From: Edward Jay Epstein
To: Daniel Benjamin
Subject: Havel's Unpublished Correction
Hi, Dan,
So, we agree that Iraq sponsors covert
attacks on American targets. The extent of such state sponsorship,
however, is not so easily settled. Even if your former boss
Richard Clarke did not uncover evidence of more "ambitious"
covert operations by Iraq, it does not mean that they did
not occur. Intelligence services, after all—even "broken
down" ones like Iraq— use false flag recruitments, bogus
identities, and diversions to disguise their authorship. So,
it remains an unfortunate, if tautological, reality in counter-intelligence
(or in weapons verification) that nothing that is successfully
hidden is ever found.
In any case, it may take a great
deal of time to uncover. Consider again the World Trade
Center bombing in 1993. You say that you are unaware of
any FBI or Justice Department investigators who believe
that there was more Iraqi involvement in it than that country's
documentation for conspirator Ramzi Yousef and its sanctuary
for conspirator Abdul Rahman Yasin. But have those agencies
proven all that prescient in this case? The FBI released
Yasin from custody, allowing him to fly to the Iraqi Embassy
in Jordan and then to his safe haven in Baghdad. The Justice
Department, for its part, missed the connection with al-Qaida,
Osama Bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, none of whom
were included in the indictment as co-conspirators. As you
yourself point out in your excellent book, although there
were "threads" pointing to al-Qaida, "within the Bureau,
there was also an unwillingness to believe that there was
more than met the eye." Wouldn't that same reluctance also
apply to threads leading to Iraq such as the escape route
of Yasin to Baghdad and the altering of documents under
Iraq's control in Kuwait to support the false identity which
Yousef assumed for his escape?
In the case of the 9/11, I accept
your point that the purported meeting between Iraqi consul
al-Ani and Mohammed Atta in Prague is open to question.
All evidence, and especially that evidence produced in the
murky world of intelligence-gathering, can be controverted:
Otherwise, it would not be evidence but an article of faith.
But it is untrue that the Czech government has discredited
the report about this meeting. You say: "President Vaclav
Havel, no less, had to walk it back. Jim Risen has written
about this in the New York Times." Risen wrote
(New York Times, October 21, 2001) that Havel told
the White House in a phone call that there was no evidence
to confirm the Atta/al-Ani meeting, but that's erroneous.
Immediately after the story appeared, Havel not only denied
he had ever communicated the information to the White House,
but he also said, through his spokesman, that the New
York Times story was "a fabrication," and "nothing
like this has occurred." Unfortunately, the Times'
error-correction policy (which is brilliantly elucidated
by Renata Adler in her book Canaries in the Mine Shaft)
remedies misspelling and inaccurate photo-captions, but
not errors of substance. So, the Times never
reported that its own authority for its exclusive story,
Havel, had said it was a fabrication.
In fact, over the past 18 months,
and as recently as last week (when it expelled additional
Iraqi diplomats), the Czech government, through the statements
of its intelligence chief Jiri Ruzek, its Interior Minister
Stanislav Gross, and its U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek
(who served the expulsion notice on al-Ani), has confirmed
that it has credible intelligence about the meeting.
I am intrigued by your "intelligence
community sources" who express doubts about the reliability
of the Czech intelligence (perhaps they, like you, were
unaware that the Times story had been an invention).
Have you considered the possibility that the CIA may have
an interest in not opening this particular can of worms,
especially given its delicate chronology? The reported meeting,
and the expulsion of Iraq consul al-Ani, happened on its
watch: April 2001. The agency couldn't be unaware of it.
Never before had the Czech Republic
expelled such a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat. The CIA maintained
a liaison with the Czechs. Prime Minister Milos Zeman said
that Czech intelligence assumed that the meeting between
al-Ani and Atta concerned the plot to blow up the American
target Radio Free Europe—not the World Trade Center. Czech
intelligence and British intelligence (through an Iraqi
defector, who was in fact al-Ani's predecessor in Prague)
had information about such a plan, targeting the Radio Free
Europe building. It seems unlikely that this information
was not passed on, by both British and Czech intelligence,
to the CIA. The CIA would have had this information in their
files. What did they do about it? Did they pass it on to
the FBI?
You note that during your tenure,
the CIA and FBI shared such information in the Counterterrorism
Security Group. Did the Czech report get lost in the shuffle
in the transition? If so, wouldn't this report coming to
light prove embarrassing after 9/11, especially after the
Czech foreign minister informed Secretary of State Powell
that Czech intelligence had identified the individual with
whom al-Ani met as a 9/11 hijacker who had made a previous
unexplained trip to Prague?
While you make many good points
about Saddam's logic, in my opinion we need not go that
deep to find a motive for him. The United States had been
attacking his forces in the "no fly" zones, embargoing his
economy, and attempting to subvert his regime since 1992.
Even before President Clinton had ordered the sustained
bombing of Iraq in Desert Fox, Saddam's Revolutionary Command
Council (May 1, 1998) had justified a "great jihad" against
America and threatened "dire consequences." Why, Dan, are
you so sure these "consequences" did not include a terrorist
attack?
Cheers,
Ed Epstein
From:
Daniel Benjamin
To: Edward Jay Epstein
Subject: Holes in Your Scenario
Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 3:03 PM PT
Ed,
I can see that you take the supposed
rendezvous in Prague pretty seriously. A few points about
this: First, if the reporting about such a meeting was halfway
credible, the administration never would have stopped adducing
it as proof of the Iraq/al-Qaida connection. There have
been so many instances of stretching information to fit
the case, they certainly would have kept this one front
and center. (See, for example, Colin Powell's misreading
of the recent Bin Laden tape. The message really showed
the divergence of Iraq's and al-Qaida's interests. Saddam
wanted to avoid an invasion; Bin Laden desperately wanted
a war to drive home his point about an America campaign
to destroy Islam.) There has been so much pressure on the
agency to deliver intelligence that shows an al-Qaida/Iraq
link that it is inconceivable that this "can of worms,"
as you call it, could be left unopened.
Contrary to what you suggest, the
CIA would not be embarrassed by the fact that a meeting
occurred between Mohamed Atta and the Iraqi intelligence
agent al-Ani in April 2001. There was no reason for Atta
to be on anyone's screen—except perhaps the Germans' since
they knew about the Hamburg cell—so this cannot be counted
among the various screw-ups of the period. Even today, Langley
would be thrilled to confirm this. The Department of Defense's
recently created intelligence unit, which second-guesses
the CIA right and left (and, I'm betting, pushed the now-notorious
forged documents about sales
of uranium by Niger to Iraq) would never let this pass if
there were any reason to believe the report. And you're
giving the agency too much credit for being able to keep
a secret. If there were anything to the report about a meeting—or
if there were any kind of subterfuge going on—someone
at Langley would leak it to the Washington Times
or Sy Hersh. The checks and balances on government power
take many forms.
You are right to be skeptical about
the FBI's ability, especially in years past, to follow the
thread of a conspiracy to Baghdad, Peshawar, or elsewhere.
But the same is not true for the CIA or for the U.S. Attorney's
office in the Southern District of New York, where the staff
was extraordinarily talented and dedicated. And while we
criticize the bureau for failing to "connect the dots" of
the early terrorist conspiracies of the 1990s, one point
we make in Sacred Terror is that the problem for
the government as a whole was recognizing that a paradigm
shift had taken place—that the real terrorist threat came
increasingly from "non-state actors," not from states. The
counterterrorism community was straining to collect every
bit of evidence of state involvement in terrorism—from
Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and others—throughout this period.
In fact, there were plenty of officials who would have been
only too delighted to find real Iraqi complicity in some
terrorist plot; it would have made it much easier to shore
up international support for sanctions, which were eroding,
or military action. The solid connection between Iraq and
Bin Laden, however, was not there.
We could bat around the different
accounts of the Prague meeting forever. I'm convinced—by
my friends in the intelligence world and the accounts not
just in the NewYork Times but also in the Los
Angeles Times, Newsweek, and elsewhere—that
the source of the al-Ani/Atta story recanted and Czech animadversions
to the contrary are about tail-covering, which happens on
the Vltava as much as the Potomac. (And yes, as you can
tell from the State Department's Patterns
of Global Terrorism 2000, we were on top of the threats
to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague.)
There is a much more important
point here: You write that, "it remains an unfortunate,
if tautological, reality in counterintelligence (or in weapons
verification) that nothing that is successfully hidden is
ever found." Well, sure. That's pretty much the Rumsfeldian
"absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence," and,
I hope you'll agree, is not a basis—or even, really, a
partial basis—for waging a war. This is, after all, not
an abstract discussion.
The lack of a solid story on the
meeting in Prague, the very incomplete picture of the Iraqi
relationship with Ansar al-Islam and its relationship with
al-Qaida, the allegations of occasional meetings in the
1990s (which are not news), this is very far from being
the kind of substantive relationship that would make really
credible the administration's hypothesis that Saddam might
give a weapon of mass destruction to al-Qaida. And, it should
be added, this is less than an iota of the kind of information
that we have on the relationship between other terrorist
groups and their state sponsors.
You say that we don't need to go
too deep into Saddam's logic to find a motive for him to
attack the United States. But if we're going to put American
lives on the line, of course we have to figure out if the
postulated threat is real. Evidence of the relationship
is lacking. The motive still seems implausible to me. Saddam
has shown an incredible will to hold on to power. And while
he does miscalculate, his goals—Kuwait's oil or the destruction
of Iranian power—usually make sense in the context of
his regional ambitions. Sure, he has said menacing things,
but the cost and benefits of killing lots of Americans in
a terrorist attack and risking his regime don't calculate.
He knows that hitting us would not cause us to desist from
bombing his forces, keeping sanctions on his economy, or
trying to subvert his regime. Until 9/11, he was doing just
fine by not provoking the international community and letting
the sanctions regime fall apart. It's ironic, but Osama's
triumph was actually the beginning of Saddam's undoing.
Cheers,
Dan
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