[secretagent]

"Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley.

How does Hayes know this? Unnamed sources mean no sources.

[Boot Hill]

secretagent says:   "How does Hayes know this?"

View Replies says:   "No replies."

I agree with you SA, 45 replies later and the key element of this story remains undisclosed: a reliable source for the claim that Saddam gave Zawahiri $300,000 in the spring of 1998. Don't misunderstand me, I believe it to be true, but belief doesn't get the job done.

--Boot Hill

[JasonC]

We have Iraqi government records now, including their bookkeeping on oil for food and their intelligence operations. We also have several thousand men either in custody, or who have passed through our custody, who have told us all sorts of checkable things.

The line in the article I did find dubious, though, was the statement that Bin Laden "may" have been "out" of money when he left Sudan, and "may" have needed more to "rent" Afghanistan. (As though $300,000, or $3 million, would be enough for the latter).

Bin Laden had a fortune in the hundreds of millions, from his contractor days in Saudi Arabia and from his period as intel go between dispersing Saudia funds to the Afghan resistence to the Russians. It probably brought him regular income of tens of millions per year.

He may have lost assets when he was kicked out of Sudan, but it is extremely unlikely he lost everything (he would be diversified, etc). He could "rent" Afghanistan because he had access to regular streams of hard currency from portfolio investment abroad.

Iraqi payments may have supplimented this - that is entirely plausible. But it is unlikely he was broke without Iraqi support. As for Zawahiri, he may be Bin Laden's number two man now and certainly appears to be leading the foreign fundamentalistsin Iraq (as opposed to the Baathist resistence and the Shia under Sadr), but this does not imply he was already Bin Laden's number 2 in 1998.