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THE VISIBLE HAND
The Iraqi Connection
President Bush must win the war his father started.
OpinionJournal
Wall Street Journal Online
BY RICHARD MINITER
Monday, September 24, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

In President Bush's soaring, Reaganesque speech Thursday night, two words were missing: Saddam Hussein.

Is America's Gulf War foe behind the attacks? Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials say there is "no evidence" of that. Yet veteran State Department watchers say that "evidence" is a kind of Foggy Bottom shorthand for absolute proof--the kind that lawyers would need to convict the Iraqi dictator in court.

Still, there is a strong circumstantial case that Iraq has backed Osama bin Laden and has been waging a terrorist war of assassination plots and bombings that had already killed hundreds of Americans before Sept. 11--from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole last year.

Israeli intelligence services reportedly met with CIA and FBI officials in August and warned of an imminent large-scale attack on the U.S. There "were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," a senior Israeli official later told London's Daily Telegraph.

Bin Laden's Al Qaeda reportedly had representatives based in Baghdad. In 1997 he also set up training camps in Iraq, according to Canada's National Post. Iraq has also reportedly delivered small arms and money to bin Laden's organization over the past few years. Iraqi intelligence agents have met repeatedly with bin Laden or his operatives in Sudan, Turkey, Afghanistan and an undisclosed site in Europe (evidently Prague). Iraqi opposition leaders have also said that there is a long history of contact between Iraq and the archterrorist.

Bin Laden is believed to have met repeatedly with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay. Bin Laden also seems to have ties to Iraq's Mukhabarat, another one of its intelligence services.

Perhaps the most dramatic meeting occurred in December 1998, when Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in the Mukhabarat who later became ambassador to Turkey, journeyed deep into the icy Hindu Kush mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," according to a 1999 report in the Guardian, a British newspaper.

That same year, an Arab intelligence officer, who knows Saddam personally, predicted in Newsweek: "Very soon you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis." The Arab official said these terror operations would be run under "false flags" --spook-speak for front groups--including bin Laden's organization. And Iraqi intelligence agents were in contact with bin Laden in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence sources told the Washington Times' Bill Gertz.

A Saddam-bin Laden partnership would offer both sides advantages. The Iraqi dictator would gain an energized terrorist network, whose actions he could plausibly deny. Bin Laden would gain expertise and the world-wide logistical support that only a client state can offer. Certainly, bin Laden has need of Saddam's skills--developed with the aid of the Soviets and East Germans--for planning covert operations, forging false documents and coordinating large campaigns over vast areas. Given their personal history, several of the hijackers needed false papers and concealment skills to enter and remain in the U.S. The FBI has acknowledged that it was searching unsuccessfully for two of the hijackers two weeks before the attacks.

"It's clear that the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq," Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterintelligence efforts, told Knight Ridder in 1999. He added that "the Iraqis have all the technological elements, the tradecraft that bin Laden lacks, and they have Abu Nidal," the notorious Palestinian bomb expert.

Most of all, bin Laden needs money. His Al Qaeda organization operates in some 50 countries. Informed estimates put bin Laden's personal wealth at perhaps $30 million--not the $300 million usually cited in the press--and this probably is not enough to sustain a global terror network over many years. Bin Laden told an Arab reporter that he lost $150 million in Sudanese investments. What's left of his fortune is tied up in real estate in Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere or has been frozen by various governments in the past few years. Sanctions notwithstanding, Saddam is far more liquid. Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $7 billion.

Iraq doesn't shrink from financing terrorism. Baghdad has two intelligence services that have funded and planned terrorist campaigns carried out by independent organizations, starting in 1969 in eastern Iran.

Saddam and bin Laden share a powerful hate for America, and both cite the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat and subsequent sanctions crippled the Iraqi economy and stymied its buildup of nuclear and biological weapons. Upon learning of the first President Bush's 1992 election defeat, Saddam joyously fired his pistol into the sky and declared on Iraqi radio: "The mother of all battles continues and will continue."

Bin Laden called Saudi Arabia's alliance with the U.S. during the Gulf War "treason." He regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on holy sands of Arabia.

Bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998, call for jihad lists three grievances: that U.S. warplanes use bases in Saudi Arabia to patrol the skies of Iraq, that United Nations sanctions have caused grievous suffering in Iraq, and that America's Iraq policy is designed to divert attention from Israel's treatment of Muslims. In short, bin Laden's call to arms reads as if it was issued from Baghdad.

Aside from Saddam's links to bin Laden and his known hostility to America, there is a wealth of intriguing connections between Iraq and this past week's attacks. Mohamed Atta, believed to be the commander of the hijacking crew that smashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Center, reportedly met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe a few months ago. U.S. intelligence reports from Southeast Asia suggest that Iraq played a role in training the hijackers who attacked America, according to Time magazine. An Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities last October.

Certainly, Iraq seems to be acting strangely. Hours after the attacks, Iraqi soldiers moved away from likely military targets, notes Neil Partrick, a London-based analyst.

And Iraq, alone among the 22 members of the Arab League, failed to condemn the atrocities of Sept. 11. Indeed, Baghdad celebrated them. Saddam's government issued a statement, quoted widely in Al-Iraq and other state-run papers, that said America deserved the attacks.

Perhaps Iraq's official response indicates nothing more than a continuing hatred of America, but Mideast leaders who are no friends of the U.S. acted differently. Iran sent its condolences. Yasser Arafat expressed sorrow and gave blood. Even Libya's Moammar Gadhafi called for Muslim aid groups to help Americans, adding that the U.S. had the "right to take revenge."

For almost a decade, Saddam has waged a secret terror campaign against Americans, according to terrorism experts, former government officials, U.S. government reports and newspaper accounts from around the world. That Iraqi-inspired terror campaign--working through Osama bin Laden and others--is believed to include foiled assassination attempts against President Bush père in Kuwait in April 1993 and against President Clinton in the Philippines in November 1994. The terror campaign seems to include the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five American soldiers; a massive 1995 bombing of U.S. troop barracks at Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans soldiers; the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224; and last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 39.

Knowledgeable observers point to wide-ranging Iraqi terrorist activity. James Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence during the Clinton administration, has repeatedly raised the issue of Iraqi involvement in last week's attacks and past terrorist assaults. Laurie Mylroie, author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" and a Clinton Iraq adviser, presents a compelling case that Iraqi agents were behind a string of bombings.

Iraq's secret war against America probably began with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Iraq became involved, Ms. Mylroie believes, after learning of the bomb plot from a terrorist holed up in Iraq who was an uncle of one of the ringleaders. One of the perpetrators placed 46 calls--some more than an hour long--to that uncle in a single month before the bombing, according to phone records collected by the FBI.

The two ringleaders both had connections to Iraq. The mastermind, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was known to his associates as "Rashid the Iraqi." It was he who persuaded the bombers to make their target the World Trade Center. The other man, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad, where, ABC News reported in 1994, he had been put on the government payroll. He is believed to be still at large in Iraq. "The majority of senior law-enforcement officers in New York believe that Iraq was involved," Jim Fox, who ran the FBI's investigation of the World Trade Center bombing, told Ms. Mylroie. Egyptian and Saudi intelligence sources also told U.S. officials that Iraq organized the bombing.

Iraqi agents, Ms. Mylroie persuasively argues, also supplied false passports and escape routes. They may have also provided bomb-making expertise and money. The hydrogen-cyanide gas that was supposed to be spread by the explosion--luckily it was burned up instead--probably has origins in Iraq's chemical-weapons program, Ms. Mylroie concludes. The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B.

The Iraqi terror campaign intensified in the mid-1990s, after bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence became better acquainted, most likely in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. In that dusty city, Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub until the late 1990s, when Sudanese officials allegedly told them to leave. Bin Laden was based in Khartoum until 1996, when Sudan kicked him out at the request of the U.S. government, a representative of the Sudanese government told me. There are documented meetings that occurred between bin Laden and Iraqi agents at the time.

After a June 1996 Arab League summit--the first since the Gulf War--issued a communiqué in favor of maintaining sanctions against Iraq, Iraq's government-controlled press seethed with anger. "Before it is too late, the Arabs should rectify the sin they committed against Iraq," one state-run paper warned. Saudi Arabia was the prime mover behind the Arab League's bold statement. Two days after the meeting ended, a truck bomb exploded outside the Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia. The U.S government never publicly charged Iraq, but Gen. Wafiq Samarai, an Iraqi defector, did. He said Saddam had asked him to join a secret committee to commit terrorist acts against U.S. forces during the Gulf War. The Al Khobar bombing was strikingly similar to the plans of that committee, Mr. Samarai said.

Next, Iraq seems to have played a role in bin Laden's plot to bomb two U.S embassies in East Africa. Beginning on May 1, 1998, Iraq warned of "dire consequences" if the U.N. sanctions were not lifted and the weapons-inspection teams removed. Eight days later, bin Laden released another statement calling for jihad against America. Throughout the summer, Iraq's and bin Laden's threatening statements moved in lockstep. Then Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors on Aug. 5. Two days later, the bombs went off in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Dire consequences, indeed.

Why didn't the Clinton administration follow up on the Iraqi connection? Part of the answer is bureaucratic bungling. The New Jersey FBI office released a suspect who was sought by the New York office in connection with the 1993 twin towers bomb plot. There was little communication or trust between the FBI and the National Security Agency. And the FBI turned much of its evidence in the 1993 bombings to the defendants long before America's national-security specialists saw it. During the Clinton years, America's antiterrorist units suffered from the lowest ebb of morale since the 1970s, according to a recent National Commission on Terrorism report.

Another possibility is that administration officials didn't want to see it, that they saw their job as containing Saddam, not confronting him. Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Adviser, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996 that dealing with Saddam was "little bit like a Whack-a-Mole game at the circus: They bop up and you whack them down, and if they bop up again, you bop them back down again."

To avoid targeting Iraq, Clinton administration officials blamed the governments of Sudan and Afghanistan or a loose network of Islamic extremists. Both explanations seem incomplete. Sudan and Afghanistan are among the world's poorest nations; their governments cannot control sizeable sections of their own territories. While both governments are run by Islamic extremists and have long been havens for terrorists, they lack the ability to act alone. Iraq has strong ties to both of these nations.

The idea that loose networks of Islamic hardliners randomly come together to plot attacks is also hard to credit. It takes organization, money, patience and precision to carry out these attacks--qualities not usually present in volatile, itinerant extremists. Clinton officials should have noticed that the 1998 U.S. embassy bombs detonated within nine minutes of each other and the perpetrators had false papers and plane tickets for Pakistan.

They also should have grasped that the terrorists are political extremists--not Islamic zealots. This is also true of the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta slugged down vodka like a sailor, notes Time magazine. The night before the attacks, several men with knowledge of the impending attacks are reported to have had a drunken party at a Florida strip club--two major violations of Islamic law. Many of the perpetrators lacked beards, which fundamentalists believe the Koran instructs cannot be shaved. One disco-loving hijacker has been traced to another Al Qaeda terrorist plot in the Philippines, where a fellow terrorist lived with a non-Muslim girlfriend. A third terrorist boasted of his sexual conquests, on a phone tapped by the Philippine police. Audio files on the computer used by the 1993 World Trade Center bombers contain numerous obscenities. And so on.

Even overlooking the Koran's injunctions against murder and killing of women in war, the lifestyles of the Al Qaeda terrorists don't reflect orthodox Islam. But the Clinton administration kept talking about a shadowy network of Islamic extremists--not a campaign of terror by a vengeful Saddam Hussein.

The scale of last week's devastation requires a sober look at America's enemies, starting with Iraq. If Iraq is behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the terrorist assaults of the past decade, then Americans will know that they were not the victims of senseless hate, but malevolent calculation. And President Bush will know that winning the war against terrorism will require him to win the war his father began.

Mr. Miniter is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe. His column appears Fridays.