Saddam's Dangerous Friends

...Bin Laden, according to the Iraqi document, was then “approached by our side” after “presidential approval” for the liaison was given...

...According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq’s former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed...

...The ultimate boss, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the checkbook...

...The July 2002 Iraqi memo describes how these weapons were distributed to the operatives in embassies...

...According to the Pentagon study, “the IIS hosted thirteen conferences in 2002 for a number of Palestinian and other organizations, including delegations from the Islamic Jihad Movement and the Director General for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz...

...Zawahiri arrived in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, and “from the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden,” according to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower...

...There are two terrorist organizations on the Iraqi Intelligence list that deserve special consideration: the Afghani Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) of Ayman al Zawahiri...

...Striking American embassies and interests unless the Americans pull out their forces from the Arab lands and discontinue their support for Israel...

...During the 1990s, both Saddam and bin Laden wanted the West, particularly the United States, out of Muslim lands (or in the view of Saddam, the “Arab nation...

...In his book Holy War, Inc., Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who has long been skeptical of Iraq-al Qaeda connections, describes Hekmatyar as Osama bin Laden’s “alter ego...

...The IIS agent goes on to inform the Director that ‘this organization is an offshoot of bin Laden, but that their objectives are similar but with different names that can be a way of camoufl aging the organization.’” We never learn what those “previous priorities” were and thus what, if anything, came of these talks...

...Later, he lists the organization’s objectives...

...In 1989, Ayman al Zawahiri attended the founding meeting of al Qaeda...

...2. ABC News is doing a story based on the executive summary tonight...

...Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...A page from the Pentagon’s new study McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves many of America’s largest cities...

...As much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20, or 50 years...

...This should not be posted on the web until these actions are complete...

...In the 1990s, Iraq’s military intelligence directorate trained and equipped “Sudanese fi ghters...

...The terrorist tools include missile launchers and missiles, “American missile launchers,” explosive materials, TNT, plastic explosive charges, Kalashnikov rifl es, and “booby-trapped suitcases...

...A second memo to the director of the IIS instructs him to revise the plan for “operations inside Somalia...

...An examination of the rest of the study makes the White House decision to ignore the Pentagon study even more curious...

...It revealed that a Sudanese government offi cial met with Uday Hussein and the director of the IIS in 1994 and reported that bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan...

...It is considered one of the extreme political religious movements against the West, and one of the strongest Sunni parties in Afghanistan...

...Its goal is to apply the Islamic shari’a law and establish Islamic rule...

...What’s happening here is obvious...

...They also believe our leader [Saddam Hussein], may God protect him, is the true leader in the war against the infi dels...

...The ambassador informs Baghdad that such support had been suspended...

...Finn declined, saying that members of Congress had not been told the study was coming...

...Still under the misimpression that the Pentagon study undermined the case for war, McClatchy’s Warren Strobel saw this bureaucratic infi ghting as a conspiracy to suppress the study: The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network...

...In another instance, the new Pentagon study makes reference to captured documents detailing the Iraqi relationship with Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda affi liate in the Philippines founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law...

...The third section of the Pentagon study is called “Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases...

...How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of “strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism,” in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America’s most prestigious news outlets...

...The authors themselves acknowledge the limits of their work...

...invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network...

...In the early 1990s, Zawahiri and bin Laden moved their operations to Sudan...

...The appendices, which include copies of some of the captured documents and translations, put the entire study at approximately 1,600 pages...

...The study authors summarize the response by writing, “the local IIS station has been told to deal with them in accordance with priorities previously established...

...The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons...

...Much of the confusion might have been avoided if the Bush administration had done anything to promote the Pentagon study...

...According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to “armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests...

...That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists...

...But the Pentagon study does not mention the most signifi cant element of those documents, first reported in these pages...

...As I said, this probably ought to be big news...

...The second section of the Pentagon study concerns “State Relationships with Terrorist Groups...

...It is considered one of the most brutal Egyptian organizations...

...According to the Islamist attorney Montasser al-Zayat, ‘Zawahiri completely controlled bin Laden...

...Strobel quoted a “U.S...

...There is much, much more...

...All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study’s executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press offi ce, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence...

...In fact, there are several captured Iraqi documents that have been authenticated by the U.S...

...Another, James Lacey, expressed his concern in an email to Karen Finn in the Pentagon press offi ce, who was handling the rollout of the study...

...From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them...

...Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein’s long support of jihadist terrorism...

...An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S...

...One of his top assistants would later say Zawahiri had told him that “joining with bin Laden [was] the only solution to keeping the Jihad organization alive...

...After a fundraising trip to the United States in the spring of 1993, Zawahiri returned to Sudan where, again according to Wright, he “began working more closely with bin Laden, and most of the Egyptian members of Islamic Jihad went on the Al Qaeda payroll...

...Those “documents” include letters, memos, computer fi les, audiotapes, and videotapes produced by Saddam Hussein’s regime, especially his intelligence services...

...What good is the truth if nobody knows it...

...government that were not included in the study but add to the picture it sketches...

...It’s unclear whether he shared the study with President Bush, and NSC offi cials did not respond to repeated requests for comment...

...Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an infl uential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda’s second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon...

...Nevertheless, these similarities created more than just the appearance of cooperation...

...Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination...

...An internal Iraqi Intelligence document reports that Iraqis have “good relations” with Hekmatyar and that his organization “relies on fi nancial support from Iraq...

...At precisely the same time, Hekmatyar “worked closely” with Osama bin Laden and his Afghani Islamic Party hosted “al Qaeda’s terrorist training camps” in eastern Afghanistan...

...I recommend we put [it] out and on a website immediately...

...They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary—not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself—can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions...

...Our information on the group is as follows: ¶ It was established in 1979...

...The document is being misrepresented...

...On Tuesday, the day before it was scheduled for release, Lacey wrote: “1...

...The IIS document also reveals that Saddam was funding another close ally of bin Laden, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization of Ayman al Zawahiri...

...With the study not scheduled for release for two more days, this article shaped subsequent coverage, which was no doubt the leaker’s purpose...

...And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war in Iraq, the most important decision of the Bush presidency...

...The organization’s leaders live in Jordan . . . when they visited Iraq two months ago they demonstrated a willingness to carry out operations against American interests at any time...

...Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi regime’s General Military Intelligence Directorate “was training Sudanese fi ghters inside Iraq...

...The fi rst section explores “Terror as an Instrument of State Power” and describes documents detailing Fedayeen Saddam terrorist training camps in Iraq...

...The study is based on a review of some 600,000 documents captured in postwar Iraq...

...On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service fi rst reported that the new Pentagon study was coming...

...Some of these materials were transported in the political mail carriers [Diplomatic Pouch...

...The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence...

...Bush administration offi cials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there...

...Their objectives are the same as bin Laden...

...At precisely the same time Zawahiri was “joining with bin Laden,” the spring of 1993, he was being funded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq...

...In describing the relations between the Army of Muhammad and the Iraqi regime, the authors of the Pentagon study come to this conclusion: “Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda—as long as that organization’s nearterm goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision...

...More recently, captured “annual reports” of the IIS reveal support for terrorist organizations in the months leading up to the U.S...

...Jihad in the name of God...

...Although some members of EIJ were skeptical of bin Laden and his global aspirations, Zawahiri sought a de facto merger with al Qaeda...

...A series of memoranda order an Iraqi Intelligence operative in Bahrain to explore a relationship with its leaders...

...Stories from other media outlets tracked McClatchy very closely but began to incorporate a highly misleading phrase taken from the executive summary: “This study found no ‘smoking gun’ (i.e...

...That support would resume soon enough, and shortly before the war a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat named Hisham Hussein would be expelled from the Philippines after his cell phone number appeared on an Abu Sayyaf cell phone used to detonate a bomb...

...During the early 1990s alQaeda’s training camps in the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan were situated in an area controlled by Hekmatyar’s party...

...According to the study, captured documents “indicate that as early as January 1998, the scheduling of suicide volunteers was routine enough to warrant not only a national-level policy letter but a formal schedule—during summer vacation—built around maximizing availability of Arab citizens in Iraq on Saddam-funded scholarships...

...The former head of Iraqi Intelligence Directorate 4 met with bin Laden on February 19, 1995...

...At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust...

...invasion in March 2003...

...In recent weeks, as the Pentagon handled the rollout of the study, Hadley was tasked with briefing President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney...

...In May 1999, the regime plotted an operation code-named “Blessed July” in which the top graduates of the terrorist training courses would be sent to London, Iran, and Kurdistan to conduct assassinations and bombings...

...The story has been leaked...

...Graduates of the terror training camps would be dispatched to sensitive sites to carry out their assassinations and bombings...

...Fadl told the court that the chairman of the meeting, an Iraqi known as Abu Ayoub, proposed the formation of a new organization that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan...

...Authenticated by a Pentagon and intelligence working group, the document was titled “Iraqi Effort to Cooperate with Saudi Opposition Groups and Individuals...

...The reversal highlighted the politically sensitive nature of its conclusions, which were fi rst reported Monday by McClatchy...

...This is how the Washington Post wrote it up: An examination of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records collected by U.S...

...3. The Washington Post is doing a story based on rumors they heard from ABC News...

...But the study, based on more than 600,000 captured documents, including audio and video fi les, found that while Saddam sponsored terrorism, particularly against opponents of his regime and against Israel, there was no evidence of an al Qaida link...

...Once again, it’s worth dwelling on these facts for a moment...

...The Pentagon study goes on to describe captured documents that instruct the IIS to maintain contact with all manner of Arab movements and others that “reveal that later IIS activities went beyond just maintaining contact...

...For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq...

...Disrupting oil exports [to] the Americans from Arab countries and threatening tankers carrying oil to them...

...After the erroneous report from McClatchy, two offi - cials involved with the study became very concerned about the misreporting of its contents...

...offi cial familiar with the report” who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a “direct operational link” between Iraq and al Qaeda...

...The organization relies on fi nancial support from Iraq and we have had good relations with Hikmatyar since 1989...

...When bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996, the Iraqis sought “other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location...

...Attacking the American and British military bases in the Arab land...

...An early version was provided to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley more than a year ago, before November 2006...

...They further note that Saddam’s security organizations and bin Laden’s network were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much of the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historical narrative that promised a return to a glorious past...

...Bin Laden requested that Iraq’s state-run television network broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and the document indicates that the Iraqis agreed to do this...

...He was literally present at the creation, and his EIJ “dominated” the new organization headed by Osama bin Laden...

...In pursuit of their own separate but surprisingly ‘parallel’ visions, Saddam and bin Laden often found a common enemy in the United States...

...Although the organization “is an offshoot of bin Laden,” the fact that it has a different name “can be a way of camoufl aging the organization...

...Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime...

...In making their case for invading Iraq in 2002 and 2003, President Bush and his top national security aides claimed that Saddam’s regime had ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network...

...In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered “fi nancial and moral support” to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq...

...Among the study’s other notable fi ndings: In 1993, as Osama bin Laden’s fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there...

...The fourth and fi nal section of the Pentagon study is called “The Business of Terror...

...troops...

...A headline in the New York Times, a cursory item in the Washington Post, and stories on NPR and ABC News reported that the study showed no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein...

...The largest share of bin Laden’s fi nancial support went to Zawahiri and the Jihad organization.’ ” Later, Wright describes Zawahiri’s role in the founding of al Qaeda...

...One document, authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and fi rst reported on 60 Minutes, is dated March 28, 1992...

...There is no Iraqi response provided in the documents...

...On July 9, 2001, the agent reports back: “Information available to us is that the group is under the wings of bin Laden...

...And, in a way, it was...

...A Sudanese fi ghter named Jamal al-Fadl was among the participants, and he later testifi ed about the event in a New York courtroom during one of the trials connected with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in East Africa...

...The leaders of EIJ quickly became leaders of bin Laden’s organizations...

...In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affi liate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as “under the wings of bin Laden...

...He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions around bin Laden,” Wright reported in the defi nitive profi le of Zawahiri, published in the New Yorker in September 2002...

...Between the year 2000 and 2002 . . . explosive materials were transported to embassies outside Iraq for special work, upon the approval of the Director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service...

...Most reporters don’t care...

...Toward the end of 1989, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at a mujahideen camp...

...According to Fadl, the meeting was attended by ten men—four or fi ve of them Egyptians, including Zawahiri...

...The al Qaeda leader also proposed “joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia...

...Common interests, even without common cause, increased the aggregate terror threat...

...This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a ‘de facto’ link between the organizations...

...An abstract that describes the study reads, in part: Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, fi nancing, and training the same outside groups...

...Another captured Iraqi document from early 1993 “reports on contact with a large number of terrorist groups in the region, including those that maintained an offi ce or liaison in Iraq...

...The responsibility for these materials is in the hands of heads of stations...

...This IIS document provides this description of the Afghani Islamic Party: It was founded in 1974 when its leader [Gulbuddin Hekmatyar] escaped from Afghanistan to Pakistan...

...The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to “priorities previously established...

...One of them said in an interview that he found the media coverage of the study “disappointing...

...Some of these materials were transported by car in booby-trapped briefcases...

...The analysis section of the study covers 59 pages...

...They receive their directions from Yemen...

...A separate set of documents presents, according to the Pentagon study, “evidence of logistical preparation for terrorist operations in other nations, including those in the West...

...Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives...

...We have previously met with the organization’s representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime...

...The authors write: “An example of indirect cooperation is the movement led by Osama bin Laden...

...One of the cases is that of the Army of Muhammad, an al Qaeda affi liate in Bahrain...

...Striking the embassies and other Jewish and American interests anywhere in the world...

...But sources close to Cheney say the vice president was blindsided...

...forces since the March 2003 invasion has concluded that there is ‘no smoking gun’ supporting the Bush administration’s prewar assertion of an ‘operational relationship’ between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, sources familiar with the study said...

...It describes Osama bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset “in good contact” with the IIS station in Syria...

...Another group, the secret “Renewal and Jihad Organization” is described this way in the Iraqi memo: It believes in armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests...

...Saddam also recruited non-Iraqi jihadists to serve as suicide bombers on behalf of the Iraqi regime...

...direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda...

...In one letter, a director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) responds to a request from Saddam for an inventory of weapons stockpiled in Iraqi embassies throughout the world...

...That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean they saw themselves in that light...

...There was some dispute about the name, but ultimately the new organization came to be called Al Qaeda—the Base...

...It is entitled “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents...

...The same annual report “also notes that among the 699 passports, renewals and other offi cial documentation that the IIS issued, many were issued to known members of terrorist organizations...

...In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt...

...The alliance was conceived as a loose affi liation among individual mujahideen and established groups, and was dominated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad...

...Bergen writes: “Bin Laden and Hekmatyar worked closely together...

...The working group concluded that it “corroborates and expands on previous reporting” on contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda...

...Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration’s prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism...

...In a memo from Ambassador Salah Samarmad to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, we learn that the Iraqi regime had been funding and equipping Abu Sayyaf, which had been responsible for a series of high-profi le kidnappings...

...A separate memo reveals that the Army of Muhammad has requested assistance from Iraq...

...Several well-known Palestinian terrorist organizations make the list, including Abu Nidal’s Fatah-Revolutionary Council and Abu Abbas’s Palestinian Liberation Front...

...The study was commissioned by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, and produced by analysts at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded military think tank...

...An IIS document dated March 18, 1993, lists nine terrorist “organizations that our agency [IIS] cooperates with and have relations with various elements in many parts of the Arab world and who also have the expertise to carry out assignments” on behalf of the regime...

...As Zawahiri’s jihadists trained in al Qaeda camps in Sudan, his representative to Iraq was planning “commando operations” against the Egyptian government with the IIS...

...But it is instructive that the operative in Bahrain understood the importance of disguising relations with al Qaeda and that the director of IIS, knowing that the group was affi liated with bin Laden and sought to attack Americans, seemed more interested in continuing the relationship than in ending it...

...In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for nonIraqi jihadist groups...

...The documents show that the Iraqi regime provided “fi nancial and moral support” to members of the group, which would later become part of the al Qaeda affi liate in the region, Ansar al Islam...

...It’s worth dwelling for a moment on that set of facts...

...In the same folder is a memo from Saddam Hussein to a member of his Revolutionary Council ordering the formation of “a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil, especially Somalia,” where al Qaeda fighters were preparing to battle U.S...

...Despite the leak, there are Congressional notifi cations and then an offi cial public release...

...Another Iraqi document, this one from the mid-1990s, was fi rst reported in the New York Times on June 25, 2004...

...It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of [Egyptian president Anwar] Sadat...

...The IIS memo directs that “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement...

...Other groups listed in the Iraqi memo include the “Islamic Scholars Group” and the “Pakistan Scholars Group...

...The second section of the Pentagon study also discusses captured documents related to the Islamic Resistance organization in Kurdistan from 1998 and 1999...

...The document further states that bin Laden “had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative”—a comment that suggests the possibility had been discussed...