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In the early period after the attacks, Western intelligence agencies said they knew of nothing to suggest an Iraqi connection. That position has now changed. A top US analyst - a serving intelligence official with no connection to the 'hawks' around Wolfowitz - told The Observer: 'You should think of this thing as a spectrum: with zero Iraqi involvement at one end, and 100 per cent Iraqi direction and control at the other. The scenario we now find most plausible is somewhere in the middle range - significant Iraqi assistance and some involvement.'

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The FBI is now sure that Atta, the Egyptian who had studied in Germany, was the hijackers' overall leader. He personally handled more than $100,000 of the plot's funds, more than any other conspirator, and he made seven foreign trips in 2000 and 2001 - all of which appear to have had some operational significance. Investigators lay heavy stress on a captured al-Qaeda manual which emphasises the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.

Two of those trips were to meet al-Ani in Prague. The Iraqi's profile has been supplied by defectors from Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, who are now being guarded by the London-based opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). CIA sources have confirmed its crucial details. 'There's really no doubt that al-Ani is a very senior Iraqi agent,' one source said.

The Observer has interviewed two of the defectors. They began to tell their stories at the beginning of October, and have been debriefed extensively by the FBI and the CIA. Al-Ani's experience in covert 'wet jobs' (assassinations), gives his meetings with Atta a special significance: his expertise was killing.

According to the defectors, he has an unusual ability to change his appearance and operate under cover. One defector recalls a meeting in the early 1990s when al-Ani had long, silver hair, and wore jeans, silver chains and sunglasses. Al-Ani explained he was about to undertake a mission which required him to look like a Western hippy. A member of Saddam's Baathist party since his youth, al-Ani also has extensive experience working with radical Islamists such as Mohamed Atta.

Since the 1980s, Saddam has organised numerous Islamic conferences in Baghdad, expressly for the Mukhabarat to find foreign recruits. Al-Ani has been seen at at least two of them. On one occasion, the defectors say, he took on the cover of a Muslim cleric at a fundamentalists' conference in Karachi, presenting himself as a delegate from the Iraqi shrine of the Sufi mystic Abdel-Qadir al-Gaylani, whose followers are numerous in Pakistan.

Last Wednesday, Iraq made its own response to the news of the meetings between al-Ani and Atta. Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Deputy Prime Minister, denied Iraq had anything to do with the hijackings, saying: 'Even if that [the meetings] happened, that would mean nothing, for a diplomat could meet many people during his duty, whether he was at a restaurant or elsewhere, and even if he met Mohamed Atta, that would not mean the Iraqi diplomat was involved.'

Yet the striking thing about the meetings is the lengths to which Atta went in order to attend them. In June last year, he flew to Prague from Hamburg, only to be refused entry because he had failed to obtain a visa. Three days later, now equipped with the paperwork, Atta was back for a visit of barely 24 hours. He flew from the Czech Republic to the US, where he began to train as pilot. In early April 2001, when the conspiracy's planning must have been nearing its final stages, Atta was back in Prague for a further brief visit - a journey of considerable inconvenience.

On 17 April, the Czechs expelled al-Ani, who had diplomatic cover, as a hostile spy. Last night, a senior US diplomatic source told The Observer that Atta was not the only suspected al-Qaeda member who met al-Ani and other Iraqi agents in Prague. He said the Czechs monitored at least two further such meetings in the months before 11 September.

The senior US intelligence source said the CIA believed that two other hijackers, al-Shehri and Jarrah, also met known Iraqi intelligence officers outside the US in the run-up to the atrocities. It is understood these meetings took place in the United Arab Emirates - where Iraq maintains its largest 'illegal', or non-diplomatic, cover intelligence operation, most of it devoted to oil exports and busting economic sanctions.

The source added that Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which has now effectively merged with al-Qaeda, maintained regular contacts with Iraq for many years. He confirmed the claims first made by the Iraqi National Congress - that towards the end of 1998, Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's ambassador to Turkey and a key member of the Mukhabarat leadership - went to Kandahar in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden.

The FBI believes many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy's 'muscle', Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts' passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer - codenamed Abu Zeinab - had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab's story. He had worked at a site which was already well known - Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad.

However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden's Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs.

Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners' camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: 'It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.'

Asked whether he believed the foreigners' camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: 'All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.' One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five.

In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas - Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer, he echoed Zeinab's claims: 'The foreigners' training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, "this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak".'

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