Tuesday August 7 11:30 PM ET

Author Gore Vidal Thinks McVeigh Had Help

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Author Gore Vidal, who maintained a three-year correspondence with executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, says he is convinced that McVeigh acted as
part of a conspiracy.

In an article in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine published on Tuesday, Vidal asks of McVeigh's insistence that he acted alone: ``Was (he) being a good soldier covering up for others?
Or did he, perhaps now, see himself in a historic role (as abolitionist John Brown) with his own Harper's ferry, and though his ashes molder in the grave, his spirit is marching on?''

Citing material provided to him by investigative reporter Joel Dyer, Vidal concludes that there is overwhelming evidence of a plot involving militia groups and government infiltrators to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The April 20, 1995 bombing claimed 168 lives in the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

Vidal also quotes a letter to him from McVeigh, who was executed in June for the bombing, in which the Gulf War veteran explained why he bombed the Murrah building:

``I chose to bomb a federal building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost the bombing was a retaliatory strike, a counterattack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in the previous year (including but not limited to Waco) ... Our government, like the Chinese, was deploying tanks against its own people.'

In the materials given to Vidal, Dyer said that credible experts believed that McVeigh neither built nor detonated the bomb that blew up the Murrah building and that some experts believe that a single fertilizer bomb could not have caused that amount of damage.

Dyer also said that there were new findings that 10 witnesses saw a group of men in or near the Ryder truck that was believed used in the explosion shortly before it was taken to Oklahoma City and that at least one of the men was a known militia figure.

-----