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Seeking Saddam's smoking gun: Links between Iraq, Osama Bin Laden and recent major terrorist attacks
Foreign Affairs
Source: Boston Globe
Published: 7/29/2001 Author: Joe Lauria
Posted on 9/11/01 10:30 PM Pacific by Spirit Of Truth


Seeking Saddam's smoking gun
By Joe Lauria, Globe Staff, 7/29/2001
Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America
By Laurie Mylroie (email a request to join her email newsletter)
American Enterprise Institute, 321 pp.


Saddam Hussein vowed revenge earlier this year for one of President Bush's first acts in office: the Feb. 16 bombing of Iraq in response to Saddam's increased attacks on US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.


Conventional Washington wisdom said Saddam was too boxed in by sanctions to hit back. Instead, he called on Arabs outside Iraq to strike US interests in the region. That, according to a new book by Laurie Mylroie, a specialist on Iraq, fits Saddam's pattern of revenge since the 1991 Gulf War: masterminding terrorism through Arab fundamentalists who are left holding the bag.


Mylroie argues in "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" that the Clinton administration erred by prosecuting such individuals in Justice Department-led criminal trials, rather than conducting national security investigations that would have singled out Saddam.


Coauthor of the 1991 national bestseller "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf," Mylroie sees Saddam's fingerprints on four terrorist attacks: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1995 bombing of the US training mission for Saudi troops in Riyadh; the 1996 attack against the US base in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia; and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.


Saddam's motive is not in doubt: continue the Gulf War through other means. Proving it is more difficult. Mylroie sets out an intriguing case for Iraq's involvement in the World Trade Center blast based on circumstantial evidence - there is no smoking bomb. But the late director of the FBI's office in New York, James Fox, believed Iraq was behind the trade center attack. Washington ignored him, believing a "loose network" of Islamic radicals intended to topple the twin towers onto each other with their bomb, releasing a cloud of cyanide gas to maximize the killing.


Mylroie's evidence, based mostly on phone, airline, and passport records entered into the trial, appears to show that mastermind Ramzi Yousef, now serving life, was an Iraqi agent who traveled to New York on an Iraqi passport to direct dupes intended to deflect attention from Saddam.


He and other conspirators placed numerous telephone calls to Iraq while in New York during the lead-up to the bombing, which occurred on the second anniversary of the Gulf War's end. Mylroie's detective work indicates Yousef later tried to change his identity with a doctored Kuwaiti passport. Another convict who fled New York a day after the bombing is living under Saddam's protection in Baghdad, she says.


But Mylroie argues that President Clinton ignored these signs because he didn't want to confront the issue of Iraq as a terrorist threat. His order to strike Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June 1993, she says, was presented as retaliation for an Iraqi attempt to kill former President Bush. But he was also seeking a gesture that would address the terrorist bombing in New York: "He believed [the strikes] would take care of the terrorism in New York. It would take care of the strong suspicions of the New York FBI that Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing and would deter Saddam from all future acts of terrorism."


Among those who support this contention is James Woolsey, who was CIA director at the time the Iraqi intelligence headquarters was hit. Woolsey says he believed Iraq may have been involved in the World Trade Center bombing, but was never asked his opinion by the Clinton White House.


Mylroie says the Riyadh bombing that killed five Americans was probably Saddam's response to a negative United Nations weapons inspectors' report and was aimed at US troops still in the region from the Gulf War. She quotes an unnamed senior Saudi official: "Of course that was Iraq. That was a professional bomb. It was not made by a bunch of Saudis sitting in a tent." She admits: "There is no proof Iraq was behind the Riyadh bombing. Yet Iraq should have been considered a prime candidate, and it was not." She says progress in the Mideast peace process at the time created a "climate of euphoria incompatible with the notion that the war with Iraq was not yet over."


The al-Khobar bombing seven months later killed 19 US servicemen who had helped enforce the Iraq no-fly zone. Mylroie constructs á scenario in which Iraqi agents in Khartoum, Sudan, worked with Osama bin Laden to plan the attack. She quotes Israeli counterintelligence sources and Saudi officials who believed Saddam was behind that bomb too.


Likewise, Mylroie believes Iraq worked with bin Laden in the African embassy bombings on Aug. 7, 1998, two days after Saddam formally suspended weapons inspections. In the planning of the attack, bin Laden's group and Saddam issued parallel warnings. In May, Baghdad warned of "dire consequences" if UN sanctions were not lifted. Because US intelligence never investigated possible links to Saddam, Mylroie says, there is no proof. Instead the US indictment stops at bin Laden and his alleged conspirators.


But Iraq was not mentioned at all during the African embassy trial in New York. Richard Murphy, an Iraqi expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, sees that as sufficient proof that Mylroie is wrong. "I don't think she's found support in terms of the FBI and the CIA," he says.


Mylroie sees the tendency to not recognize the role of hostile governments in terrorist acts as dangerous. But CIA Director George Tenet told a US Senate committee in February that state-sponsored terrorism appears to have declined over the past five years. Transnational groups, he says, are emerging with fewer centrally controlled operations and more acts initiated at lower levels.


Clinton's secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, spoke of "a grave new world of terrorism" in which "perpetrators may leave no postmark or return address" and "traditional notions of deterrence and counter-response no longer apply."


Mylroie is swimming against this stream. Americans and their elected officials continue to see terrorism as the violent, random deeds of the world's lunatic fringe, not as state-sponsored acts. "According to the Clinton administration, a new terrorist threat has come into being, represented by loose networks of Muslim extremists," she writes. "It is truer to say that the Clinton administration's handling of terrorist episodes and its refusal to address the question of state sponsorship have encouraged further terrorist attacks."


Mylroie's argument that the legal threshold in a criminal trial is not necessary for intelligence agencies to prove state sponsorship is fraught with danger, however. Bombing without conclusive proof can lead to embarrassments such as Clinton's mistaken attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.


We may never know if Iraq was behind these terrorist attacks, but if the Bush administration wants to lead a more robust policy against Baghdad, it might be wise for it to find out.