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From: Edward Jay Epstein
To: Daniel Benjamin
Subject: Saddam and Osama
Let me make the case that the government
of Iraq has been involved in state-sponsored terrorism,
as it is defined by the U.S. government, for over a decade.
As director of counterterrorism for the National Security
Council in the Clinton administration, you know that Secretary
of State Albright had good reason for including Iraq among
the seven countries designated as state sponsors of international
terrorism in 2000.
Iraq, through its intelligence service,
has
attempted to sponsor or facilitate a number of covert
attacks against U.S. interests. There were, for example, Iraq's
sponsorship of a car-bombing attempt in 1993 to assassinate
former President Bush in Kuwait City, Iraq's sponsorship in
1998 of the attempted recruitment of car bombers to destroy
the headquarters building of Radio Free Europe in Wenceslas
Square in the historic center of Prague, and Iraq's provision
of fake identity papers and safe haven to two of the key figures
in the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center in New
York.
Since one purpose of covert sponsorship
of terrorism is to remain hidden, there may have been other
Iraq operations that better succeeded in concealing their
sponsorship. Let's consider Iraq's relationship with al-Qaida.
In your excellent book The Age of Sacred Terrorism
(which should be required reading on 9/11), you report that
Osama Bin Laden had contempt for Saddam and vice versa.
OK, but even if they are ideological enemies, didn't U.S.
(and U.N.) intelligence indicate that Saddam's scientists
provided the technology for the VX chemical weapons facility
for which Osama supplied the funds in the Sudan? Why wouldn't
Saddam similarly use Osama's al-Qaida as cover to conceal
his own covert actions? Or Osama use Saddam's embassy bases
to facilitate his own operations? I submit expediency, not
affinity, often governs such temporary alliances.
It is in this context that the
Czech intelligence report of a meeting between an Iraq embassy
official and an al-Qaida trained hijacker must be viewed.
This report asserts that Mohamed Atta, who had previously
visited Prague in June 2000, met with Iraq consul Ahmad
Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani at an undisclosed location in
Prague in April 2001. Subsequently, on April 22, Hynek Kmonicek,
who was then deputy foreign minister of the Czech Republic,
ordered al-Ani expelled from Prague. According to Kmonicek,
who is now the ambassador to the United Nations in New York,
"the Czech government collected detailed evidence of the
al-Ani/Atta meeting." The other Czech officials directly
involved in this unprecedented expulsion, namely Czech Prime
Minister Milos Zeman, Foreign Minister Jan Kavan, Interior
Minister Stanislav Gross, and intelligence chief Jiri Ruzek,
have all confirmed receiving the report of this meeting.
So, Daniel, before pre-emptively
dismissing the possibility of an al-Qaida/Iraq liaison,
wouldn't you want to hear from al-Ani, who is presumably
in Baghdad?
Regards,
Ed Epstein
From:
Daniel Benjamin
To: Edward Jay Epstein
Subject: Saddam, Sudan, and VX
Monday, March 31, 2003, at 3:41 PM PT
Ed,
Let's start by stipulating the
incontrovertible: Iraq is a state sponsor of terrorism.
You mention the State Department's 2000 terrorism report;
in fact, Iraq has been pretty much a regular on the annual
list since it was first created almost 25 years ago. (The
Reagan administration took Iraq off the list in 1982 because
Washington saw Saddam Hussein as a valuable ally in containing
and undermining the Khomeini regime in Iran. Iraq was put
back on the list in 1990 after invading Kuwait.) And you're
right to mention the attempt to assassinate the first President
Bush in 1993 and the plotting to attack the office in Prague
that produces Radio Free Iraq programming.
You could have added the many killings
of Iraqi dissidents abroad; support for the Iranian Mujahedin-e
Khalq, which seeks to topple the Tehran government; the
subsidies for Palestinian suicide bombers; the safe haven
and support given for many years to radical Palestinian
groups, including the one led by Abu Nidal, who died in
Baghdad last summer after reportedly committing suicide
by shooting himself four times. (Talented fellow.) No question,
Saddam Hussein uses terror as a tool of policy. Iraq is
a distant third behind Iran and Syria on the terror list
because Saddam mostly relies on his broken-down intelligence
service—who my former boss Richard Clarke recently referred
to as the Marx Brothers of international terror—to do
the work and because he has not tried anything ambitious
since the botched attempt on Bush. But Saddam is still in
the business.
Making the case that he and the
radical Islamists of al-Qaida are working together is entirely
another matter. Obviously, we need to ask whether different
enemies are working together against us. But before looking
more deeply into motives, let's look at the facts. The allegation
of Iraqi involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing
has never been substantiated. True, a conspirator named
Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Baghdad, and Ramzi Yousef had
an Iraqi passport. But Iraqi papers could be procured on
the black market, and the fact that Yasin was allowed to
stay in Baghdad only means that the Iraqis found him useful—a
potential chip to be played later. That's where the trail
ends. I don't know of any FBI or Justice Department investigators
or intelligence experts who believe there was more Iraqi
involvement in WTC I. The main proponent of a link, as you
note on your Web site, is Laurie Mylroie. She's popular
with the neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq—aka
"The Cakewalkers"—but U.S. counterterrorism experts have
never been able to corroborate her claims.
High points for the close reading
of The Age of Sacred Terror, and I very much appreciate
the compliment. You found the one datum that has, for some
time, given me second thoughts about Iraqi complicity in
Islamist terror. The Sudanese method of producing VX was
indeed of Iraqi provenance. But remember, the plant belonged
to Sudan. Osama Bin Laden invested in the regime's Military
Industrial Company, as he did in many, many other companies,
farms, real estate, trading firms, etc. I've never been
able to find evidence of contact between Bin Laden and the
Iraqis or to demonstrate that Baghdad knew of al-Qaida's
involvement in the VX project. I'm guessing that no one
in the Bush administration has either, or, given their desperation
to show a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, we would
have heard about it. (I find it amazing that they never
even point to the VX issue to support their case. They know
the intelligence is solid. Perhaps they don't want to revisit
the missile attack against Khartoum in August 1998 and
credit Bill Clinton with carrying out the first U.S. counterterrorism/counterproliferation
strike and sounding the alert on al-Qaida. If it is the
ABC syndrome—not Atomic, Biological, and Chemical, but
rather Anything but Clinton—at work, that tells us a lot.)
Which leads us to the issue of
the Iraqi intelligence agent al-Ani and the purported meeting
with Mohamed Atta in Prague. The story, as I understand
it from intelligence community sources, goes like this:
After 9/11, Washington sent out an all-points bulletin to
intelligence services around the world asking about the
hijackers. Among the informants whom the Czechs spoke with
was one who knew al-Ani and said that he had seen him with
Atta. This lit up the U.S. intelligence community and the
White House. But when the Czechs double-checked, the source
recanted. By that time, plenty of officials in Prague had
spoken about the connection, and the matter was becoming
embarrassing. President Vaclav Havel, no less, had to walk
it back. Jim Risen has written about this in the New
York Times, and, although senior U.S. officials continued
for a time to cite the report as if it were true (any wonder
so many Americans believe Saddam was behind 9/11?), it is
now completely discredited. Do you know any reason to think
otherwise?
I would like to hear from al-Ani,
as you suggest, but I wouldn't expect to hear much. I also
have not pre-emptively dismissed the possibility of an al-Qaida-Iraq
liaison. On the contrary, as you know from Sacred Terror,
after the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa,
Dick Clarke insisted that we conduct a review of the intelligence
involving al-Qaida, Iraq, and Iran to see if the CIA was
missing something regarding state sponsorship of Bin Laden's
organization. Interestingly, the connections to Iran were
more numerous. But in both countries, we saw that there
had been cases of operatives transiting through these countries,
sometimes even living for a time in them, and there were
indications of passing contacts with Iranian or Iraqi officials.
Still, we could not find anything that hinted at broader
cooperation.
Let me just list a few other reasons
why I'm skeptical about a serious connection between Iraq
and al-Qaida:
-
I
mentioned Saddam's reliance on his intelligence service
to carry out his conspiracies. He doesn't trust outside
groups. He would be extremely wary of trusting one that
was determined, like all jihadist groups, to topple
secular regimes like his own.
-
After
the effort to assassinate former President Bush was
uncovered, Saddam learned the same lesson that Libya's
Qaddafi did after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and
that the Iranian mullahs would in the late 1990s after
the attack on Khobar Towers: It is all but impossible
to hide state sponsorship of a terrorist attack. I suspect
that explains, in part, why he hasn't targeted anything
big since 1993.
-
Saddam's
goal is regional domination. Supporting al-Qaida in
its attacks against the United States would not help
him achieve that. I believe Saddam wanted to continue
working on a nuclear program until he had a bomb to
blackmail his neighbors and deter the United States.
He is certainly capable of miscalculating. But I think
he would have seen attacking America as a gamble that
would have risked bringing the wrath of the United States
down on him before he had the bomb.
-
Finally,
Saddam has had weapons of mass destruction for decades.
If he had wanted to cause America grievous harm, wouldn't
he have given al-Qaida or another group a chemical or
biological weapon already? He has not done so because
he wants to achieve mastery of the Persian Gulf, not
provoke a premature fight with the United States.
Of course, now that he has that
fight on his hands, and his back is to the wall, all that
could change--wouldn't you agree?
Best,
Dan
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