There was obviously deep distrust on both sides. That much was widely reported.
On the Iraqi side, concerns were strikingly different. Iraqi diplomats welcomed inspections from the end of the Clinton Administration— two years before they kicked off.175 But senior diplomats agonized over what would happen next—once the U.S. and Britain discovered no weapons caches or production facilities at any of the inspection sites. What mechanism would protect Iraq— and require the U.S. to validate the results—once Iraq’s disarmament was thoroughly verified? How would the U.S. and British governments react when their weapons fantasy turned out to be a hysterical delusion?
Iraq understood the concept of pride. They understood that London and Washington had a heavy personal stake in the inspection results. The U.S. had pounded its breast, and declared before the world that Iraq was hiding illegal weapons caches. Washington would have to save face somehow, when its theory proved entirely wrong. Iraqi diplomats spent a lot of time debating and fretting over how to get the trapped giants out of their corner.
That’s what ultimately convinced me Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq actively worried how Washington and London would handle the embarrassment of defeat. That revealed a lot.
Another thing, as of November 2000, as the Presidential vote count was underway in Florida, top Iraqi officials swore U.N. inspections could resume in a few weeks. So while the U.S. and Britain publicly chastised Iraq for withholding access to sites, in back channel negotiations Iraq was throwing the door wide open. Baghdad was eager to act as a friendly host, insisting inspectors would be well treated, whereas the United States dug in its heels and balked. That in itself was a blaring admission that Washington and London recognized the outcome would embarrass the West.
Above all, Iraq made clear it wanted friends. All of Iraq’s future trading partners were eager to put their reconstruction contracts into play. They gave Baghdad the same ultimatum. Baghdad must accept inspections before everyone could get on with business. They hated sanctions, too. They desired a new chapter of friendly relations with Baghdad. But there was no way to surmount disarmament verification.
And so, over and over, Iraq assured the White House and CIA that Baghdad would welcome U.N. inspectors to finish their job.
That’s a total contradiction of what the international community was told.
Cooperation with the Global War on Terrorism
Another great contradiction was Iraq’s so called “lack of cooperation” with global. anti-terrorism policy. Congress had no idea what it was talking about, suggesting Iraq embraced any sort of terrorist philosophy. Throughout the 1990s, Iraq was one of Washington’s best sources on counter-terrorism. Our back-channel existed first and foremost as a back door to receive that intelligence. And Baghdad was always enthusiastic to contribute, regardless of sanctions. Congress had nothing to fear.
Support for global anti-terrorism was motivated by Baghdad’s secular identity, and its determination to keep a tight rein on radical fundamentalists inside its borders. Baghdad flatly abhorred the notion that it willingly provided sanctuary to aspiring terrorists. Quite the contrary, Saddam would have liked to arrest all young jihadi types, so they could rot in prison. On that point, Saddam shared a lot in common with former Vice President Dick Cheney.
It must be understood that Saddam restricted his definition of “terrorism” to craven acts of violence or sabotage for the purpose of disrupting political or economic interests. Saddam’s government did not consider “acts of liberation” to constitute terrorist assaults— like the Palestinian fight against Israeli Occupation. Baghdad never shared intelligence on “freedom martyrs.” Quite the opposite, those jihadis received special protection and financial support from Saddam’s government, which never wavered all those years.
Washington and London should have thought hard about Iraq’s commitment to liberation ideology before sending U.S. soldiers into Baghdad.
In Iraq, opposition to Infidel Occupations is a form of religion.
But Saddam was supremely paranoid about religious zealots ready to commit acts of violence in the name of Islam against Arab governments. They would come to Iraq eager to attack the United States, or (mostly) Saudi Arabia, expecting to receive a sympathetic audience. Saddam would throw them right out, howling in protest, through our diplomatic back channel, that sanctions acted like a magnet for those groups to the detriment of the Gulf Region.
Saddam hated them more than we did.
“You don’t want them in your country!” Diplomats complained. “Why should we allow them in ours?”
“If we discover jihadis who want to attack Saudi interests, do you think we can arrest them? No! We would like to help protect the Saudis. But the International Community would never allow it! They would never forgive us! So what can we do?”
The problem was that Baghdad was right. Young Islamic radicals recognized that Saddam’s government had limited options for handling the influx. So they came in as visitors, and kept a low profile for a few months, until they could resist no longer. At that point, they would come into confrontation with Iraqi authorities, who would quickly ship them off to a new outpost.
Deportation was the only option.
Against that backdrop, our push to get an FBI or Interpol Taskforce into Iraq won rapid approval after the U.S.S. Cole bombing in October, 2000.
Iraq only hesitated long enough to insist that any terrorists identified by the FBI would hail from Syria, Jordan or Lebanon. Baghdad swore they would not be homegrown in Najaf or Mosul. Officials insisted their country was a transit point only. Saddam feared what their fanaticism could inspire among his people, so he squashed them hard. Saddam wanted them gone.
By February, 2001, Baghdad agreed— nine months before 9/11.
After 9/11, the agreement had to be revalidated. Baghdad correctly feared that any intelligence sharing might be portrayed by Washington as an admission of guilt, as opposed to positive cooperation, like Pakistan, Jordan or Egypt.176 Iraq desired to be respected like any other nation contributing responsibly to this problem. Their fear was not unreasonable.
But given Iraq’s history of cooperation, it was fairly simple to persuade them. I just had to keep the Task Force on the table until we could get it implemented.177 Without a doubt, it was a serious and meaningful effort. All of us presumed the FBI would send its best and brightest agents, who would act aggressively to hunt out terrorists hiding in Iraq. They would have the right to interview witnesses and conduct investigations. Most controversially, they would have the right to arrest terror suspects. This was the motherlode.
Revelations that Iraq possessed documents proving a Middle Eastern link to the Oklahoma City bombing hit me totally by surprise. The Oklahoma bombing in April, 1995 preceded my first visit to the Iraqi Embassy by 16 months.
But wait a minute, I can hear you thinking. That was Timothy McVeigh’s gig, right? Didn’t he go to his execution by lethal injection, swearing that he acted alone?
Yes, he did. And a lot of smart people think McVeigh lied, including former CIA Director, James Woolsey,178 and McVeigh’s own attorney, Steven Jones.
And yours truly.
My handler, Paul Hoven was an expert on the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 toddlers and infants179 at a nursery school on the ground floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Hoven studied the detonation pattern and architectural designs of the building— which convinced him explosives had been strategically placed in stairwells and/or elevator shafts. He found it most peculiar that employees of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had not shown up for work the day of the bombing, as if they’d got advance wind of the attack. As for who might have conspired with McVeigh, Hoven studied the “skin-head” angle, the Aryan Nation connection, revenge for Ruby Ridge and the tragic conflagration at Waco, Texas. He understood all the different contributing factors. However, Hoven also gave strict instructions that I should grab anything at
all that hinted of Middle Eastern involvement.
It strained logic to think that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols acted alone.
Think about it from a practical level. Building a bomb of that detonation force requires massive sophistication and expertise in storing and mixing dangerous chemicals; maximizing detonation capability; storage of the completed bomb; and technical planning for delivery—all without triggering a premature detonation.180
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were ambitious, yes. But in all probability, inexperienced bomb-makers would blow themselves sky high before they got so “lucky” as to create a bomb of that magnitude, and protect its separate components until delivery and detonation. This was a bomb capable of destroying a nine story building, and laying it to waste in concrete rubble, after all. There’s some difficult chemistry here.
Some of us strongly believe that McVeigh and Nichols must have received technical guidance for the job. Travel and supplies required financial assistance, as well.
There’s a remarkable documentary film that lays out this argument called “Conspiracy? The Oklahoma City Bombing.” I strongly recommend it. For a more in depth and devastating analysis, I also recommend “Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing” by Jayna Davis and “Oklahoma City Bombing Revelations,” by Patrick B. Briley.2
“Conspiracy?” does a beautiful job reexamining the facts about Oklahoma City, including recaps of the eye witness observations by 10 men and women, who claim to have spotted Timothy McVeigh with a young, Middle Eastern man at the Murrah building on April 19, 1995—minutes before the explosion.
Three employees of the Ryder shop, where McVeigh rented the truck, swore independently under oath that two men entered the store together, identified as Timothy McVeigh and an unknown Arabic man in his mid-20s. The truck was rented from a small store in a small town, with a limited number of daily transactions—not a busy shop. So there was no confusion two days later when the FBI showed up after the blast. All three employees agreed. Two men rented that truck. One of them appeared Middle Eastern.181
Likewise, two Middle-Eastern looking males were spotted sprinting at break neck speeds away from the Murrah building, and jumping into a dark truck a couple of minutes before the explosion. Speeding away, they almost ran over a woman four blocks away.
As former CIA Director Woolsey told film makers, “The number of witnesses puts the burden of proof on those who say there was no foreign involvement of any kind.”182
Here’s the bombshell: Terry Nichols’ passport showed that he traveled to the Philippines five times from 1990 to 1995, ostensibly to collect his “mail order” bride. But after the wedding, Nichols returned to the Philippines unaccompanied by his wife.
Strikingly, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef both visited Southwestern College in the Philippines, a notorious recruiting ground for the Islamic Abu Sayef, during the same months, from November, 1994 to January, 1995. That would be Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, who went into hiding in the Philippines from 1993 until his capture in 1995.183
More curiously, a police informant visually identified Nichols as having attended a meeting with Ramzi Yousef, at which bomb building and detonation strategies were discussed—the missing technical assistance for the Oklahoma City Bombing. Nichols apparently introduced himself as “the farmer.” (Back home in Kansas, Nichols was indeed a farmer.)
By the way, the 1993 World Trade Center attack relied on the same M.O. as the Oklahoma City Bombing– a Ryder truck loaded with fertilizer explosives and ammonium nitrate.
And the shoe drops.
That’s an awful lot of coincidence. That two notorious terrorists would inhabit the same Islamic University campus for several months, meet to talk shop in late 1994 and early 1995, then apply the same bomb building techniques— without conspiring on the Oklahoma City attack four months later in April 1995— strains credulity.
My handler, Paul Hoven studied the Oklahoma City investigation exhaustively, and he thought it was a cover up— a la Arlen Specter and the single bullet theory in the John F. Kennedy assassination. In his megalomania, Timothy McVeigh even loathed sharing credit with Terry Nichols. As such, his reliability could be considered highly questionable, as far as identifying co- conspirators.
And now Baghdad swore it possessed documents proving a Middle Eastern connection to Oklahoma City and the 1993 World Trade Center attacks!184
Well, I wanted to see what Iraq had. Anybody else doing credible anti-terrorism would want to see it, too. It would be irresponsible not to examine it closely!
And so I returned to New York frequently to investigate what Iraq was offering. Diplomats responded enthusiastically to my questions. They made additional inquiries to Baghdad, and received confirmations that the documents pertained to both the Oklahoma City bombing and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
And what’s the primary (known) link between those two attacks? Ramzi Yousef.
Could it be that Iraq possessed financial documents tied to him?
As one Iraqi diplomat traveling with a delegation from Baghdad put it, “We don’t think this will be valuable to the United States, we know this will be valuable to your efforts.”
If it related to Ramzi Yousef, that would be a phenomenal understatement!
Iraq’s contribution was priceless. It might outline the whole Al Qaeda spider web of illicit financing from its earliest days!
A picture of these documents began to emerge, which excited me very much. Reports from Baghdad clarified that in its treasure trove, Iraq was holding banking and financial records from the early to mid 1990s.
It was exactly what Dr. Fuisz and I hoped for. Such a cache would have incalculable value from the standpoint of tracking the pipeline of Al Qaeda finances. Identifying even a single bank account would allow a back trace on all funds moving from other accounts. Some monies would involve legitimate transactions. Others would not. Either would yield intelligence on even more accounts. Gaining that intelligence could have resulted in the seizure of tens of millions of dollars that otherwise continue to circulate internationally to this day.
Tracing this spider network of cash from the Middle East to New York and Europe to the Philippines and Indonesia would have disrupted a whole river of finances, keeping this global terrorism network afloat in “happy cash.” I call it happy cash, because most of it comes from heroin trafficking—a cash crop that produces $3 billion in revenue for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
An astounding 85 percent of the world’s heroin supply comes from Afghan opium production. All global drug cartels draw from those fields. The Islamic religion has nothing to do with it. Those are drug profits. And that’s where terrorists get their money.
Iraq offered a way to identify that network and stop it, effectively.
Baghdad had just one stipulation: They would only hand over those documents to the FBI or other international law enforcement agency— not the CIA. They wanted to support legitimate terrorist investigations— not get swallowed in the miasma of intelligence. I sympathized enormously. The Intelligence Community might easily identify something unpopular in a document, and bury it forever.
From my perspective, Iraq’s concern demonstrated the integrity of the documents. They were “results oriented only,” not for show.
That should not have been a problem. It fit perfectly with our first objective of getting an FBI Task Force into Baghdad. The FBI would find a lot to keep them busy.
I took one more precaution: I told Iraqi officials that if the documents truly pertained to Oklahoma City, then the Chief of Police of Oklahoma City would very likely travel to Baghdad with the FBI to receive the documents. I explained the Police Chief was like a tribal leader, who would know the families of the Oklahoma bombing personally. He would probably go to church with them—just like Iraqi tribal leaders attended mosque with families in their own community. The Chief of Police would be personally insulted
—and Iraq’s reputation for cooperating with anti-terrorism goals would be smashed for all of the future— if he arrived in Baghdad and the documents proved to be worthless. He would be ashamed to go home to face the families. The United States would never forgive Baghdad. (And nobody would ever forgive me!)
Many times I urged diplomats that it would be better to abandon their claim than to create false hope for those families. I gave them plenty of opportunities to back out.
Nothing scared Iraqi diplomats into backing off their claims.
By November, 2001 our teams’ efforts were shaping up to a brilliant success on several fronts.
Our team was riding high to victory. That’s when I made an extraordinary discovery.
Saddam Hussein was a romantic.
There was a man at the Iraqi Embassy. Oh yes, there had to be one.
Our affair started back in 1997, one of those teasing romances. Only like everything else in my life, my liaisons proved slightly more colorful and dangerous in the end.
Mr. A—— was dark, tall and dashing, in his mid-30s. He had a muscular build. And he was incredibly sexy, with a mustache and a great wide mischievous smile, quite playful.
For all those years, it was fairly predictable that whenever the U.S. bombed Baghdad, I would visit Iraq’s Embassy. Any number of times, I dropped by, while the United States engaged in military action. I would be inside the embassy, while Secret Service Agents or security guards would be posted outside, depending on the severity of the confrontation.
Late one of those nights, during a major bombing raid on Baghdad, Mr. A——swept me up in his arms. We slow danced for the better part of an hour, in the greeting room of the Embassy. I kicked off my high heels, and danced in my stocking feet. There was no music. So he sang Iraqi love songs to me, which occasionally he stopped to translate.
Outside the embassy, Secret Service agents were posted on the street to stop any conflicts with angry Americans that might escalate hostilities between the two countries. Through the window, I could observe their reactions. It was a cold and rainy night. They looked slightly shocked, as they stared back through the glass.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 19
