Two weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reportedly put his military on its highest state of alert since the 1991 Gulf War. According to the London-based Sunday Telegraph, the Iraqi leader even took the unusual step of moving his two wives, Sajida and Samira, from Baghdad to an undisclosed location in the family's hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles to the north.¹

Saddam's precautions were hardly unwarranted. A growing body of circumstantial evidence indicates that Iraq may have participated in plotting the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The most striking evidence linking Baghdad to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks is that the presumed ringleader of the suspected hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met twice with Iraqi intelligence operatives in the Czech Republic. According to senior Czech officials quoted in the Czech daily Hospodarske Noviny and the Wall Street Journal, Atta traveled from Hamburg, Germany, to Prague in June 2000 and met with Iraqi intelligence agents at Baghdad's embassy there, which has long been under constant surveillance by the Czech authorities. After the meeting, he flew on to the United States, where he began flight lessons the following month. Atta had made a previous attempt to enter the country on May 30, but wasn't allowed to leave the airport upon arriving in Prague because he lacked a visa.²

Atta made a third trip to Prague in April 2001 and met with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, the chief of consular affairs at the Iraqi embassy there. Later that month, Ani was expelled by the Czech authorities for "engaging in activities beyond his diplomatic duties" after he was observed photographing the Radio Free Europe building in Prague, which had begun broadcasting anti-Saddam programs into Iraq in 1998. Ani had been under surveillance at the time as a suspected intelligence operative because he "was never present at any diplomatic event," said the Czech Foreign Ministry official who expelled him, Hynek Kmonicek, in an interview with Newsweek. "It's suspicious," said Kmonicek. "Why would a diplomat with no diplomatic duties meet with a student of architecture? How is it possible they even know each other?"³ Czech intelligence officials suspect that Ani may have provided Atta with fake passports for the 19 hijackers that carried out the September 11 attacks.

During his second visit to Prague, Atta also reportedly met with Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, a former brigadier-general in the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). Hijazi, who was recalled to Baghdad prior to the September 11 attacks, is known to have traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden in December 1998.⁴ Hijazi is also believed to have met with bin Laden in Sudan prior to the latter's expulsion from the country in 1996.

According to the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Hijazi and Brigadier-General Habib Ma'amouri reportedly developed plans for hijacking civilian airliners and crashing them into civilian targets during the mid-1990s at the GID Special Operations Branch in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. Two Iraqi defectors have corroborated this claim. A former Iraqi military officer, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, said he was in charge of training an elite special forces team, "designed to plan and conduct operations against US and British interests around the world," at Salman Pak. Using a Boeing 707 parked inside the complex, Alami's team practiced hijacking planes without weapons. He also said that another team of non-Iraqis underwent similar training at the same camp. A second defector gave a similar description of the camp, and recounted meeting some of the non-Iraqi trainees, whom he described as deeply religious, when a group of five Saudis and an Egyptian helped him move his car and jump-start the engine.⁵

There have also been reports that at least three high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials have visited Pakistan over the last four months to meet with representatives of al-Qa'ida.⁶

In addition to evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, there are indications that Baghdad may be responsible for the anthrax attacks that have occurred over the past month in the United States. The anthrax spores that were found in Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle's office earlier this month were treated with sophisticated chemical additives that enable the spores to remain suspended in the air. They could not have been developed in a cave. In fact, according to a report in the Washington Post, only three nations are believed to be capable of producing these chemicals: the United States, Russia and Iraq.⁷

Iraq, for the record, has vehemently denied involvement in either the September 11 attacks or the anthrax attacks.

The Bush Administration Divided

As more and more evidence of Iraqi complicity in the terror attacks in the US comes to light, officials in the Bush administration remain polarized into two camps. The first, headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has categorically rejected suggestions that Iraq may have played a role in the September 11 attacks. Powell and others have declined to name Iraq as a suspected sponsor of the attacks, ostensibly because sufficient evidence of its involvement has not come to light. In fact, it appears that fear of disrupting the Bush administration's anti-terrorism coalition is the primary concern at the State Department.

A dissident faction within the administration, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, a key aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, have advocated expanding the war on terror to include Iraq. Wolfowitz and others feel that the attacks could not have been launched without state sponsorship and believe that, in any event, Iraq constitutes a much greater long-term threat to US national security than bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida network. In their view, the elimination of Iraq's clandestine nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, which have proceeded unhindered since the 1998 expulsion of UN weapons inspectors, should be a top priority in the near future.

While President Bush has clearly avoided pointing the finger at Iraq, he has nevertheless alluded repeatedly to the fact that the war on terror will not necessarily be confined to Afghanistan. Earlier this month, US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte delivered a letter to the Security Council stating that American self-defense could require "further actions with respect to other organizations and some states." While Iraq has been put on the back burner for the time being, military action against Baghdad has not been ruled out. It appears that the Bush administration is waiting until it has accumulated incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi involvement in terror attacks against the US before shifting the focus of its war on terror.

In fact, it appears that some high-ranking figures in the Bush administration may be quietly investigating claims made by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The most incriminating evidence produced by Mylroie in her book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, concerns the identity of Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani convicted of masterminding the 1993 attack. Yousef fled the US after the attack using a passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani resident of Kuwait. According to Mylroie, Iraqi intelligence altered files at Kuwait's interior ministry after the 1990 invasion in order to provide Yousef with a false identity.

Although the US Justice Department has long maintained that Yousef was, in fact, Abdul Basit, earlier this month former CIA director James Woolsey reportedly flew to London to determine whether Yousef's fingerprints match those of Abdul Basit, who lived in Britain during the 1980s. Although CIA and State Department officials are said to have been outraged by Woolsey's trip, the fact that he arrived on board a US government plane would appear to indicate that his investigation has been sanctioned by some in the Bush administration.⁸

Some who advocate a major military campaign against Iraq have cautioned against putting off action into the distant future. A military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein will undoubtedly be costly and therefore necessitate strong support from the American people. According to the results of a Reuters/Zogby poll released on October 25, 74% of Americans now believe that the US should expand the war on terrorism by targeting Saddam Hussein and 56% "strongly" favor such a policy. This degree of unqualified support for war against Iraq will not last forever.

Notes

  ¹ "Army alert by Saddam points to Iraqi role," The Sunday Telegraph (London), 23 September 2001.
  ² See "Hijack Suspect met Iraqi Agent in June 2000," The Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2000.
  ³ "Hard Questions About an Iraqi Connection," Newsweek, 29 October 2001.
  ⁴ Newsweek, 15 October 2001.
  ⁵ The Wall Street Journal-Europe, 22 October 2001.
  ⁶ The Sunday Telegraph (London), 23 September 2001.
  ⁷ "Additive Made Spores Deadlier," The Washington Post, 25 October 2001.
  ⁸ Knight-Ridder, 10 October 2001.