Saddam and Terrorism (page 2)

Tuesday, April 1, 2003


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Subject: Havel's Unpublished Correction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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