'Saddam controlled the camp'
The Iraqi connection
As evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to the 11 September hijackers begins to emerge, David Rose gathers testimony from former Baghdad agents and the CIA to reveal the secrets of Saddam's terror training camp
His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one
of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces
veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf
war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department
for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is
the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew
halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before
piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre.
Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer
has learnt that Atta's talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent
links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has 'credible information'
that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking
team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States.
They are believed to be Atta's closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan
al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the 'German cell ' who
lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s.
In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in
the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the
Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary
of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly
to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based
Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: 'Yes, you
cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey,
weather and other topics. But I am not so sure.
In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the
scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include
action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers
have responded to this prospect with 'horror', arguing that an attack on
Saddam Hussein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western
anger across Middle East.
Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary, heads a clique
of determined, powerful hawks, most of them outside the administration -
among them James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. The doves argue
that an al-Qaeda-Iraq link is improbable, given the sharp ideological differences
between Saddam's secular Baathism and Islamic fundamentalism. They also
say that claims of Iraqi involvement are being driven by the agenda of the
hawks - a group which has for years been seeking to finish the job left
undone at the end of the Gulf war in 1991.
Nevertheless, Saddam does not lack a plausible motive: revenge for his expulsion
from Kuwait in 1991, and for the continued sanctions and Western bombing
of his country ever since. In this febrile atmosphere, hard information
about who ordered the 11 September attacks remains astonishingly scarce.
US investigators have traced the movements of the 19 hijackers going back
years, and have amassed a detailed picture of who did what inside the conspiracy.
Yet what lay beyond the hijackers is an intelligence black hole. If they
had a support network in America, none of its members has been traced, and
among the hundreds of telephone records and emails the investigators have
recovered, nothing gets close to identifying those ultimately responsible.
It still seems almost certain, intelligence sources say, that parts of Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaeda network actively backed the conspiracy: about half
of the estimated $500,000 the hijackers used reportedly came from al-Qaeda
sources, while some of the terrorists are believed to have passed through
bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. At the same time, however, evidence is
emerging of direct Iraqi links with the US hijackers in particular, and
with radical Islamic terror groups in general.
In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said
they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now
changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection
to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of
this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100
per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find
most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance
and some involvement.'
Last night, Whitehall sources made clear that parts of British intelligence
had reached the same conclusion. Uncomfortable as it may be, this reassessment
is having a political impact. Last month, when the CIA was still telling
him it did not believe Iraq was involved in 11 September, Powell said there
were 'no plans' to attack Iraq. Last Thursday, speaking in Kuwait, he abruptly
reversed his earlier pronouncements. He promised that after dealing with
bin Laden and Afghanistan, 'we will turn our attention to terrorism throughout
the world, and nations such as Iraq'.
The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany,
was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000
of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven
foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational
significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual
which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist
attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.
Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has
been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat,
who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi
National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details.
'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one
source said.
The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their
stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively
by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations),
gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing.
According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance
and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s
when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses.
Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him
to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since
his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists
such as Mohamed Atta.
Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad,
expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen
at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on
the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi,
presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic
Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan.
Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between
al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq
had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings]
happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people
during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if
he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.'
Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went
in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg,
only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days
later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely
24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train
as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have
been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief
visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience.
On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a
hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer
that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and
other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two
further such meetings in the months before 11 September.
The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers,
al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside
the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings
took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest
'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted
to oil exports and busting economic sanctions.
The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively
merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years.
He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that
towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and
a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan,
where he met bin Laden.
The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle',
Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to
overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run
by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these
individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that
al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim
fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been
available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London
travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel
had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer
- codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training
in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took
down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known
- Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris
river south of Baghdad.
However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was
new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire
fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis
from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi
Arabs.
Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was
controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The
Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular
Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange
experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times
a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till
late at night, just because of all this praying.'
Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda,
Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these
people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.'
One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack
aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were
also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students
worked in groups of four or five.
In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile
he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should
speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad,
who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to
US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims:
'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking.
They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they
were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly
coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers
attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been
done by graduates of Salman Pak".'
Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques
in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners' part of the camp. Yesterday
their story received important corroboration from Charles Duelfer, former
vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team.
Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter.
He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis,
he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training.
'Of course we automatically took out the word "counter",' he said.
'I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror
camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq
presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very
good at recognising long-term strategic threats.'
At the end of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence
Secretary, told reporters there was 'no evidence' that Iraq was involved
in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten.
Many still suspect the anthrax which has so far killed four people in America
has an ultimate Iraqi origin: in contrast to recent denials made by senior
FBI officials, CIA sources say there simply is not enough material to be
sure. However, it does not look likely that the latest anthrax sample, sent
to a newspaper in Karachi, can have come from the source recently posited
by the FBI - a right-wing US militant. 'The sophistication of the stuff
that has been found represents a level of technique and knowledge that in
the past has been associated only with governments,' Duelfer said. 'If it's
not Iraq, there aren't many alternatives.'
If the emerging evidence of Iraqi involvement in 11 September becomes clearer
or more conclusive, the consequences will be immense. In the words of a
State Department spokesman after Powell's briefing by the Czech leader on
Friday: 'If there is clear evidence connecting the World Trade Centre attacks
to Iraq, that would be a very grave development.'
At worst, the anti-terrorist coalition would currently be bombing the wrong
country. At best, the world would see that some of President Bush's closest
advisers - his father, Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney, to name but
three - made a catastrophic error in 1991, when they ended the Gulf war
without toppling Saddam.
The case for trying to remove him now might well seem unanswerable. In that
scenario, the decisions Western leaders have had to make in the past two
months would seem like a trivial prelude.
Additional reporting by Ed Vulliamy in New York and Kate Connolly in
Berlin.