As the United States builds its case and battle plan against Osama bin Laden, a small but influential core of policymakers and analysts is pointing toward a second potential suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks–Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Members of the group, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, base their suspicions partly on the work of Middle East scholar Laurie Mylroie, whose investigation of trial evidence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center concluded that the plot’s mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, was an Iraqi intelligence agent.
Clues adding up
Such findings, while disputed, have been augmented in recent days by tantalizing clues in the current case, a reported meeting several months ago in Europe between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent, for example. Proponents of pursuing the Iraqi connection say it is naive to believe bin Laden’s loose network of trainees could have carried out such a sophisticated plan without support from intelligence professionals.
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“I basically think it’s a strong possibility that has to be put at the top of the list to investigate,” Woolsey said of the possible Iraqi link.
“It should be pursued without any further delay,” said Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. “And if Iraq was indeed involved in 1993, then it is another piece of circumstantial evidence to link them to this attack.”
The calls for a closer look at Hussein, one of the few world leaders not to offer condolences since Sept. 11, haven’t gone unheeded.
“There are bits and pieces of information that point in the direction of possible Iraqi involvement, and they are being pursued,” said a U.S. official involved with the case. “It is pretty much a certainty that there was a meeting [between Atta and Iraqi intelligence]. Did it have a bearing on these attacks? The bottom line is, we don’t know yet.”
Even without a strong current link, the recent attacks’ echoes of the 1993 bombing and other previous plots have been especially striking to people like Mylroie and Woolsey. To them, the four simultaneous hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon represent the next logical escalation in the earlier plans of Yousef, who directed the 1993 bombing and now is imprisoned.
Yousef’s intent in 1993, Mylroie said, was to send one tower toppling into the other, collapsing both in a poisonous haze of cyanide gas. The collapse never happened, and the cyanide burned up in the heat of the explosion, but Yousef wasn’t done. He planned another attack for early 1995 that never materialized–the simultaneous bombing of 11 U.S. commercial airliners while crashing another plane into CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia.
Nor was Yousef just any operative. In a lengthy, detailed chronology, Mylroie says he was an Iraqi intelligence agent traveling under a stolen identity–a “legend” created for him during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.
Addressing Iraq’s possible links to the Sept. 11 attacks will be more complicated than simply pursuing leads, mostly because the Bush administration is trying to build support in the Arab and Muslim world for an anti-terrorism coalition. The populations of many Arab nations sympathize with Iraq, believing that the United States has bullied the country with economic sanctions and periodic air strikes since the 1991 conclusion of the Persian Gulf war.
Mylroie says Hussein’s chief means of continuing to fight the war has been terrorism. For her book “Study of Revenge,” Mylroie dug through government evidence exhibits from the trials of the suspects in the 1993 bombing case, including much that was never presented in court. She established a trail of phone records and false identities that she says leads directly to Baghdad.
Identity lifted
Her most intriguing information concerns the plot mastermind Yousef. Known among New York Islamic circles as “Ramzi the Iraqi,” Yousef left the U.S. after the bombing, traveling on a Pakistani passport as Abdul Basit Karim, with a Kuwait address.
Abdul Basit Karim was a real person, Mylroie concluded, with a file at Kuwait’s Ministry of the Interior. She said his file had been tampered with, citing a notation from Aug. 26, 1990–during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait–that said he had left the country for Pakistani Baluchistan, via Iraq and Iran.
Friends of Abdul Basit Karim described him as being shorter and thinner, and with different facial features than Yousef, yet the fingerprints in the file matched Yousef’s.
Mylroie’s conclusion is that Iraqi authorities killed Abdul Basit Karim then doctored his file to steal his identity.