The New York Times January 27, 2003 Clear Ties of Terror By WILLIAM SAFIRE WASHINGTON - In the days following the Sept. 11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell could find "no clear link" between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
One soon appeared. On Sept. 24, 2001, I reported: "The clear link between the terrorist in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in Kurdistan, that northern portion of Iraq protected by U.S. and British aircraft. . . . Kurdish sources tell me (and anyone else who will listen) that the Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of Al Qaeda mullahs and terrorists. . . ." The C.I.A. would not listen. Through credulous media outlets, the agency - embarrassed by its pre-Sept. 11 inadequacies - sought to discredit all intelligence about this force of 600 terrorists. Called Ansar al Islam, and led by Osama's Arabs trained in Afghanistan, they were sent in with Saddam's support to establish an enclave in the no-flight zone. One assignment was to assassinate the free Kurds who made up the only anti-Saddam leadership inside Iraq. Well armed and financed by both Iraq and Iran, this affiliate of Al Qaeda has since provided a haven for bin Laden followers exfiltrating from Afghanistan. They tried to assassinate an articulate Kurdish leader, Barham Salih, killing several bodyguards, but their target escaped and several killers were captured. Our National Security Council members did not learn about this bloody engagement, one of them told me a week afterward, until they read about it in The Times. The Kurds induced the captives and some defectors to reveal that the Ansar cell of Al Qaeda had begun producing poisonous chemicals for export. One product was reported here to be a cyanide cream being smuggled through Turkey. The operation was set up by a man with a limp, the informants said, a key bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi. ( I misspelled that name a few weeks ago.) The C.I.A. continued to pooh-pooh any connection between Ansar and Saddam. But reporter Jeff Goldberg of The New Yorker and more recently C. J. Chivers of The Times went into Iraq and interviewed some of the captured terrorists. Such reporting eroded the "no clear link" line put out by opponents of action against Saddam. Late last summer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared publicly "There are Al Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq," which was met with a derisive "no one's got proof" headline. The C.I.A. resisted a proposal to send a covert force into Iraqi Kurdistan to destroy the secret chemical weapons lab. On Oct. 8 of last year President Bush made public a little more of what we learned. "Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq," he told a Cincinnati audience. "These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks." That was Zarqawi. Long sought in Jordan for terrorist attacks (most recently the assassination of the U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman), he joined bin Laden in Afghanistan. After the Taliban defeat, Zarqawi slipped out of that country through Iran and made his way to a Baghdad hospital, where his injured leg was treated or amputated, certainly with the knowledge of Saddam's mukhabarat secret police. He was then dispatched to Al Qaeda's Ansar cell in Iraqi Kurdistan, reported the captives who worked with him in the mountains, to create the terrorist poison laboratory. British intelligence believes the limping terrorist took one of his products, ricin, to Algerian contacts in Turkey. This is a poison that can be delivered in warheads and one well known to Iraqi chemists, who cannot speak to U.N. inspectors. Two weeks ago, a British detective, Stephen Oake, was killed arresting Algerians suspected of making ricin in North London. American "counterterrorism officials" are still in angry denial about the pattern they refused to see that connects Qaeda terrorists in hiding with Iraqi terrorists in power. But even the Bush administration's most reluctant warrior has come to accept the validity of the link that embattled Kurds have been trying to warn us of since Sept. 11: Saddam and the followers of bin Laden are bedfellows. Iraq, concluded Secretary of State Colin Powell this weekend in Switzerland, has "clear ties to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda."
