Ramzi Yousef, Oklahoma City, and Al Qaeda: Linked in Documents?

Does an obscure document, hidden among the hundreds of documents released recently from Iraq and Afghanistan, provide evidence linking Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef to the Oklahoma City attack on the MurrahBuilding?

The Arabic-language handwritten document, numbered AFGP-2002-801138, and available at http://www.ctc.usma.edu/aq/AFGP-2002-801138-Orig.pdf , contains a series of pages that were written in what appears to be some sort of daily planner.

The daily planner appears to be a standard daily calendar/agenda book, containing a daily calendar for the year 2000. The dates within the calendar are in English, and have the Islamic dates for each day as well.

The planner appears to be one sold commercially in Pakistan. The early pages of the planner are printed in English, and contain information that would be helpful to non-Urdu speaking persons in Pakistan, including emergency telephone numbers in Karachi, air travel times from Pakistan, and various other reference guides. It's interesting to note that the handwriting in the document is all in Arabic, despite the planner's Pakistani provenance.

A note at the beginning of the document states that the document was obtained from a "Boot Camp - Class of 2000" in Afghanistan. The term "Boot Camp" most likely refers to one of the Al Qaeda training camps operating in Afghanistan in that time period. Dated comments within the document confirm that the document was most likely written in the year 2000. Other notes indicate that the document is very likely a compilation of questions being prepared for use by Osama Bin Laden in the filming of a new videotape.

The document confirms the links between Al Qaeda and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted in the US for his role in terrorism planning in New York City, and Ramzi Yousef, convicted Al Qaeda operative, calling them "brothers" (see page 122).

In respect to our Brothers who are imprisoned in the United States and other infidel countries, are there attempts or hope to release them such as sheikh 'Omar 'Abd Al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef and others?

And in a series of questions, apparently forming a set from which Bin Laden can select questions to discuss in a video tape, goes on to implicate Yousef (and indirectly implicate Al Qaeda) in the April 1995 attack on Oklahoma City (see page 192).

We hear about the Oklahoma explosion and that it is the largest explosion in America. Is it the one planned by Ramzi Yousef or not? (Note: This question was circled and marked with two (X) marks.

The document goes on to pose other questions to Bin Laden with regards to "the Americans".

One particularly disturbing question discusses rumors of nuclear weapons and Iraq, implying that Iraq was already in possession of nuclear missiles in the summer of 2000. It's interesting to note the repeated references to Iraq even though the document was found in Afghanistan, but isn't surprising given the fact that many of the "mujahideen" were actually men from the Arab countries, including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. (See page 178):

An Iraqi soldier said," America placed missiles with nuclear heads capability in Kuwait aimed on Russia and that what he saw with his own eyes. When Saddam occupied Kuwait he took these missiles along with its transporters and is still in Iraq. The United States is still looking for these missiles but could not find them because Saddam succeeded in hiding it. Is this claim true, and what do you think of it?

Many of the questions are quite ominous, and show that rumors of some sort of large scale attack against the United States was being planned in the summer of 2000.

What is the news about the battalions you are preparing? Do we have a role to play in it or not? We asked our instructors but no one gave an answer in this matter?

Why is there a delay in executing the martyrdom operations against the Americans?

We heard a lot about the (BATTALION) that will be dispatched from Afghanistan, are there news about it, and its destination?

Dear Sheikh, we pledged the legend to you to work and join Jihad movement, we will not let down, we are the soldiers of God. Please explain to us the importance of martyrdom operations against the American infidels?

What are the most famous and important American corporations that handle American interests and where is it located?

Other questions are more indirect - implying that the US of international "troublemaking".

Is it in the American interest to stir trouble in Iran? I read in a study that the United States created a Shiite state in case an eastern and a western Sunnis states clash or not with this Shiite state. The study concluded that Khumeini was delivered to Tahran during the revolution by an American combat aircraft?

As more of these documents are released and examined, it is very likely that we will find not only a wide range of "smoking gun" evidence regarding earlier terror attacks, but we will likely gain insight into the minds of Al Qaeda. Hopefully we will be able to translate this insight into prevention of future terror attacks.

For more translations and news on terrorism, visit http://www.lauramansfield.com

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kashmir/mil-abuses.htm
Afghans have been considerably active in transnational terrorism.

http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/kashmir/1994/kashmir94-02.htm
Kashmir, where Islamist militants operate out of ISI training bases in Afghanistan

John Cooley, a journalist with decades of experience, specifically points to Afghan terrorism against both Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir. In Unholy Wars, Cooley states "As of September 1997, Indian troops [in Kashmir] had reported killing 302 mercenaries, including 118 Afghans and 106 Pakistanis. ...Some 80 foreign guerrillas, mainly Afghans and Pakistnis, had been taken prisoner." And Victory, a book celebrating the Reagan covert operations that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, describes members of the Reagan administration greeting with delight the news of mujahideen terrorism in Uzbekistan before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In Charley Wilson's War, Crile's contradicts this assertions and facts that Afghanistan was involved with transnational terrorism. All these sources were published and widely available before Charley Wilson's War went to press. Crile relied entirely on narrow and selective interviews with an extremely small group of people, his toning down of Afghanistan was incredible.

Charley Wilson's War:

The CIA's policy of "credible deniability" exonerates them on charges of "blowback" and arming Islamic terrorism.

"The CIA had deeded to the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI, the right to decide which mujahideen leaders would recieve the Agency's weapons..." [pg. 198]

"Unlike the CIA and the U.S. government, which operated with a strict taboo against any Americans crossing into Afghanistan..." [pg. 199]

"Over the long years of the Cold War, a kind of unwritten understanding had emerged between the superpowers about rules of engagement in proxy wars. The implicit understanding in Afghanistan was that the United States would not taunt the Soviets with an overt demonstration of involvement." [pg. 217]

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja92albright

In the late 1970's, the CIA was in upheaval. The excesses, blunders and outright disasters of the 1960's and early 1970's in Greece, Chile, Vietnam and many other places had culminated in the United States' massive defeat in Vietnam. The Agency had presided over a nearly endless series of intelligence failures and was undergoing the only real shakeup in its history. The Shah of Iran was tottering on his Peacock Throne and nobody at Langley seemed to notice.

Iran was the responsibility of the CIA's Near East Division (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.) But all attention was focussed on Afghanistan. Beginning with some disorders instigated by Shite radicals associated with Ayahtollah Khomeni in Iran, the United States

In a series of pointless provocations, the CIA was working hard to provoke unrest and rebellion against the Marxist government in Kabul. They succeeded in causing enough disturbance to spook the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979.

Before the invasion, the Soviets had a military presence in Afghanistan, but a limited one. The Soviets staged a massive invasion and occupation. Crile gives the impression that the Soviet invasion was some sort of master plan for the conquest of the entire region from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. had precipitated an Islamic rebellion in Iran and was backing other Islamic fundamentalists because they were "anti-communist." The Soviets were not going to have the madness spread to their bordering client state in Afghanistan where it might incite Islamic revolts inside the U.S.S.R.. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was an act of panic.

Several years earlier, Pakistan had embarked on the process of building the Islamic Bomb.

They were encouraged in this by the United States as part of the Nixon Doctrine of persuading client states like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to take on more of the regional security tasks during the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. This policy launched a campaign of conventional and nuclear weapons proliferation, abrogation of the Bretton Woods agreement (on stabilizing international exchange rates) and a fundamental realignment of foreign policy. Most Americans only remember the "Vietnamization" aspect of the Nixon Doctrine, but

One of the programs central to the Nixon Doctrine was a series of arms for oil deals with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. Some of these spiralled out of control in the Lockheed, McDonnel / Douglas and Koreagate scandals. The deregulated financial policy opened the door for a new realm of "hot money" banks like Nugan Hand and the Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI.) BCCI would quickly become the backbone of the Pakistani nuclear technology transfer network. After the collapse of BCCI, the same network would begin flowing in the opposite direction by marketing nuclear arms technology to Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya.

So the Pak were building a nuclear capability with the U.S. agreeably turning a blind eye.

The 1977 coup deposed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the Prime Minister at the time of the Nixon Doctrine's implimentation) and paved the way for Zia Al Haq to become dictator. In 1979, Al Haq arranges the judical murder of Bhutto on corruption charges related to the McDonell / Douglas scandal, among other things. The U.S. is shocked, shocked, I say, to discover Pakistan is building a uranium enrichment plant. In a fury of feigned outrage against the excesses of the Zia dictatorship, the U.S. cuts off Pakistan's military aid at the same time the CIA is trying to start a rebellion in Afghanistan -- thereby provoking a Soviet invasion of Pakistan's neighbor.

Sound complicated? Crile never mentions any of these events as the prologue to the little morality play he's selling in Charlie Wilson's War. Instead, it's all godless commies trampling the freedom-loving Afghans as part of an evil plot to invade the Mideast oil regions (which happen to be on the other side of Iran from Afghanistan.)

The Socialite and the Dictator

Crile's Afghan fairy tale starts with an ultra-rightwing Houston socialite named Joanne Herring. By the late 1970's Herring had been recruited by the Pakistanis. As their honorary consul in Houston.

Pakistani president Zia ul Haq was desperate to get the arms embargo lifted and prevent further interference with the Pakistani nuclear program. To do this, it was necessary to obtain political influence in Washington, D.C.. Fortunately for the Islamic bomb, Pakistan had an agent, Joanne Herring, perfectly placed to recruit a dissolute and corrupt member of the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee, good ol' Charlie Wilson.

Herring had little difficulty selling the credulous Rep. Wilson on jihad as a means of killing communists. But killing communists wasn't the role Zia and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had in mind for Wilson; it was just the bait. The real purpose of recruiting the high-living Texan was acquiring the atomic bomb.

And thus, Charlie Wilson's war became the means for swindling the U.S. government into not just allowing, but indirectly funding, the development of the nuclear weapons most likely to used by Islamic terrorists, Iran, North Korea and Libya to attack the United States.

Nuclear Jihad from Texas

The following passages illustrate this central focus of Rep. Wilson's relationship with the Pakistani Islamic bomb. They illustrate the limited and misleading discussion in the book regarding the centrality of the Islamic bomb to the relationship between Rep. Wilson and Pakistan:

"Wilsons importance to Zia and Pakistan went beyond the extra money. Every year the Appropriations subcommittee members fought a battle royal over charges that Pakistan was actively pursuing an Islamic bomb. And every year Wilson, sometimes single-handedly, beat back those accusations. The fact is, Pakistan was working on the bomb, as Wilson, the CIA and almost everyone else knew. Furthermore, it was not about to stop." [pg. 420. emphasis in original]

"The great unpredictable element in this entire mix, the unknown that threatened to unravel absolutely everything for Zia, was the matter of the bomb - or rather, the intense national effort then being mounted in Pakistan to build an Islamic bomb. If the American Congress were confronted with evidence that Pakistan was on the verge of having a bomb, there was no question it would trigger an immediate move to cut off all foreign aid.

"It was all quite unfair from Zia's point of view. No one in the Reagan administration had any illusions about Pakistan's bomb-building program. Even Zia's democratic predecessor, Zulfikar All Bhutto, had been working on the bomb. Nor would it have escaped any of the Reaganites that once Pakistan had a bomb, it would use American F-16s if it ever wanted to drop one on India.

"The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would not only provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb.

"Zia understood, however, that if he were ever caught red-handed, the White House could not protect him from the wrath of Congress. That was where Wilson, with his seat on the Appropriations subcommittee, came in. By now Zia knew how critical this committee was to Pakistan's fate. There had already been one close call in 1985, when a Pakistani agent had been caught in the United States trying to buy Kryton high-speed triggers, the switching devices used to fire nuclear weapons. ...Ironically, the CIA had helped to bring on the crisis; part of its job was to expose Zia's bomb-building efforts, and every station chief in Islamabad had given this a high priority." [pg. 463]

"...In July [1987], just after Congress had passed legislation authorizing a new aid package to Pakistan, a man widely believed to be Zia's agent, Arshad Pervez, was caught in Philadelphia trying to buy twenty-five tons of a specialty steel alloy vital to the building of a nuclear bomb.

"It was dramatically worse than the Kryton-trigger affair of 1985. This time there was a Solarz amendment on the books that would force the White House to stop all aid. There was no realistic way to avoid it: Congress was going to cut Zia off…

"…Wilson would later call his subsequent efforts to save Zia's military aid, 'my greatest achievement in Congress.' Perhaps he remembers it this way because he is at heart a political artist and can assess the value of an accomplishment by the difficulty of the task. Everything else he had accomplished had been carried out in the shadows and behind closed doors. Here he had to operate publicly against a coalition of virtuous liberals. He had the thankless task to trying to defend the right of a Muslim dictator to break U.S. law in order to build all Islamic bomb while still qualifying for massive U.S. foreign aid. And he had to do it in the name of protecting a massive CIA killing-war.

"On the face of it, this was a lost cause. U.S. policy was firmly comitted to nuclear nonproliferation. A law had clearly been violated. The president had no choice but to trigger the Solarz amendment and cut off Zia's aid. Even if Reagan claimed a national security waiver, Congress was now committed to enforcing its own law.

"But Wilson would end up forcing his colleagues to abandon their pretense of ethical deliberation. For this lone issue, he would strip Congress down to a body that operates solely on the basis of power and horse trading. Here, he would call in every chit and, to the horror of his liberal friends, win." [pgs 477-8]

But in these passages, Crile makes it very clear that the goal of pursuing the CIA's proxy war in Afghanistan and killing Russian soldiers trumped the national security interests of the United States in preventing nuclear proliferation. Overall, the Islamic bomb's role in Crile's drama is one of misdirection and ultimately whitewash. The cover story was the ostensible belief the United States would be able to control Pakistan's atomic program.

That delusion was publicly shattered in recent months when the Pakistani nuclear black market program to arm Iran, Libya and North Korea was finally exposed. The collaboration between Pakistan and the other countries had long been suspected.

Crile never mentions the repeated exposure of Pakistan's covert nuclear sales to other countries during the period covered in Charlie Wilson's War. Even the most cursory research would have uncovered it.

The question that must be addressed is Crile's misrepresentation of the history of the Islamic bomb. It can't be claimed that Crile was unable to discover these facts, since the book was written long after the disclosures of Pakistan's nuclear black market program. But the misrepresentation is perfectly in accord with the interests of Crile's sources and main characters in the book.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1489385/posts

It was only the beginning of the extraordinary maneuvers Wilson had to make to push this bill through a highly reluctant Congress. By then even his most reliable ally, John Murtha, the chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, wanted to end the CIA program. Murtha was appalled at reports of the mujahideen's drug trafficking, but in the end he stood with Charlie, and his support guaranteed the bill's passage in the House. It was passed in the Senate that fall. The secret appropriation was hidden in the $298 billion Defense bill for fiscal year 1992. When it was presented for a vote, no one but the interested few noticed the $200 million earmarked for the Afghans.

And so, as the mujahideen were poised for their thirteenth year of war, instead of being cut off; it turned out to be a banner year. They found themselves with not only a $400 million budget but also with a cornucopia of new weaponry sources that opened up when the United States decided to send the Iraqi weapons captured during the Gulf War to the mujahideen.

However disgraceful the mujahideen's conduct was in the following months, in April 1992 they managed to stop fighting one another long enough to take Kabul. Once again Charlie felt vindicated. He had stayed the course and allowed the victory that belonged to the Afghans to occur. But then everything became ugly. By August, the interim foreign minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was outside of the capital, with his artillery shelling the positions of his former comrade in arms, the interim defense minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Kabul, which had survived the entire Afghan war relatively intact, was suddenly subjected to intense urban warfare. Before it was over, close to 40 percent of the housing was destroyed; the art museum was leveled; the palace ravaged.

Under normal circumstances, such misuse of American resources should have led to a scandal or at least entered the American consciousness as an issue of concern. But the anarchy in Kabul was completely overshadowed by the historic events sweeping the world. In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Everywhere across the twelve time zones of the former Soviet Union, statues of Lenin were coming down and freedom was breaking out in a Russia reborn. People were now referring to the United States as the world's lone superpower.

For the men who ruled the CIA, Afghanistan was acknowledged as the main catalyst that helped trigger these historic changes. Flush with the glory of tumbling dominoes and convinced that the Afghan campaign had been the key to it all, the Directorate of Operations led a ceremony on a sunny humid June day in 1993 to recognize the man who had made it possible. Without Charlie Wilson, Director Woolsey said in his comments, "History might have been hugely different and sadly different". It wasn't the parade that Charlie had sought, but then no other member of Congress, indeed no outsider, had ever been singled out by the CIA for such an accomplishment. If that's where it all had ended for Charlie Wilson -- standing tall at the CIA's Langley headquarters that day with the fear of nuclear war fast receding and America now the world's only superpower - then it truly would have been a Cold War fairy tale come true.

But that's not the way history works. Inevitably, great events have unintended consequences. What no one involved anticipated was that it might be dangerous to awaken the dormant dreams and visions of Islam. Which is, of course, exactly what happened. There were many early warnings well before Charlie's award at Langley. In January of that year, a young Pakistani, Mir Aimal Kasi, walked down the line of cars at the gates of the CIA and calmly murdered two officers before escaping to Pakistan where he was embraced as a folk hero. A month later a bomb went off in the car park of the World Trade Center. What emerged from the smoke was a clear indication that some of the veterans of the Afghan campaign now identified America as their enemy.

As early as a year before at Khost, a haunting portrait of the future was already in place: battle-hardened Afghan mujahideen, armed to the teeth and broken down into rival factions -- one of the largest being a collection of Arab and Muslim volunteers from around the world. Pakistan's former intelligence chief, Hamid Gul, maintains that over the course of the jihad, up to thirty thousand volunteers from other countries had come into Pakistan to take part in the holy war. What now seems clear is that, under the umbrella of the CIA's program, Afghanistan had become a gathering place for militant Muslims from around the world, a virtual Mecca for radical Islamists. As early as the Gulf War, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, long the main recipient of CIA weaponry, had articulated his belief that the United States was seeking world domination and control of Muslim oil. The man Charlie once described as "goodness personified," Jalaluddin Haqani, had long been a gateway for Saudi volunteers, and for years the CIA had no problem with such associations. Osama bin Laden was one of those volunteers who could frequently be found in the same area where Charlie had been Haqani's honored guest. As the CIA's favorite commander, Haqani had received bags of money each month from the station in Islamabad.

The presumption at Langley had been that when the United States packed its bags and cut off the Afghans, the jihad would simply burn itself out. If the Afghans insisted on killing one another, it would be a shame but not America's problem. Perhaps that policy would have worked out had it been only weapons that we left behind. But the more dangerous legacy of the Afghan war is found in the minds and convictions of Muslims around the world. To them the miracle victory over the Soviets was all the work of Allah -- not the billions of dollars that America and Saudi Arabia poured into the battle, not the ten-year commitment of the CIA that turned an army of primitive tribesmen into technoholy warriors. The consequence for America of having waged a secret war and never acknowledging or advertising its role was that we set in motion the s pirit of jihad and the belief in our surrogate soldiers that, having brought down one superpower, they could just as easily take on another.

The morning of September 11, 2001, broke bright and shining in the nation's capital. As was his custom before leaving for work, Charlie Wilson walked out on to his terrace to take in the spectacular view. Never in history had a nation accumulated such dominance over the rest of the world as the United States had in the decade following the Soviet collapse. Wilson's name was all but unknown to most Americans, but as he looked out over the monuments and the historic houses of government, he had every reason to believe that he had played a part in the startling disappearance of America's greatest enemy.

A call from a friend interrupted his morning ritual: "Do you have your television on?" The sight of the World Trade Center in flames stunned him, but like most Americans, he assumed it had to have been a horrendous accident. Some ten minutes later he was watching when the second plane appeared on screen and flew straight into the second tower. A sickening realization gripped him: it had to be the work of terrorists, and, if so, he had little doubt that the killers were Muslims.

"I didn't know what to think, but figured if I got downtown I could learn more." By then Wilson had retired from Congress and was working as a lobbyist, with Pakistan as one of his main accounts. At 9:43 am, half an hour after the first attack, he was driving across the Fourteenth Street Bridge with the windows up and news radio blasting so loud that he didn't hear the explosion that rocked the Pentagon less than a mile away.

For five straight nights he watched, until the fires were finally put down and the smoke cleared. He didn't know what to make of it all at first. When the photographs of the nineteen hijackers appeared in n ewspapers across the country, he took some comfort in pointing out that they were all Arabs, not Afghans. "It didn't register with me for a week or two that this thing was all based in my mountains."

For most Americans, the events of 9/11 were quickly tied to Afghanistan when it was learned that the hijackers had all spent time there. Much was made of this by the Bush administration, which assailed the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden and for allowing Afghanistan to become a breeding ground for international terrorists. The American public rallied behind the president when he launched his "war on terror". But almost everyone seemed confused about who the terrorists were, and all but clueless to explain why they hated the United States so much.

The question is not so difficult to understand if you put yourself in the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the Soviet departure. Within months, the U.S. government "discovered" what it had known for the past eight years -- that Pakistan was hard at work on the Islamic bomb. (The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb.) But with the Russians gone, sanctions were imposed and all military and economic assistance was cut off. A fleet of F-16s that Pakistan had already purchased was withheld. Within a year, the Clinton Administration would move to place Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support of Kashmiri freedom fighters. The Pakistan military had long been the surrogates for the CIA, and every Afghan and Arab mujahid came to believe that America had betrayed the Pakistanis. And when the United States kept its troops (including large numbers of women) in Saudi Arabia, not just bin Laden but most Islamists believed that America wanted to seize the Islamic oil fields and was seeking world domination.

By the end of 1993, in Afghanistan itself there were no roads, no schools, just a destroyed country -- and the United States was washing its hands of any responsibility. It was in this vacuum that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden would emerge as the dominant players. It is ironic that a man who had had almost nothing to do with the victory over the Red Army, Osama bin Laden, would come to personify the power of the jihad. In 1998, when bin Laden survived $100 million worth of cruise missiles targeted at him, it reinforced the belief that Allah had chosen to protect him against the infidels.

It's not what Charlie Wilson had in mind when he took up the cause of the Afghans. Nevertheless, in spite of 9/11 and all the horrors that have flowed from it, he steadfastly maintains that it was all worth it and that nothing can diminish what the Afghans accomplished for America and the world with their defeat of the Red Army: "I truly believe that this caused the Berlin Wall to come down a good five, maybe ten, years before it would have otherwise. Over a million Russian Jews got their freedom and left for Israel; God knows how many were freed from the gulags. At least a hundred million Eastern Europeans are breathing free today, to say nothing of the Russian people. It's the truth, and all those people who are enjoying those freedoms have no idea of the part played by a million Afghan ghosts. To this day no one has ever thanked them.

"They removed the threat we all went to sleep with every night, of World War III breaking out. The countries that used to be in the Warsaw Pact are now in NATO. These were truly changes of biblical proportion, and the effect the jihad had in accelerating these events is nothing short of miraculous.

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame."

NOTE:

The chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik offered members of Congress large cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson on the Ethics Committee to save Murtha, which he did. In return, O'Neill assigned Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee and made him a life member of the governing board of the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his young dates.

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