Bombing Mirrors Novel Plot White Supremacist Story Strikingly Similar To Real Events

The deadly terrorism in Oklahoma City closely matches a story line from a novel used in the past as a game plan by white supremacists.

The FBI hasn’t connected any group to the bombing, but investigators are scrutinizing white supremacists among hundreds of leads.

Supremacists who formed The Order in the Pacific Northwest in 1983 followed ideas from the novel, “The Turner Diaries,” written under an assumed name by the leader of the former American Nazi Party.

In that fictional account, terrorists kill a prominent Jew, print counterfeit money and carry out robberies to fund a race war. Those acts were carried out by The Order.

Angry at the arrest of a follower, the fictional supremacists blow up a federal building at 9:15 a.m. one day by packing a truck with a bomb made from oil-soaked fertilizer.

The Oklahoma City bombing occurred at 9:04 a.m., and authorities say a fertilizer-based petroleum car bomb was used.

“It’s a helluva coincidence and something I’m sure they are looking at closely,” said retired FBI Agent Norm Stephenson, who investigated The Order and a paramilitary training sect known as The Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord, based in Arkansas.

That view was echoed Thursday by Danny Welch, director of Klanwatch, an Alabama organization that monitors white supremacists.

“They should be looking at white supremacists as possible suspects,” Welch said, pointing to these developments:

White supremacist Richard Wayne Snell was executed in Arkansas on Wednesday, 12 hours after the bombing. A member of The Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord, the 64-year-old racist was executed for murdering a black state trooper and a pawn shop owner he mistakenly thought was Jewish.

In 1988, Snell was acquitted with Aryan leader Richard Butler in Arkansas for plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. The FBI said their plan came from “The Turner Diaries.”

Snell and the others had been accused of bombing a gas pipeline and other domestic terrorism.

Factions within the militia movement are circulating a fax flier, published last month, saying Snell’s execution on April 19 would be remembered. The flier refers to significant past events on April 19, including last year’s federal raid on a religious sect in Waco, Texas.

On that same day in 1992, “The feds attempted to raid Randy Weaver’s cabin in North Idaho, but had their plans thwarted by concerned citizens,” the flier states.

Aryan leader Butler said in Hayden Lake, Idaho, that he was “aware of the coincidences,” including Snell’s execution. “But I’m sure that our people had nothing to do with what happened in Oklahoma.”

The evidence points to Arabs angry about continuing U.S. support for Israel, Butler said.

Other white supremacists from California to Florida referred to the bombing on telephone hot lines and computer bulletin boards.

“I mourn the victims but praise the armed propaganda of the deed,” said John Baumgardner, of Florida’s Collective Action Network. “Regardless of who set the bomb, I feel the hand of God’s angry judgment is evident in this event.”