Prague Connection (Saddam Hussein & Mohamed Atta)

nytimes ^ | 11-12-01 | WILLIAM SAFIRE

[SJackson]

AN DIEGO -- The undisputed fact connecting Iraq's Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks is this: Mohamed Atta, who died at the controls of an airliner-missile, flew from Florida to Prague to meet on April 8 of this year with Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi consul.

Al-Ani was known to the B.I.S., the Czech counterintelligence service, as a "case officer" of Iraqi intelligence working under diplomatic cover. "A case officer is not merely an agent," notes Edward Jay Epstein, the espionage analyst and my fellow Angletonian. "An agent executes assignments, but a case officer serves as the intermediary between an agent and the state intelligence service controlling that agent."

Saddam has long been infuriated by the ability of Radio Free Europe to foment dissent inside Iraq. Wiretaps of Saddam's Prague consulate led the B.I.S. to suspect al-Ani of enlisting agents to blow up R.F.E.'s Prague headquarters.

Al-Ani usually met agents at his consular office, where he could plausibly appear to be issuing them visas. But in Atta's case, the case officer took pains to avoid showing any direct link to Iraq. Why did the case officer meet Atta away from the Iraqi consulate? Surely the Iraqi, under round-the-clock surveillance, knew the B.I.S. would follow him.

Epstein has a "false flag" theory: "A remote location in Prague, not connected to Iraq, would allow al-Ani to misidentify himself to Atta. Such an alias, or false flag, could both aid the recruitment by appealing to Atta's ideological interest and conceal Iraq's involvement. False flags are a common tool of recruitment by intelligence services."

Perhaps Saddam, hardly a devout Muslim, did not want to show his hand to bin Laden's mid-level religious fanatics. The B.I.S. followed al- Ani to a clandestine meeting at a hotel with Atta, who had just come to the city. After that meeting, the Czechs shadowed Atta to the airport for his flight to the U.S.

Why didn't the B.I.S. inform the U.S. about Atta at that time? Here was a suspected plot against a large U.S.-financed facility; within two weeks, the Czechs declared his case officer, al-Ani, persona non grata and shipped him back to Baghdad. Were the C.I.A. and F.B.I. kept in the dark about his agent flying back and forth to America under his own name of Atta, or were our counterspies informed but did nothing?

Last week, the Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman, confirmed to CNN that al-Ani and Atta met in Prague (which Czech officials had at first denied). But Zeman was eager to dissociate that meeting from planning to destroy New York's twin towers: "Atta contacted some Iraq agent [sic] . . . to prepare a terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe."

Really? How does the Czech prime minister know what the Iraqi spymaster and Atta discussed? He could know only if the meeting were bugged or if al-Ani talked before being thrown out of Prague. Was the C.I.A. or F.B.I. informed about the U.S. interest in why al-Ani was ejected, and what travelers to America had recently been in secret contact with him?

After all, Atta had flown from Virginia Beach, Fla., the day before and returned the following day. That shows urgency: one does not back and forth across the Atlantic within 72 hours to meet secretly with a known Iraqi intelligence officer for no reason.

We since have learned that Atta, who had made at least one earlier trip to Prague, returned to the U.S. to open a bank account at the Sun Bank in Florida and received $100,000 to finance his mission through an Arab emirate money changer. But before that money to finance his Sept. 11 attack could pass, Atta apparently needed to stop in Prague first, where Iraq's al-Ani was running agents.

The Prague connection links Saddam and bin Laden at the agent level. Now here is an unpublished report that suggests Saddam helps the terrorist leader on a personal level:

In mid-May, two of Saddam's secret service agents arrived at the clinic of Dr. Mohammed Khayal, Baghdad's leading kidney specialist. The doctor hurriedly packed a bag and was escorted to a government car. Three days later, he was returned, and the building was soon abuzz with the word that Saddam's Dr. Khayal had been to Afghanistan where his patient was Osama bin Laden.

[Cicero]

Safire seems to agree with what we were saying in the forum the other day that the latest Czech report on this meeting was disinformation, probably at the urging of U.S. intelligence. Why would Atta fly across the Atlantic, meet with an Iraqi intelligence handler, and immediately fly back to the United States, in order to discuss bombing a target in Prague. It makes no sense.

American intelligence has been spinning all kinds of lies to avoid tying the attack to Iraq. Hopefully it's because they don't want to start a war with Iraq YET, until Afghanistan has been taken care of, not because they want to let Saddam off the hook entirely, as clinton would have done.