-Caveat Lector-
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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- December 16, 2001
New York Times
New Clue Fails to Explain
Iraq Role in Sept. 11 Attack
By CHRIS HEDGES with DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.![]()
When Czech officials disclosed that Mohamed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, had met last April with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague, it stirred immediate speculation about whether Iraq had a role in killing thousands of Americans.
But in the weeks since, the Prague meeting has emerged as an object lesson in the limits of intelligence reports rather than the cornerstone of the case against Iraq. Interviews with Iraqi defectors, Czech officials, and people who knew the Iraqi diplomat have only deepened the mystery surrounding Mr. Atta's travels through central Europe.
Iraqi opposition groups say the episode cannot have been a coincidence. According to several former Iraqi intelligence officials, the diplomat was actually a well trained spy with ties to terrorist operations, a master of disguise whose movements are supervised by Iraq's most senior officials.
American officials in Washington, by contrast, said the diplomat was a minor functionary who happens to have the same last name as a more important Iraqi intelligence agent. These officials said that they had no evidence that Iraq was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
There are even questions about whether the reports of the meeting took place. An associate said the Iraqi diplomat had a business selling cars and met frequently with a used car dealer from Germany who bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Atta. Just this week, there were even reports from Prague that the Mohamed Atta who visited Prague last April was a different man with the same name.
In a retreat from the earlier definitive statements by his government, the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, recently said there was "a 70 percent" chance the meeting between Mr. Atta and an Iraqi agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani took place.
With the Taliban vanquished and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda fighters cornered in Afghanistan, this sort of arcane debate among experts has taken on new significance. President Bush has said he intends to defeat the nations and groups that support terrorism, a global war whose targets will be selected by intelligence agencies sifting through fragmentary conflicting evidence comparable to the reports about the Prague meeting.
"There was definitely one meeting," between Mr. Ani and Mr. Atta, an intelligence official in Washington said. "We don't know if it was significant. We certainly don't attribute to it the significance others attribute to it automatically. Just because there was a meeting doesn't mean it was connected to 9/11."
This much has been asserted. Mr. Atta went to Prague last April and then flew to Florida as the plot to ram jetliners into buildings gained momentum. It has been reported by Czech authorities that he met with Mr. Ani, the diplomat who Iraqi opposition leaders insist is an important spymaster for Saddam Hussein.
American intelligence officials who believe that Mr. Ani is a low-ranking diplomat of little consequence emphasize that the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition group seeking to overthrow Saddam Hussein, has an agenda and a history of coloring fact to suit its needs.
As if the waters were not muddied enough, some in Prague who knew the diplomat say he met with a used car salesman named Saleh from Nuremberg, Germany, who looked like Mr. Atta. "He is a perfect double for Atta," said a Syrian businessman who has lived in Prague for 35 years and says he knew the diplomat and the car salesman. "I saw him several times with Mister Consul."
On Friday, a major Czech newspaper, quoting Czech intelligence officials, offered still another theory: the Mohamed Atta who came to Prague last April was not the hijacker but a Pakistani of the same name.
"He didn't have the same identity card number," an unidentified Interior Ministry official told the newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes. "There was a great difference in their ages, their nationalities didn't match, basically nothing -- it was someone else." The details of the meeting, as reported by the Czech authorities, remain vague. The Czech intelligence service has not said how it knows the meeting took place, or what was said.
"We went to the public just with the thing we can really prove," said Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech ambassador to the United Nations who gave Mr. Ani his expulsion orders last April. "And we can really prove just one thing: that these two people met." But his proof, he acknowledged, is the Czech Interior Ministry announcement.
Mr. Ani was expelled from Prague for activities that were described as "incompatible with his diplomatic status." Details of his infraction have never been made public but they had nothing to do with Mr. Atta, who was unknown to Czech intelligence, Mr. Kmonicek said.
A number of Arabs in Prague who knew Mr. Ani say he had every attribute of a minor figure in a minor post, a woman chaser and drinker with a tyrannical penchant whose main task seemed to be urging Iraqis to return home. Yet former Iraqi intelligence agents in exile in Europe, made available for interviews by the Iraqi National Congress, say they grew up with and worked with Mr. Ani and that he is an established and respected spymaster.
His specialty is said to be the recruitment of foreign Muslim militants who support Iraq's long campaign against America and the close surveillance and intimidation of Iraqi dissidents.
The former Iraqi agents in Europe say that Mr. Ani, is in fact, Muhammad Kailil Ibrahim al-Ani.
"Baghdad would only use Ani for big jobs, serious jobs," said a former major in Iraqi intelligence. "He had something very important to tell Atta, or Atta had something very important to tell Baghdad."
Mr. Ani, for his part, adamantly denied any ties to terrorism or Sept. 11 and said he had never heard of Mr. Atta until after the terror attack. Jaroslev Kmenta, a Czech journalist who knew Mr. Ani in Prague, interviewed him in Baghdad last month.
` "I've never in my life met him, never seen him, never spoke to him," Mr. Kmenta quoted him as saying. "The first time I heard of him was after Sept. 11."
Mr. Kmenta said Mr. Ani seemed to be living well in Baghdad, driving a late-model BMW and eating at a riverside restaurant, which would support the thesis that he is a figure of importance to the regime because economic sanctions have left most Iraqi civil servants living in penury.
The defectors in Europe said that like many agents sent abroad, Mr. Ani altered his real name from post to post, dropping his first name, Muhammad, in Prague and going by Ahmed.
"I went down to renew my driver's license in 1991 in Baghdad," said the former major in the intelligence service, who fled to Europe after his brother was executed for involvement in a failed coup in 1994 against Mr. Hussein. "I saw Ani dressed in jeans, with an earring and with long flowing hair. He looked like a hippie. He was on a job. I could not speak with him. I saw him a year later dressed in long Arab robes."
He said Mr. Ani grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Baghdad and joined the intelligence service, following a year or two of university studies. He was sent to study at The Institute of National Security, the preparatory school for Iraq's intelligence service. In 1994, the defectors said, he was transferred to a new intelligence branch created for foreign operations called Al-Amin al- Khas. He soon was part of special operations, a unit for covert activities like recruitment and assassination.
In Prague, few who were interviewed about Mr. Ani thought of him in such vaunted terms. But they recognized allegations of highhandedness. Waled Majed Bahnam, 56, and his son Majid Waled Majed, 22, both Iraqis, own the Bavodo restaurant in Prague. In July 2000 for the Iraqi national day, Mr. Ani ordered $1,200 worth of food and catering from the restaurant.
After three days, when the bill still had not been paid, the mother called asking for the money. The family said Mr. Ani and the accountant came over and screamed at them. "They said `We are the embassy, you are nothing, we are the boss, you are animals,' " Mr. Bahnam said. Mr. Ani threatened to revoke their passports and the accountant said he would kill the couple's eldest son. When the family complained to the Foreign Ministry, the embassy paid the bill.
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