe No. 2 isn’t the only riddle the FBI has failed to adequately explain. No one has apparently been able to explain, for example, the bombing’s rarely acknowledged 169th victim.

When sifting through the debris of the Murrah Building, workers encountered numerous body parts, including nine severed legs. Only eight of those legs, however, were eventually matched up with bodies.

The owner of the ninth leg — apparently a dark-skinned person, according to the medical examiner’s testimony in the McVeigh trial — has never been found, leading investigators to conclude that its owner was very near the blast when it occurred, and other body parts were obliterated by the explosion. There is the possibility that it belonged to a random passerby, but there are no missing person records relevant to the Oklahoma blast, and even extensive searches among homeless service agencies in the area failed to turn up any likely subjects.

There’s also confusion around the question of how the bomb was constructed. McVeigh claims in “American Terrorist” that he and Nichols alone managed to load several tons of liquid jet fuel and ammonium nitrate into the Ryder truck and mix it into lethal explosive all in the span of three hours. Considering the difficulty of such work — particularly that of mixing the chemicals — McVeigh’s account stretches the limits of credulity.

A more reasonable explanation for the construction of the bomb can be found in the testimony at Terry Nichols’ trial. Charles Farley, a local sporting-goods rental shop worker, told the courtroom that he passed by Geary Lake at the time the bomb was being built, and saw not only the Ryder truck, a two-ton farm truck loaded with white bags of fertilizer and a car similar to McVeigh’s getaway car, but at least five men working around the scene.

“Initially, when I got to the gate, there was one individual standing at the back of the farm truck, at the back left corner of the farm truck,” Farley testified. “I seen three individuals standing down between the Ryder truck and the brown car, one of them standing in the — in the road just a little bit, one of them leaning against the front of the Ryder truck and the other one just kind of standing between them.”

Farley said he made to drive out of the area, pulling just beyond a gate nearby. “As soon as I was out, I seen an individual walking alongside of the farm truck. He was probably at the cab when I first seen him. And I was really going slow. I mean, I was just creeping. And I was going to roll the window down and ask him if he needed some help. And — [he] give me kind of a dirty look and I decided, well, if you’re going to be that way, me too, and I’m just going to leave; so I just drove away.”

Farley said he couldn’t identify any of the other men, but he got a clear view of the man who shot him a look. Nichols’ defense attorneys handed him a photo of a gray-bearded man, and Farley said it was the man. The Rocky Mountain News later tracked down the identity of the man in the photo and found it was a 60-something member of a local Kansas citizens’ militia group named Morris Wilson.

Strangely, prosecutors did not attempt to rebut much of Farley’s testimony, which came on the last full day of defense testimony. It proved a crucial error in judgment. The jury convicted Nichols, but only of the lesser crime of taking part in the conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter, eschewing the murder and bombing charges that would have brought him the death penalty. Several of the jurors later said that Farley’s testimony had convinced them that there was a wider conspiracy.

The jurors were not alone. In the sentencing phase of the trial, Judge Matsch himself indicated he was not convinced that everyone involved in the bombing had been brought to justice when he offered to lighten Nichols’ life sentence in exchange for information about other participants. He said many questions about the case remained unanswered, adding: “If the defendant in this case, Mr. Nichols, comes forward with answers or information leading to answers to some of these questions, it would be something that the court can consider in imposing final sentence,” Matsch said.

But defense attorney Michael Tigar demurred, explaining that Nichols couldn’t discuss the bombing without jeopardizing his chances in the face of a near-certain second trial on state murder charges in Oklahoma. “We will consider your honor’s words carefully,” Tigar said, “but I hope it’s understood that we don’t labor here without those constraints.”

There were other indications that Nichols was apparently prepared to start naming co-conspirators. And therein lies the most compelling evidence that there was a John Doe No. 2 — as well, perhaps, as a John Doe No. 3 and even a John Doe No. 4 — involved in the Oklahoma bombing.

But any chance of that went out the window when Oklahoma officials, eager to hand him the death penalty, decided to pursue their own case against Nichols. His murder trial — which had been scheduled to begin this month — is now on hold, as his new defense team sifts through the FBI’s withheld documents.

The most famous instance of the FBI’s disturbing propensity to take action built around a predetermined (and factually flawed) scenario is the Richard Jewell case, when agents decided that the former security guard had perpetrated the pipe bombing of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

Not only was Jewell’s name dragged through the mire, but the trail of the real killer grew cold as agents focused their energy on a man later proven to be innocent. It was only when the likely bomber, right-wing terrorist Eric Rudolph, set off more bombs at gay bars and abortion clinics around the South that the FBI finally picked the trail back up. By then, of course, it was too late for his subsequent victims — and Rudolph to this day remains at large.

Combine that with fiascoes at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, where federal agents decided to bring the full force of their armaments into play against religious fanatics, and a pattern has emerged of an agency unwilling to shift from an original theory or plan of attack.

That stubbornness has frequently appeared in play in the government’s Oklahoma City bombing investigation. A month before McVeigh’s 1997 trial, prosecutors were prepared to argue that he had used a fertilizer-diesel oil mix for the bomb, even though there was clear evidence in lab analyses of the explosion’s force that the bomb was not of that type. But the FBI had obtained receipts showing Nichols had purchased two tanks of diesel for his pickup truck, and had even gone so far as to enlist as witnesses entomologists who had done autopsies on dead insects found in puddles of diesel at Geary Lake, Kansas, where McVeigh and Nichols had put the bomb together. It was evidence FBI agents had found — even if they knew it didn’t prove anything.

But then, on the eve of the trial, Playboy magazine ran an article on the case that included information from documents leaked by McVeigh’s defense team. In those documents, McVeigh had said that he used nitromethane, a high-combustion jet fuel, in the bomb and had obtained it at a racetrack south of Dallas.

“Of course, Lori Fortier had been telling them this all along, that McVeigh said he had nitromethane,” says Kevin Flynn, a veteran reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver who covered the trials. “But since they couldn’t prove it, and they couldn’t locate where he might have gotten it, they couldn’t go to the jury with it, so they went with a false story — a story they had reason to believe was false, that it was diesel fuel, only because they could show that Terry Nichols bought two tanks of diesel fuel that weekend, and that he had a siphon. So they were going to go with a false story, because they couldn’t prove the one they thought was true.”

According to Flynn’s reporting, though, after the Playboy story prosecutors realized they needed more. “They went down to Dallas, they found the racetrack, they looked at the calendar, they got the race dates there in October and they tracked down all the nitromethane sales people. And one guy said, ‘Yeah, a guy came in and paid cash for three barrels, who kind of looked like McVeigh.’ He couldn’t do a positive ID two and a half years later, but he was a credible enough witness that they changed their whole story on the eve of the trial.”

There are other indications that the FBI chose to simplify the case at the expense of potential leads. According to testimony by the FBI’s own fingerprint witness at the McVeigh trial, there were thousands of fingerprints recovered in the investigation. The witness testified on cross-examination that there were roughly about 1,100 fingerprints that they did not try to identify. Instead of cross-referencing them in a broad search, they simply checked them against a handful of potential John Doe No. 2 suspects. The agency has never explained why it chose such a limited check.

A more traditional problem with the FBI’s modus operandi cropped up in the investigation, too — namely, its high-handed treatment of local law enforcement officials, which often takes the form of ignoring important information they possess. This was especially striking to police in the rural Kansas precincts where McVeigh and Nichols constructed the truck bomb. A number of them offered leads that still appear promising, but their attempts fell on deaf ears.

“I can tell you that the frustration level around here was just enormous,” says Suzanne James, a former deputy prosecutor in Topeka who had information on some of the militiamen with whom Morris Wilson associated. “When the FBI came in here, they just plain wouldn’t listen to anything anybody local told them.

“If nothing else, I think the FBI owes the public an explanation, if these people were investigated, why they were eliminated as possibilities,” says James. “Otherwise, you have one of these endless things like the Kennedy assassination.”

Even analysts whose work is often devoted to debunking conspiracy theories are troubled by the lingering riddles in the Oklahoma City bombing.

“I think it’s not a closed case,” says Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence-gathering arm. “I think that certainly there’s the possibility that there are two or three or perhaps more people out there still. I absolutely don’t think that’s certain. That said, I think there’s no question there are unanswered questions.”

Now, the best prospect for settling the mysteries of Oklahoma City no longer lies with the investigators at the FBI, or whatever secrets may emerge among the thousands of recently disclosed documents. And it appears it may very well not happen before McVeigh is executed. However, not all of McVeigh’s secrets will die with him. Nichols will remain very much alive, pending the outcome of his state trial. And in that setting, there is at least a reasonable chance — particularly if the sentencing judge replicates the offer Judge Matsch made to Nichols — that the identity of John Doe No. 2, or whoever it was that helped him bomb Oklahoma City, could finally come to light.

Olson’s current problems stem from his failure to be forthcoming before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is deciding whether to forward his nomination to the larger Senate, when he testified before the committee in early April. As Salon has reported, Olson gave evasive answers about his participation in dirt-digging expeditions into the Arkansas pasts of former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary.

But Olson’s troubles with Congress shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed his career, because they bear remarkable similarity to the behavior that got him into hot water more than a decade ago, and almost led to perjury charges.

A careful examination of that episode raises serious questions about not merely his integrity but the legendary legal prowess to which even his critics defer. Indeed, the last time Olson served as a top presidential legal counselor, he left behind a political disaster area strewn with bad legal advice, wrecked careers and lingering scandals.

As assistant attorney general to President Reagan from 1981 to 1983, Olson advised the president to claim executive privilege to block an investigation by congressional Democrats into the scandal-plagued Superfund program, based on assertions that later proved fatally false — largely because Olson, apparently eager to force a political fight with Congress, failed to double-check key information.

Olson’s blunders eventually caused the resignation of Reagan’s lightning-rod Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Anne Gorsuch Burford. And those events in turn wound up costing Reagan much of his administration’s agenda for reshaping environmental policy.

Afterward, when Congress was investigating both the scandal and apparent attempts to cover it up, Olson gave what a colleague would later call “deliberately evasive” answers when questioned about this advice in testimony before Congress. He earned a full investigation by an independent counsel, for perjury and obstruction of justice, because of this testimony.

Olson was even cited for contempt of court while contesting the I.C. investigation — a case he took all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost decisively. However, he eventually avoided prosecution when the independent counsel scrupulously ruled that, though Olson’s testimony was “misleading and disingenuous,” it did not rise to the level of prosecutable perjury.

There is no small irony in that final outcome. Despite claiming martyrdom for himself at the hands of an abusive independent counsel, Olson later played a leading role in turning that office into a political weapon by aiding and abetting, at seemingly every turn, independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation of Bill Clinton.

Ultimately, Olson’s complete record reveals a troubling portrait of a counselor willing to risk everything — including the credibility of his president, and his political colleagues’ careers — in pursuit of a highly charged partisan agenda that seems more calculated to bolster his own reputation than the cause of the office he serves, and a lawyer who makes ironclad assertions that later turn out to be false and misleading. It is a record that raises serious questions about his judgment and competence — as well as demonstrating the capacity for evasion and dissembling now being questioned in the Senate.

Ted Olson’s career as a battling Republican lawyer really began the day he stood next to James Watt as the interior secretary defiantly declared executive privilege.

That was in October 1981, a few months after President Reagan had named Olson assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. Watt had been subpoenaed by Michigan Rep. John Dingell, the Democratic chairman of the subcommittee assigned to look into environmental cleanup efforts, to provide Dingell’s subcommittee with documents relating to that work. Watt had deemed these papers “enforcement sensitive” — that is, making them public, he said, would compromise the department’s ability to enforce cleanup laws.

However, Watt’s privilege assertion and the controversy accompanying it did not last long. Sensing a political fiasco, Reagan’s White House counsel, Fred Fielding, negotiated an access agreement with the Dingell subcommittee in early 1982. Olson strongly opposed the terms of the agreement, and he apparently viewed the compromise as a personal defeat.

Another opportunity for Olson to again tackle the executive-privilege question presented itself in short order. In September 1982, another House subcommittee — chaired by Rep. Elliott Levitas, D-Ga. — sought access to EPA files involving enforcement of the so-called Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup provisions, particularly focusing on the activities of Rita Lavelle, assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response. Dingell’s subcommittee also asked for documents involving the same matter. EPA staff members were reluctant to disclose some information, again fearing the documents were “enforcement sensitive.”

The information in question involved the handling of funding for three Superfund sites: Stringfellow in California, Berlin and Farrow in Michigan, and Tar Creek in Oklahoma. There were concerns that “election tracking” — the practice of timing key events, such as the announcement of cleanup funding, to assist the election campaigns of “friendly” (read: Republican) politicians — had occurred in the funding of those three sites. Such activity by federal authorities had been outlawed in the post-Watergate ethical reforms passed by Congress.

There was also some concern that Lavelle — who had been previously employed as an executive at Aerojet-General Corp., one of the polluters at the Stringfellow site — was continuing to work on the Stringfellow case despite having been ordered away by her EPA superiors, largely because of the conflict of interest her work on that case represented.

EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford — who was already embroiled in controversies over her reorganization of the department — directed her staff to seek advice on the disclosure issue from Carol Dinkins, who headed up the Justice Department’s Land and Natural Resources Division. Dinkins turned to Olson and his Office of Legal Counsel for help.

On Oct. 1, Olson led a meeting of EPA and Justice Department officials to discuss turning over the documents. Olson favored a “staged response” in releasing the documents, noting that they included some “politically sensitive” material. EPA officials, however, expressed an inclination to transmit all documents promptly. But Olson and other Justice officials were adamant that broader executive-branch interests were at stake, and argued vehemently against broad access.

Burford would later maintain that she had never requested that executive privilege be asserted in order to hold back the documents, and that she contended from the start that doing so was a political mistake. However, she had not reckoned on Olson and his apparent determination to fight this battle.

In her memoirs, Burford later wrote: “The people at Justice behind the push for executive privilege were all presidential appointees who, to be blunt, shared several characteristics: (1) they didn’t have enough to do; (2) they weren’t very good lawyers; and (3) they had tremendous egos. They wanted to make a name for themselves in Washington, and one way to do that while they were at Justice was to have their names on a Supreme Court case.”

Tension increased between Olson and other Justice Department lawyers and EPA staff. Throughout the month, EPA staffers attempted to reach a compromise with Dingell’s investigators, at one point proposing that the committee be able to review all the documents, but that they not be made public. Olson promptly shot down all those schemes and continued to proceed with plans to fight the documents’ disclosure.

The Dingell panel issued a subpoena on Oct. 22, and within three days, Olson was putting the finishing touches on a memorandum to President Reagan recommending he assert executive privilege over the documents. During meetings to discuss the memo, Burford’s position was again voiced: “Be sure these documents are worth it before we go through this.”

Olson ignored that advice. His final memo to Reagan on the matter, dated Oct. 25, 1982, stated without qualification that the documents contained no evidence of wrongdoing by administration officials, which is one of the legal conditions for asserting executive privilege. It also informed Reagan: “The Administrator [Burford] concurs in this recommendation.”

But in fact, Olson and his staff had failed to ascertain whether either assertion was true. In reality, Burford was far from concurring. She later testified that she failed to see how Olson could have been unaware of her reluctance — that her hesitancy had been obvious, and that she had suggested that Olson explore alternatives to asserting privilege. There’s no evidence, however, that Olson and Burford had ever discussed the issue directly; they had never met face to face.

The biggest flaw in Olson’s Oct. 25 memo, however, was the statement that the documents he was seeking to keep from investigators contained no evidence of wrongdoing. In fact, Olson’s staff had not even conducted a thorough review of the documents Dingell wanted — some 51 pieces in all — and would not do so until Dec. 9, well after executive privilege was asserted. There had been a preliminary review in early October, and even then red flags had been raised; the OLC lawyers forwarded them at that point to Dinkins’ attorneys for more detailed review. There is no indication that review was ever completed; Dinkins conducted a cursory check and then apparently let the matter lapse.

The day he received the memo, Oct. 26, Reagan signed a directive to Burford to assert executive privilege over the subpoenaed documents. However, because the Dingell hearings had been postponed, the directive was left in a safe without ever being sent to Burford or anyone else. Nor was Burford ever told about the directive.

On Nov. 1, Olson and Burford met in Burford’s office, along with EPA, Justice and White House staff, and there was immediate tension between them over the executive-privilege plan. Burford’s concerns were perhaps more political than principled. She said she had been dismayed by the way the administration had failed to back up Watt in his executive-privilege bout. She backed down only after asking whether the president wanted her to exert executive privilege, and being told he did.

Strangely enough, not a single person at the meeting managed to tell Burford that Reagan in fact had already signed a directive ordering her to do so.

After the Levitas subcommittee issued its subpoena on Nov. 22, Olson and Burford met again. Burford again raised her concerns about being left to dangle in the wind like Watt, and Olson assured her that she had the full and committed support of the Justice Department. Ensuing events would indicate her fears were well-grounded.

She also asked Olson if Justice could take over the assertion of privilege, or whether at least Olson himself could make the assertion before Congress. Olson demurred, saying the job must be hers. Finally, on Nov. 30, President Reagan issued a directive to Burford to assert executive privilege in response to both subpoenas. Burford did so on Dec. 2 before Rep. Levitas’ panel, and on Dec. 14 to the Dingell subcommittee. Each committee promptly cited her for contempt of Congress, and eventually the entire House voted to cite her.

It was not until Dec. 9 that Olson and his staff began reviewing the contents of the withheld Dingell documents. Olson aide Laurel Pyke Malson then discovered a document indicating that Rita Lavelle had in fact continued to participate in the Stringfellow case even after having been warned away. When she brought the document to Olson’s attention, he warned her not to jump to conclusions. Nonetheless, a few days later, EPA counsel Robert Perry transmitted a copy of the document to the Dingell subcommittee with a letter explaining that it did not fall within the executive-privilege claim.

This potentially explosive revelation severely damaged the effort to assert privilege. Olson and his deputy, Larry Simms, met on Dec. 12 because Simms had come to believe the Stringfellow document (as well as other factors) had doomed their claim.

Nonetheless, Olson proceeded full steam ahead with his plan of attack. When the full House cited Burford on Dec. 16, he and his team responded with an extraordinary civil suit in federal court contesting the constitutionality of Congress’ contempt powers, charging that the invocation of privilege was proper and that the contempt citations should not stand. The suit, however, had a short shelf life; it was dismissed by the court on Feb. 1.

The Olson team’s effort was “without a doubt the sloppiest piece of legal work I had seen in 20 years of being a lawyer,” Burford later wrote in her memoirs. It only cited in its support nonbinding opinions from a single case — former President Richard Nixon’s suit against the House Judiciary Committee — and Burford notes that no factual defenses were raised.

By this time, moreover, the full effect of the Stringfellow document was working its way through the Dingell investigation. It soon became clear that Lavelle’s activities could trigger criminal charges. The Justice Department began to contemplate a full investigation of Lavelle.

The death blow for the executive-privilege claim came on Feb. 3, when Olson’s staff, with updated instructions, conducted a more thorough review of the withheld material. Two documents prepared by a pair of attorneys working for Lavelle were found to contain clear evidence linking “election tracking” work to funding announcements. The staff presented them to Olson, who indicated he would take the notes to Deputy Attorney General Edward Schmults.

With that information in hand, Burford asked Lavelle to resign on Feb 4. When she refused, she was removed by President Reagan himself. Eventually, Lavelle would be convicted by a federal jury on two counts of perjury, one count of obstructing a congressional investigation and another count of submitting a false “statement of certification.” She spent four months in prison and then served five years’ probation.

On Feb. 17, Burford had two meetings with White House officials, arguing strongly for giving up the executive-privilege claim. She then met with Reagan himself, telling him “his interests were not [being] well served” by the assertion of executive privilege, pleading with him to let her release the documents. The next day an agreement was reached to release the documents to the Dingell and Levitas subcommittees. On Feb. 25, the withheld documents — including those linking cleanup funding announcements to elections — were turned over.

Within days, the revelations in the documents created a political firestorm on Capitol Hill and in the press, where calls began sounding for Burford’s resignation.

Burford was officially hung out to dry at a March 3, 1983, meeting with Schmults, Dinkins, Perry and others. She says Schmults told her the Justice Department could no longer represent her in the legal arena because Justice was now forced to investigate EPA. Yet Schmults, recalls Burford, rejected her suggestion that simply withdrawing Reagan’s order forcing her to assert executive privilege could resolve the conflict.

Burford recalls her response: “This is bizarre. You’re saying that an administration official acting under orders of the president is not entitled to Department of Justice counsel.”

It became clear at that point, Burford says, that resigning was the only way she could avoid another contempt citation. When a Reagan confidant told her a few days later he wanted her to step down, she did so. And shortly after officially tendering her resignation on March 9, she saw the contempt citations withdrawn.

Dingell’s assessment of the episode was scathing. “Shameful behavior,” he says in Burford’s book. “The Justice Department, having asserted these extraordinary postures in their briefs, then absented themselves and left these people, who were doing what they were instructed to do, to suffer the consequences, including potential criminal liability and other liabilities without the advantage of counsel to which they were fully entitled.”

Ted Olson’s difficulties had just begun, though. Already, the House Judiciary Committee — chaired by Rep. Peter Rodino Jr., D-N.J. — had signaled it intended to inquire into Justice’s handling of the Superfund documents.

Rodino wrote in late February and early March to Attorney General French Smith seeking documents pertaining to OLC’s advice to the president on this assertion of executive privilege. Olson participated in drafting responses to the two letters. Then, on March 10, 1983, Olson appeared before the Subcommittee on Monopolies and Commercial Law of the House Judiciary Committee, and presented testimony that would continue to haunt him for another four years.

The hearing was often contentious and partisan in nature, with congressional inquisitors frequently interrupting Olson and snide remarks punctuating many of the exchanges. At a key point, Rep. John Seiberling, D-Ohio, questioned Olson:

“Mr. Olson, the question of whether EPA wanted to turn over the documents at some point before the decision was actually made not to do so, and who advised them not to, is a very important one. And I’d like to ask whether, to your knowledge, at any time EPA did indicate its willingness to turn over the documents during the course of your consideration of the Subcommittee’s request.”

Olson’s answer: “I don’t recall having been told that by anybody associated with EPA. I did read the newspapers, and it seemed to be that through — that that sentiment seemed to be being expressed, especially in the last week or two. But that’s all I know.”

This response would, in today’s context, be hailed as “Clintonian” — evasive and misleading, though technically true. Olson had been told that EPA officials were willing, conditionally at least, to turn over the documents — but by his own staff, not by anyone from EPA. Olson deputy Larry Simms, who was present during the testimony, later testified that he couldn’t understand why Olson responded to Seiberling’s question in a way suggesting he had never been told about EPA officials’ willingness to compromise on the documents.

There were other evasions as well: Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas, asked Olson about unanimity within the executive branch concerning the privilege claim. Olson responded that everyone involved “agreed that this was a proper occasion for the invocation of the privilege,” adding: “Whenever other people or some people in that process may have changed their mind later because of developments or allegations or because it became uncomfortable, I don’t know.”

This was again a masterful display of disingenuousness. “Other people” — a reference, apparently, to Burford and other EPA officials — didn’t ever change their minds. As Burford later observed: “Until told directly by Mr. Hauser, deputy legal advisor to the President, that the President wanted to assert executive privilege, it was my policy at EPA to give Congress ‘access’ to any and all documents requested … To interpret my acquiescence in an order from the President to assert executive privilege as a ‘recommendation’ that he assert the privilege is convoluted and revisionist at best.”

Rodino asked Olson whether Justice had provided all the documents regarding the advice to President Reagan on the executive-privilege claim, and was not withholding anything. Olson’s response:

“Well, Mr. Chairman, we tried to provide everything that we have that pertains to the advice that we have given. Most of those documents are published. I don’t include handwritten notes of my own. I make Xerox copies of cases and make notes in the margin. There are scraps of paper probably everywhere. I’m not sure that we’ve included everything. We’ve included everything that we think is relevant to the questions that you’ve asked and to the advice that we’ve given.”

The most troubling aspect of this testimony was Olson’s apparent suggestion that the only documents not yet turned over were primarily “scraps of paper” and the like, while omitting any mention of his Oct. 25 memo to President Reagan, which had not yet been produced (it eventually was, two weeks later). That memo, in fact, was probably the definitive document in the framework of Rodino’s request.

As the day wore on, the exchanges grew more contentious. At one point, Seiberling suggested that Reagan should “get another lawyer,” and he urged both Olson and Attorney General William French Smith to resign. Olson’s combativeness was understandable, but even his associates at the Justice Department were troubled by his lack of candor.

One of Olson’s aides who attended, Laurel Pyke Malson, afterward said she viewed Olson’s testimony as “deliberately evasive.” She later clarified this observation: “Mr. Olson appeared to construe questions as narrowly as they reasonably could be interpreted.”

Though the tensions eased somewhat when Attorney General Smith personally assured the Judiciary Committee on March 15 that all the requested documents would be produced, the cloud over Ted Olson would only darken in the coming months.

Things seemed to be going smoothly for Alan Parker, the committee’s chief counsel, who went about the work of overseeing the document production from April 1983 to April 1984. During the entire process, Parker believed the Justice Department was providing everything contained within the requests.

However, Deputy Attorney General Schmults had in fact decided that no handwritten documents would be handed over to the committee — and that Parker was not to be informed they were being withheld. Some Justice staff advised Schmults to inform Parker, but he refused. So throughout the gathering process, a number of handwritten notes were withdrawn from files being produced, at the instruction of Michael Dolan, deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legislative Action.

But Schmults left Justice to return to private practice in January 1984, and Ted Olson, too, chose to go back to his former employer, D.C. powerhouse Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, later that spring. As the months wore on, Dolan realized that Parker was still unaware that some notes had been withheld. He began discussing internally how to deal with it, and it was agreed that at some point Dolan had to break the news to Parker.

So on April 17, Dolan disclosed to Judiciary Committee staff that handwritten notes had been withheld. He was later chastised by Olson for being “too forthcoming” — perhaps because the revelation produced more well-publicized condemnations from Rodino. Nonetheless, after several more months of tussling and negotiating, all the handwritten notes eventually were turned over, ending in early 1985.

The storm broke on Dec. 5, 1985, when the Judiciary Committee issued its final report. In scathing language, it recommended that Attorney General Edwin Meese seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate possible criminal conduct it found, including possible perjury and obstruction of justice. And it was clear that much of the focus was on Ted Olson and Ed Schmults.

Over the next four months, the matter would be reviewed by the career prosecutors in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section. They released their findings in April 1986, and identified cases of misconduct by four Reagan administration officials: Edward Schmults, Theodore Olson, Carol Dinkins and Deputy White House Counsel Richard Hauser.

The Public Integrity Section recommended that Schmults be investigated for obstruction of justice, for his role in withholding the handwritten notes from congressional investigators. Olson was targeted for a perjury investigation for his congressional testimony on the executive-privilege assertion and the withholding of documents. Dinkins and Hauser allegedly certified their respective reviews of the withheld EPA documents falsely.

Most significantly, the Public Integrity Section described the circumstances around these acts as “a seamless web of events, germinating from the original decision to withhold EPA documents … Accordingly, in our view, splitting off narrow areas for investigation by an Independent Counsel is artificial and may impede the Independent Counsel’s ability to fully explore the allegations.”

Public Integrity thus recommended to Meese that jurisdiction of the independent counsel “be broad enough to allow the Independent Counsel to investigate or prosecute any matter within the scope of this report.” This recommendation was ignored — though the division’s analysis of what would happen if Meese limited the scope of the investigation proved prophetic.

Meese shortly announced he was appointing William Weld, then U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, to handle an independent review of the matter, since everyone at the assistant attorney general level or higher at Justice (including Meese) was forced to recuse himself from consideration of the matter. Each had been involved with the events or was a close friend of Olson.

On April 4, Weld delivered his recommendations: An independent counsel should be appointed to investigate both Schmults and Olson, he said, but not Dinkins or Hauser.

But Meese overruled both Weld and his own Public Integrity Section the next week, instead handing down a very narrow referral limiting the scope of the independent counsel’s review to the behavior of Olson.

So when Alexia Morrison — the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement chief and a former assistant U.S. attorney — was named independent counsel to investigate Olson that May, she immediately was forced to confront the problem of Meese’s referral. She quickly came to concur with the Public Integrity Section’s assessment: This case involved a “web” of events that could not be separated one from the other, and the narrow referral meant she could not explore the matter properly. As her report put it:

On the one hand, it began to appear that, viewed in total isolation from the complex of surrounding events and based on evidence we had collected to that point, Mr. Olson’s March 10 testimony probably did not constitute a prosecutable offense because it was literally true, even if potentially misleading in certain respects. Viewed in the context of those surrounding events, however, it appeared his actions might have been part of a larger pattern of conduct, involving high-ranking members of the Department, intended to obstruct the Committee’s inquiry. In short, if Mr. Olson was culpable at all, it was probably only as part of a larger concerted effort involving the conduct of others.

At the same time, it was our view that if any single act had obstructed the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry, it was the undisclosed withholding of the handwritten notes and other documents, for which Mr. Olson bore at most secondary responsibility. Accordingly, we feared that our jurisdictional mandate may have excluded those who, if any conduct was criminal at all, bore responsibility at least as great as, and possibly greater than, Mr. Olson’s.

Morrison wrote to Meese on Nov. 14, 1986, and asked him to reconsider expanding her jurisdiction to include the charges against Schmults and Dinkins, pointing to “certain new information” her investigators had obtained that heightened the need for investigating those areas. Morrison even took the unusual step of asking Meese to refrain from participating in further decisions in the case because of the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Meese did not reply for three weeks. Finally, on Dec. 17, Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns responded to Morrison, saying Meese refused to recuse himself from the matter — and also refused to expand her jurisdiction.

Morrison fought Meese’s decision by filing with the Special Division of the D.C. Circuit Court for expansion of her jurisdiction. Meese defended his decision by saying that Schmults and Dinkins “lacked the requisite intent under pertinent criminal statutes.” This was an unusual finding, since intent (or lack thereof) is typically beyond the scope of the statutory preliminary inquiry — that’s what an investigation would examine.

As Morrison noted, the allegations against Schmults and Dinkins both clearly reached the relatively low statutory standard for referral. Eventually, to close this loophole Meese relied on, Congress in 1987 would explicitly bar such considerations as intent for refusing a referral under the I.C. statute.

But in this matter, Meese won out. On April 2, 1987, the Special Division, citing Meese’s referral, refused to expand Morrison’s jurisdiction. However, it noted that Morrison could investigate whether Olson had engaged in conspiracy with others (including Schmults and Dinkins) to obstruct the Judiciary Committee’s work.

So in late spring of 1987, Morrison issued grand jury subpoenas to Olson, Schmults and Dinkins. All three moved to quash the subpoenas on the grounds that the independent counsel statute itself was unconstitutional.

A protracted court battled ensued, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Morrison won the first round in District Court, and when Olson, Schmults and Dinkins refused to comply in order to appeal the case to the D.C. Circuit of Court of Appeals, they were cited for contempt of court.

On Jan. 22, 1988, a divided D.C. Circuit panel, in an opinion authored by Olson’s friend and Federalist Society cohort Laurence Silberman, ruled 2-1 that the independent counsel statute was unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court granted expedited review, and on June 29, the Supreme Court reversed the panel in an 8-1 vote. The case, Morrison vs. Olson, established once and for all that the statute was constitutional. Justice Antonin Scalia — who would later prove invaluable when Olson represented George W. Bush before the Supreme Court, seeking to squash the manual Florida recount — offered the lone dissent.

Within two months, Morrison was able to announce the result of her investigation. Her report said the investigation had reviewed five areas of Olson’s testimony under question, considered carefully the requirements of perjury statutes, and found that while Olson’s testimony may have been “less than forthcoming,” it did not rise to the level of prosecutable perjury.

Throughout the report, Morrison was scrupulously evenhanded and restrained in her prosecutorial style. For instance, when examining Olson’s reply to Rep. Seiberling about the EPA’s willingness to produce the documents, she found that the answer was “literally true” — but only by applying a narrow reading of Seiberling’s question as asking whether the EPA was willing to provide all documents unconditionally — something Seiberling didn’t ask. In that context, everything Olson said was accurate, since this was a position Burford never supported; her willingness to produce the documents was always conditional on their remaining secure and not public.

But Olson’s response to Peter Rodino about document production was “by far the most troubling aspect of his testimony,” Morrison found, since it specifically omitted any mention of his Oct. 25, 1982, memo to Reagan. As Morrison noted, “Olson … had a substantial apparent motive to conceal that document in March 1983.” After all, that memo contained two assertions to the president that later turned out to be false — that the documents contained no evidence of administration wrongdoing, and that Burford supported the claim of executive privilege.

Ultimately, Morrison cleared Olson of the charge, largely on the basis of his answer when she asked why he didn’t bring up the Oct. 25 memo: “I forgot.” Morrison could not find any evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless, Morrison said, the substance of Olson’s answer to Rodino was “disingenuous and misleading … The impression conveyed by Olson’s claim that the Department tried to provide a complete response to the Committee’s request, save for ‘scraps of paper’ and ‘copies of cases,’ was woefully inaccurate.”

Morrison’s report at the time was noted for its “defensiveness,” largely due to the fact that it was completed more than five years after Olson’s testimony. For good reason, too; Olson for a while made a minor career out of presenting himself as a martyr to an out-of-control independent counsel statute, and still is portrayed that way by conservative analysts.

However, Morrison’s explanation makes clear that the lengthiness of her investigation was due to circumstances well out of her control. First there were jurisdictional disputes that held up her ability to call a grand jury; and more significantly, there were the lengthy legal battles filed by Olson that ended up in the Supreme Court.

Indeed, it might appear that Olson deployed a run-out-the-clock strategy in pursuing that avenue, since the statute of limitations on perjury is five years (and in fact Morrison had to negotiate an agreement with Olson in order to suspend those limitations). However, Morrison says today she is satisfied that her investigation was as thorough and complete as any could have been — given the limitations imposed on it by Edwin Meese.

At the time the report was released, Olson decried the personal cost of the investigation. The ordeal, he said, was “an extremely difficult burden to undergo, particularly for such a long time. The cost of that emotionally, financially and psychologically is enormous.”

Others decried what they saw as the criminalization of policy differences. “Public officials discharging their official duties were threatened with a criminal charge, which in reality was based on a political controversy or a separation of powers dispute,” declared Jacob Stein, Dinkins’ attorney and himself a former independent counsel.

However, Olson still has never adequately explained his questionable counsel to Reagan — particularly the false assertion that the documents contained no evidence of wrongdoing — since that fell outside of Morrison’s purview. In general he has tried to rewrite the history of that episode. In a 1985 interview with Legal Times, Olson airily dismissed Burford’s view of the EPA fiasco: “The idea that we were interested in a test of executive privilege is silly,” he said. As for his critics, Olson sniffed that they were “prone to hyperbole and irresponsible statements.”

Olson’s retelling of the episode to the Legal Times was somewhat at variance with the reality as well. He said EPA officials approached the Justice Department about withholding the documents, and claimed Burford only expressed reluctance about limiting access to the documents “months after the executive privilege had been claimed,” and even then it was just to shed the spotlight.

However, the scandal and ensuing investigation apparently did little to harm Olson’s subsequent career. He represented Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandals, and continued to build a reputation as a skilled litigator. In recent years, Olson’s attention has turned to such conservative causes as defending Virginia Military Institute’s attempts to keep women from enrolling at the school and overturning affirmative-action rules at the University of Texas law school.

But Olson’s activities have revolved with a striking avidity around the pursuit of Bill Clinton. So naturally, the subject of Olson’s relatively recent involvement in the Clinton scandals was the focus of much of the questioning he faced during his confirmation hearings in April before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Several senators wondered if his partisan past would color his conduct as a key presidential advisor.

When Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., asked whether he would be able to deliver advice to the president that might be contrary to his agenda, Olson himself brought up his involvement in the executive-privilege attempt in the 1980s. Referring to his experience with Anne Burford, he replied: “I did have experience as assistant attorney general, as you know, in the Office of Legal Counsel. One of the responsibilities of the person holding that position frequently is to say no to the White House or to other parts of the executive branch. It’s never pleasant to do that, but –”

He went on: “One of the things that I learned when I was serving in the Justice Department before, that it’s exceedingly important for the president for other officials in the Justice Department and in the executive branch to give some people in the administration the responsibility and the burden of calling them as closely as they can call them with respect to what the law is and what the law can permit, and as best as possible, to set aside policy considerations and to be willing to say no.”

Olson’s actual record in that period raises doubts about even this answer. His single-minded effort to assert executive privilege actually overlooked what the law permitted, and it wound up costing President Reagan dearly. One is only left to wonder what dubious legal tangles he has in store for President Bush’s agenda.

Meanwhile, a crowd of mostly white people, clustered on a nob overlooking the sea pillars near where the gray whale fed, gathered to loudly protest the planned hunt. “Stop the slaughter of gray whales,” shouted a big sign draped on a truck, blood dripping from the words. Just offshore, a couple of large boats manned by even more white people patrolled the harbors, vowing to intervene if the Makahs dared venture out.

The conflict over Makah whaling has become a bizarre cultural war, setting historical allies — environmentalists and Native Americans — at each other’s throats with escalating threats and actual violence. It reached a head two weeks ago when marine-mammal activists from the Sea Shepherd Society tried to land at the harbor amid a gathered mob of tribal members they had worked into a smoldering anger. First they tried to bring a caravan of protesters onto the Makah reservation, but were turned back just outside of town, near the tribal cemetery, hurling epithets — “Savages!” — that bordered on racist. Then they buzzed the harbor with their boats, shouting protests through megaphones.

The Makah responded with a hail of rocks, but the protesters persisted. The confrontation climaxed when Sea Shepherd leader Lisa Distefano came to the dock in a staged “invitation” from a dissenting tribal member. Someone pushed her off the dock and into the water, and in the ensuing melee, Distefano and three of her compatriots were handcuffed and arrested by tribal police. One of them, with a gashed forehead, was led away bleeding.

After pictures of the near-riot played on the evening news for the next few days, though, both sides — perhaps realizing they had gone too far — backed off. The Makah in particular had come off looking bad; the reservation’s yahoo element (including some members of the whale-hunt party) were largely responsible for the violence, enabling the Sea Shepherd provocateurs to play their traditional media role of free-speech martyrs.

But the fierceness of the Makah response gave the environmentalists pause as well. The customary object of Sea Shepherd protests is a corporate whaling venture from Japan or Norway, or one of the pirate operations that circle around those nations’ whaling industries. They’re not used to confronting a tiny, relatively powerless Indian tribe whose members believe they are only trying to revive their sacred heritage — as well as defending their treaty rights, which may be even more sacred in these secular times.

The Makah claims to a cultural connection to whaling cannot be dismissed. A fierce, warlike tribe given to enslaving members of neighboring bands in the centuries before they were nearly wiped out by smallpox and missionaries, the Makah were renowned even among white explorers for their dramatic whale hunts. Moreover, the hunt (and the spirit of the whale) are central to the tribe’s mythical and artistic culture, as a visit to the tribe’s museum in Neah Bay — featuring the striking products of an archaeological dig at the tribe’s traditional village site 15 miles south — will attest.

Consistent with the experience of other tribes on other reservations, the Makah elders’ efforts to revive their heritage has sparked a general resurgence of tribal pride, particularly among young people. The members of the whale-hunting crew are revered like rock stars by teenagers at Neah Bay High, and elementary school kids talk about wanting to learn more about their people’s history and culture.

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But the environmentalists’ concerns are not without substance, either. Since the tribe announced it would revive the hunt, in the wake of the gray whale’s delisting from U.S. endangered-species status, marine-mammal activists have been adamant in opposing their efforts. At every step in the official approval process — from the National Marine Fisheries Service to the final bargain with the International Whaling Commission — environmentalists have tried to block the hunt. The resistance so far has been futile; the tribe’s unique whaling right under its 1855 treaty is largely set in stone.

Indigenous tribes’ rights to hunt (now Canadian tribes are joining in the effort to revive their traditional heritage through whaling, too) provide a nice opportunity to poke a crack in the anti-whaling wall erected effectively over the years by environmentalists. Japanese and Norwegian whaling interests — the deep-pocketed beneficiaries of extraordinarily high market returns for their products — are constantly on the prowl for fresh opportunities to expand their ability to kill whales.

And while the gray whale is no longer endangered in U.S. waters — the population of the community that migrates along the West Coast has reached 22,000 in recent years, which nudges into a biological comfort zone as far as the National Marine Fisheries Service is concerned — it remains an endangered species on a global basis. Killing one nowadays — particularly given the growing cultural soft spot for the great sea creatures that at times is embarrassingly anthropomorphic — is certain to raise hackles, and is probably irresponsible given the fact that the species’ long-term survival remains in doubt.

Yet certain Inuit tribes in Alaska currently harvest about five gray whales from the migrating community annually. The Makah, who claim the tribe will eat any gray whales it harvests, seem to fit the criteria for an indigenous hunt — especially if it is a component of a genuine revival of the tribe’s traditional culture. However, there are some reasons to doubt just how sincere the Makah really are about reviving their heritage — besides the fact that the tribe only started seriously touting its heritage as a reason for the hunt after it hired a public relations firm in 1997.

• The Makah traditionally hunted the still-endangered humpback whale, which yielded tender and tasty meat, and only occasionally harvested the bottom-feeding grays, whose meat is reputedly stringy and gamy. When a young gray whale was killed in a Makah fisherman’s nets a couple of years ago, its meat was distributed to everyone in the tribe; but few ate it, and most of it gradually migrated from people’s freezers to the local landfill.

• Traditional Makah whalers — who were chosen braves from a few select families — underwent rigorous preparation for the hunt that included long steam-lodge sessions and enduring nettle treatments. But only a few of the modern Makah hunting group are partaking of such rigors; they were chosen mainly for their strength. Several enjoy party-animal reputations, guys in desperate need of something constructive to do — but hardly the leading young men of the village.

• There is a reason the old Makah hunters were considered so heroic: The hunts were extraordinarily dangerous, requiring the highest level of skills as canoeists and harpoonists. None of the current group of Makahs has displayed any of these skills. In fact, they are such poor canoeists that they plan to have the traditional cedar canoe towed by powerboat to the whale’s vicinity — at which point they plan to row out to meet the beast, armed with their paddles, harpoons … and, of course, the traditional high-powered rifle that will perform the final dispatch.

Some Makah elders, particularly those from traditional whaling families, have quietly been making these points within their own circles, arguing that the hunt is being done haphazardly, disrespectfully and for all the wrong reasons. They’ve avoided raising their profiles, though, for fear of being mistaken as being opposed to the tribe’s ability to exercise its treaty rights. And they reserve their harshest words for the Sea Shepherd types, whose provocations, they say, have simply backed the tribe into a corner.

But even if the Makah cultural-revival claims are a surface display meant to deflect the criticism the tribe knew the hunt would inspire if it were depicted as a matter of treaty rights, the fact remains the Makah have those rights. And if the Makah whaling right is an economic asset — which it almost certainly is — then it would be malfeasance for the tribe to unilaterally abrogate the right, as the Sea Shepherd types seem to be demanding. Some have tried to paint the Makahs as a stalking horse for Japanese and Norwegian interests, but that claim is based on questionable slippery-slope arguments and very light evidence. If the Makah are going to give up the right to hunt gray whales, then they need to receive something in return.

A few environmentalists have tried reaching out an olive branch to the tribe, including activists with the whale-watching group In the Path of Giants. They’ve offered to help the tribe set up a local whale-watching industry to play off the Makahs’ unique heritage. Jean-Michel Cousteau showed up in town last week and spoke eloquently about the need to respect the tribe’s rights and find a way to help them while avoiding killing gray whales.

Cousteau’s words gained him respect, but the tribe still views such offers with a great deal of skepticism. Perpetuating the standoff is the way the opposition has conducted itself so far, portraying the tribe as “savages” and playing with internal tribal politics. The Sea Shepherds’ tactics might work on a PR-minded corporation, but they sit poorly with a little tribe that never has cared what the world thinks of it.

Pushed into a corner, the Makah seemed obstinately intent on killing a gray whale and butchering it — even though, as some of their elders are trying to warn them, it is probably a bad idea. “It stirred up a can of worms,” one told a Seattle Times reporter. “I’m afraid someone is going to get hurt.”

Not without cause. The gray whale reportedly fights viciously for its life, and the whalers are almost certainly in for a wild ride if they try to lash onto one with a cedar canoe and harpoons. And that’s if the crew happens to get past the Sea Shepherd’s promised intervention.

But last weekend there began to be signs that the needless death of a gray whale isn’t the inevitable outcome of this confrontation. The anti-whaling protesters once again gathered a caravan and drove toward Neah Bay. Once again they were met near the reservation border by police, who turned them away. But none of the yahoos came out — the only Makah spectators watched quietly and peacefully from a distance. The white protesters turned their cars around and headed back to their Snow Creek outpost, where they were content to wave their signs at the passing cars.

The Makah, their defiance notwithstanding, remained curiously inactive. This past week the hunters allowed their 10-day permit to expire despite some beautiful weather, pleading for more time to prepare. There are signs they may just wait to try whaling in the spring. If they stick to that timetable, then there may be time for anti-whaling interests to back off and give the tribe breathing room and a little respect. Eventually, someone with some credibility with the tribe may be able to come up with a settlement that provides some economic recompense to the Makah for abjuring the exercise of their treaty rights.

In the waters nearby, the gray whales were feeding, rising and blowing their strange misty breath into the air, managing to remain at peace. For now.