Admittedly, this is thin gruel to say the threat to bin Laden was from the Saudis. Still, as noted above, bin Laden had publicly condemned as un-Islamic King Fahd and the senior Saudi ulema during the Gulf War and had embarrassed the Saudis by not returning to the kingdom. In addition, bin Laden was willing to work with all of the Islamist Afghan factions that had fought in the war to find a workable political settlement, something to which the Saudis paid lip service but did their best to bedevil. Throughout the Afghan war, the Saudis favored the Al-Azhar-educated Afghan leader Abdur Rasul Sayyaf because of his staunch Wahabi views. Sayyaf also was the darling of wealthy nabobs in the Gulf, many of whom showered him with cash for his performance as a guest speaker whose rhetoric flowed in classical Arabic of a quality seldom heard. Beyond the Saudis’ appreciation for Sayyaf’s doctrinal rigor and his appeal as the boy orator of the Hindu Kush, however, lay Riyadh’s eagerness to see a Wahabi-friendly Sunni Pastun regime in power in Kabul to act as a roadblock on the highway the Iranians would have to trod to reenter Central Asia, an old Persian stomping ground. After spending billions to beat the Soviets, Riyadh was determined to avoid seeing an Afghan sluiceway built through which Shi’ism could flow into the newly independent Sunni Muslim states of Central Asia.
Investment in Sudan
Bin Laden was among friends when he arrived in Khartoum. He had met many members of the Sudanese NIF who fought in Afghanistan during the anti-Communist jihad, and he also had trained NIF fighters in his Afghan camps. According to Al-Watan Al-Arabi, a Sudanese engineer named al-Tahir became a close colleague of bin Laden during the war and suggested he invest in Sudan. Bin Laden favored the idea and visited Khartoum in October 1990, the year after the NIF took power in a coup d’etat.8 This appears to have been his first visit, although bin Laden told a reporter in 1994 that he “surveyed business and investment opportunities in Sudan as early as 1983.”9 During the 1990 visit, according to Al-Watan Al-Arabi, bin Laden rented a villa in the fashionable al-Riyadh section of Khartoum and made investments involving him in Sudan’s agricultural, import-export, banking, construction, and leather tanning industries. After his arrival, bin Laden also is reported to have funded his always cash-strapped NIF hosts: $2 million to NIF leader Hasan al-Turabi for resettling Arab Afghans in Sudan; $10.5 million to upgrade Sudan’s flour industry and build a modern airport at Port Sudan; and a $50 million share in a new Islamic bank called al-Shimal, the Bank of the North.10
When bin Laden became a resident of Sudan in late 1991 or early 1992—again the data are not definitive—he expanded his business holdings and soon had a number of companies operating, including al-Hijra for Construction and Development; Wadi al-Aqiq Company, an international trading firm; an agricultural company named Al-Themar al-Mubaraka; Qudarat Transportation Company; and the Taba Investments Company, a currency trading firm. Bin Laden apparently designed his businesses to mesh with the economic advantages Turabi gave him, which included a full exemption from import and export duties and a huge tract of agricultural land in eastern Sudan.11 Through these firms, bin Laden was involved in building the NIF regime’s long-planned Khartoum-to-Port Sudan highway; growing and exporting maize, sesame, gum Arabic, cattle, palm oil, peanuts, and sunflower seeds; and producing leather for export to manufacturers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.12 The New York Times has reported bin Laden made some senior NIF members his partners in these endeavors, and Reuters said bin Laden employed “people linked to terrorist groups in his farms, companies, and construction businesses.”13 Whether the last contention is true, bin Laden did employ his own cadre and some Arab Afghans he paid Turabi to resettle; “Yes, I helped some of my comrades to come here to Sudan after the [Afghan] war,” bin Laden told Robert Fisk in late 1993.14 Finally, bin Laden tried to help the NIF improve Sudan’s economy by encouraging “Saudi businessmen to invest in Sudan.” In early 1999, Frontline reported bin Laden had “reasonable success” and “many of his brothers and Jeddah merchants had and still have investments [in Sudan] in [the] real estate, farming, and agricultural industry.”15
Thus bin Laden methodically established substantial business interests in Sudan that turned a profit and gave employment to his followers and their families. According to Al-Wasat, for example, former bin Laden employee Sayyid Salamah—who is now jailed in Egypt—“use to manage $50 million worth of activities and enterprises belonging to Bin Laden in Sudan.”16 It also must be assumed that bin Laden built dual-use companies, designed to make a profit and, as the Sunday Times of London has said, “to support the increasingly sophisticated enterprise [bin Laden’s international organization], and to provide cover for the procurement of explosives, weapons and chemicals and for the travel of the group’s operatives.”17 In addition to these enterprises, bin Laden was closely associated with al-Turabi and the NIF leadership in funding the construction and operation of the Sudan government-owned Military Industrial Corporation (MIC), which was intended to make Sudan self-sufficient in small arms, ammunition, and some other military equipment. The government-owned MIC, according to the New York Times, also has responsibility for “overseeing chemical weapons development.”18
Search for CBRN Capability
In Sudan, bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam’s enemies. Bin Laden’s first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF leaders, Iraq’s intelligence service, and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad through its intelligence officers in Sudan, and by a Turabi-brokered June 1994 visit by Iraq’s then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan’s Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for “nurturing Iraq’s ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors.” Turabi had plans to formulate a “common strategy” with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed good rapport that would “flourish” in the late 1990s.19
Turabi’s scheme for an overall strategy was not achieved, but there is information showing that in the 1993–1994 period bin Laden began work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda. Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Hajir al-Iraqi appears to have been his point man in this effort, and Time magazine reported that in 1993 al Qaeda tried to buy a “Russian nuclear warhead” on the black market. Bin Laden halted the effort when a warhead for sale could not be located, and instead, “his agents began scouring former Soviet republics for enriched uranium and weapons components that could be used to set off the fuel.”20 Time magazine claims bin Laden was frustrated in this effort and “settled on chemical weapons which are easier to manufacture.”21
In regard to CBW, it is prudent to assume bin Laden’s tannery in Sudan has legally purchased dual-use chemicals that allow production of chemical weapons as well as of leather. In the nuclear area, al Qaeda as early as 1993 drafted “plans to buy enriched uranium from the former Soviet Union to produce portable light nuclear explosive canisters to be used in terrorist operations.”22 Suggesting al Qaeda’s interest in biological weapons, moreover, is Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogji’s recollection of visiting Sudan in the early 1990s and hearing bin Laden “earnestly discussing the virtues of genetically engineered crops.”23 In all these efforts, bin Laden’s goal was to get a CBRN weapon to use on a U.S. target. Al-Watan Al-Arabi has said bin Laden especially wants the capability of “manufacturing mobile weapons of mass destruction that could be used in terrorist operations and in confronting the United States in particular.”24
Whatever progress bin Laden made in Sudan toward arming al Qaeda with CBRN weapons appears to have had Turabi’s approval and was supported by the Khartoum factories of the Military Industrial Corporation (MIC)—where bin Laden had a private office—or other NIF-controlled facilities.25 A Sudanese military engineer named Colonel Abd-al-Basit Hamza—who now builds military factories and once built roads for bin Laden’s Al-Hijra Company26—report
edly manages a “group of companies … run by the NIF in cooperation with Iraq and bin Laden. The operation of this program is led by Iraqi scientists and technicians, led by Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Mubaruhah, and by Asian and foreign experts.”27 The New Republic quotes a Sudanese military defector as saying that “up to 60 Iraqi military experts rotate through Sudan every six months, and that some of these experts are involved in some kind of munitions development” at the MIC.28 In addition, Sudanese oppositionists—not the most unbiased sources—claim Iraq’s technicians are helping Sudan build chemical weapons at MIC facilities in Khartoum and, in return, Iraqi chemical weapons have been hidden by Sudan at the Yarmuk Military Manufacturing Complex in Sheggara, south of Khartoum.29
(I have left in place the foregoing paragraphs, and several paragraphs later in the book, because they accurately present the information my research uncovered when preparing the first edition of this book. The paragraphs represent the public record as I found it and, as such, they merit being available for other researchers to evaluate. Now, however, I believe that my description and analysis of CBRN and other cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in this section—and elsewhere in this book—is incorrect. My judgment is not based on publicly available information, but rather on an extensive review of the classified information pertinent to the subject located in the files of the Central Intelligence Agency. This material is not now, of course, available to the public; indeed, it seems likely that most of it will remain classified for many decades, and properly so to protect the Agency’s sources and methods. I feel a bit like the historians of World War Two who had to go back and revise and correct their works decades after publication when the signal intercepts known as “ENIGMA” and “MAGIC” profoundly expanded their ability to understand, document, and analyze the wars against Germany and Japan. These historians were not wrong in their initial analysis; they used the best data then available. They did, however, have a professional obligation to factor the new information into their work, and they did so. On Iraq and al Qaeda I had a similar experience—better information came along after my first book was published.
(Given the restricted nature of the data that has changed my original analysis and judgment, I thought it best to describe in general terms the process by which I came to reverse my position on the issue. Readers will recall that before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Department of Defense’s analytic unit headed by Mr. Douglas Feith published a number of classified papers dealing with aspects of Iraq’s activities that most negatively affected U.S. interests, ranging from Weapons of Mass Destruction to terrorism. Many of these papers appear to have been leaked to the media, causing a great deal of discussion over the points they purported to document, none more so than the description of “cooperation” between al Qaeda and Iraq on a variety of issues.
(Before moving to a specific discussion of the paper Mr. Feith’s unit produced on the Iraq–al Qaeda relationship, a general comment on the quality of the analysis from Mr. Feith’s unit is in order. While I do not claim to have read all of the unit’s papers, those I did read struck me as rather amateurish. The bane of the professional intelligence officer’s life is that data are available to support virtually any line of analysis one wants to present, or, more dangerous, any line of analysis politicians want to have delivered. Because of this situation, an intelligence officer, to be worth anything to his policy-making masters, must be able to discern between quality information—because it is well-sourced, documentary, electronically intercepted, and so forth—and information that has little of quality about it. The officer also must be willing to defy policy makers who are more concerned with analysis that will support his or her policy preference than with the quality of data that goes into the analysis. Writing intelligence analysis is, in short, a tough business, and most senior analysts have lost a promotion or two in their career because they refused to use information of inferior quality.
(The analysis of Iraq–al Qaeda cooperation that came from Mr. Feith’s unit struck me as either being prepared by inexperienced analysts—those not yet comfortable in discerning quality from inferior information—or by solid analysts who were ordered to produce analysis that would mesh with and support the decisions policy makers intended to make. I have no way of knowing which of the two factors were at play. I would argue, however, that it would be a stretch to describe the analysis from Mr. Feith’s unit on Iraq and al Qaeda as a professional product. It certainly was not analysis on which decisions about peace and war should be made.
(When the Department of Defense found a strong Iraq–al Qaeda relationship, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet—much to his credit—requested the CIA’s bin Laden department to review all files that might show signs of the relationship described by Mr. Feith’s unit. I must add that this is an issue to which CIA had always paid close attention, and the review ordered by Mr. Tenet was meant either to revalidate the Agency’s previous conclusion that no such relationship existed or to discover that the Agency had missed or neglected data that supported the analysis produced by Mr. Feith’s officers.
(For a number of reasons, I was available to perform the review of Agency files on Iraq and al Qaeda, and the chief of the bin Laden department handed me the assignment. I was delighted with the task, eager to begin, and sure that my research would support the analysis I had presented in Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. For about four weeks in late 2002 and early 2003, I and several others were engaged full time in searching CIA files—seven days a week, often far more than eight hours a day. At the end of the effort, we had gone back ten years in the files and had reviewed nearly twenty thousand documents that amounted to well over fifty thousand pages of materials. I was both pleased and embarrassed by the results of the research. I was pleased because CIA’s position was reaffirmed and the analysis of Mr. Feith’s unit was discredited. There was no information that remotely supported the analysis that claimed there was a strong working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. I was embarrassed because this reality invalidated the analysis I had presented on the subject in my book.
(Lest readers think that the issue was left entirely to me and a few others, I must add that I was only the main researcher. The mountains of pertinent documents that were recovered and printed were turned over to the analysts of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center for final evaluation. As far as I know, they found what I found—no Iraq–al Qaeda relationship worthy of the name. It was with sharp surprise, therefore, when those of us who worked on the reevaluation of CIA data heard Secretary of State Colin Powell tell the UN Security Council that an effective Iraq– al Qaeda working relationship was in place.
(I have no explanation for how the research that was performed, and the analysis that was done on the basis of it, was shaped to yield Secretary Powell’s assertion. I would add one more reality of the professional intelligence officer’s life, however. The influence of even the best research and analysis depends at all times on the honesty, integrity, and toughness of those senior officers who are tasked to brief it to the president of the United States and his cabinet officers. A hard fact of analytic life is that the product that is written to assist the policy maker is not always the product that is delivered. Career ambitions and concerns, personal friendships that develop between briefers and the president and his circle, and the certain knowledge of what those to be briefed want to hear are all factors that can skew the presentation of analysis at the most senior levels. I have no knowledge about what bottom line on the Iraq–al Qaeda relationship was presented by CIA briefers to the president and his cabinet, but I do know that Secretary Powell’s statements did no reflect the reality we found in CIA files.
(How to rectify the discrepancy? Well, it will not be easy. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, appointed himself briefer-in-chief to the president. This was an unprecedented arrangement, as no previous DCI met daily with the president, nor was he always the prim
ary briefer of the president when the two met. After Mr. Bush’s inauguration, Mr. Tenet put himself squarely at the delivery end of the channel through which intelligence and analysis were delivered to the president and senior cabinet members. At day’s end, therefore, Mr. Tenet perhaps is the only one who knows how the Iraq–al Qaeda analysis was garbled in the hour or so it took for him to carry it from CIA headquarters to the White House. Or, perhaps, if it was deliberately garbled before he left for the drive to the White House.)
Aid to NIF
Bin Laden’s nearly five-year stay in Sudan also saw him support the NIF’s consolidation of power, continue to expand the al Qaeda organization, and promote closer ties between it and like-minded Islamist groups. In Sudan, bin Laden was eager to assist Turabi and the NIF cement their hold on power, even to the extent, the media reports, of helping the NIF assassinate Sudanese opposition leaders. Militarily, bin Laden spent $2 million to construct military training camps; some reports say more than twenty camps were built for Arab Afghans brought from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The total number of Arab Afghans that bin Laden brought to Sudan is unknown, but Cairo’s Rose al-Yusuf has reported that 380 Egyptian Arab Afghans arrived in Sudan in April–May 1993.30 The training camps are reported to be located “throughout Sudan, not only near Khartoum and Port Sudan, but in the Damazin area of eastern Sudan and a base in the southern Equatoria Province, near the Ugandan border.”31 Bin Laden allowed NIF militia recruits to train in the camps and made fighters available to join NIF combat operations against John Garang’s Christian rebels in southern Sudan.32
Through Our Enemies' Eyes Page 21
