U.S. officials say it is far too early to tell who carried out Wednesday’s truck bombing of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed the United Nations’ chief representative to Iraq, among others. But analysts note there are some rough similarities between the attack on the U.N. office and the suicide attack two weeks ago on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. Among the parallels: neither target was directly connected to Coalition forces, both attacks apparently involved suicide bombers and both targets were comparatively “soft”–security was lower than at facilities used by Coalition forces.
Before the Jordanian Embassy bombing, U.S. and British intelligence officials argued forcefully that attacks on U.S. soldiers were likely the work of die-hard elements of Saddam’s Baathist regime, including former members of the fedayeen militia and the Special Republican Guard. U.S. officials, perhaps worried about the perception that postwar Iraq was a lawless zone, initially rejected the idea that bin Laden-style jihadi fighters were much of a presence or problem in post-Saddam Iraq. And British intelligence officials said their information indicated that the foreign jihadis who entered Iraq via Syria to fight Coalition forces actually left Iraq once the war had ended.
Within days after the Jordanian Embassy attack, U.S. intelligence officials began revising their view. Officials close to the CIA now acknowledge that among the principal suspects in the Jordan Embassy attack is Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist made infamous by Secretary of State Colin Powell in a United Nations speech last February. (Powell asserted that Zarqawi was a major link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.)
U.S. intelligence believes that Zarqawi, who before September 11 headed a Jordanian terrorist group called Al-Tawhid, visited Baghdad for about two months a year ago to receive medical treatment for a leg injury he sustained fighting American forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. In his U.N. speech, Powell asserted that while in Baghdad, Zarqawi was joined there by as many as two dozen jihadi associates. Before the war, U.S. officials acknowledged that they had no proof that either Zarqawi nor his alleged coterie had any direct dealings with Saddam or elements of his regime. But the Bush administration asserted that Zarqawi’s mere presence in Baghdad established the possibility that Saddam might collaborate with, and even give weapons of mass destruction to, Islamic terrorists.
U.S. intelligence officials say they are not sure what happened to Zarqawi after his medical treatment in Baghdad was completed last summer. According to some reports, he may have moved on to Syria and then to an alleged terrorist camp in Lebanon. By the time U.S. forces attacked Baghdad earlier this year, U.S. intelligence believed that Zarqawi most likely had migrated to an enclave in northern Iraq controlled by Ansar al-Islam, a pro-jihad group that Powell claimed had been infiltrated by a high-ranking agent of Saddam’s regime. During the war, Ansar’s training camp on the Iraq-Iran border was obliterated by U.S. and Kurdish special forces, but some Ansar militants are believed to have escaped across the mountains into Iran. Among them, U.S. officials believe, was Zarqawi. Until the Jordanian Embassy bombing, U.S. intelligence sources said they still thought Zarqawi might be in Iran, though they did not believe that he was one of several high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden’s son Saad, captured by Iran and being held (the Iranians claim) for trial.
U.S. officials still have little fix on Zarqawi’s whereabouts or what kind of operational and support network he might have in Baghdad. They say he is a suspect in the attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad because Zarqawi and his group have sworn to oust the current government of Jordan and replace it with an Islamic regime, giving them an obvious motive.
Still, even two weeks after the embassy attack, U.S. officials concede they have little hard evidence of who was behind it. And they say that it is also possible that Zarqawi was not involved in the attack, and that instead it was carried out by Baathist remnants, or even remnants of Ansar al-Islam who somehow infiltrated their way back into Iraq. Another possibility: that Zarqawi teamed up with Ansar al-Islam fighters to carry out the attack.
Zarqawi or Ansar al-Islam are also high on the list of possible suspects in Wednesday’s attack on the U.N.’s Baghdad operation. And intelligence sources say that the CIA believes that an audiotape by Al Qaeda “spokesman” Abdelrahman Al-Najdi which surfaced this week, in which Najdi promised more jihadi fighters would be heading for Baghdad (and also declared that bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar were alive and in good health) was probably authentic, though the agency is not positive.
So why weren’t U.S. and British officials willing to admit until now that jihadists could be at work in Iraq? Were they worried about public perception of chaos? Or are the theories of terrorists on the loose simply a convenient cover story as Iraq moves closer toward outright hostility against Coalition forces? Nobody was willing to say.
BLAIR’S CONTINUING ‘SEX’ SCANDAL
Tony Blair’s British government has had no end of grief over a claim, in an intelligence “dossier” made public last September, that Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons could be readied for use within 45 minutes. The same claim made it into at least one of President Bush’s radio addresses, even though CIA analysts did not believe the information, and, according to a source close to the agency, would have cautioned the White House to steer clear had it asked for guidance.
After the BBC reported in May that some intelligence officials believed Blair’s office had used the 45-minute claim to “sex up” the published dossier in order to marshal political support for a war to oust Saddam, the British government launched a witch hunt for the source of news leaks to the BBC. During the course of its search for the leaker, David Kelly, a government expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction who over the years had spoken on background to many journalists, including BBC reporters, was publicly fingered as the main source for the BBC’s “sexing up” allegation. Shortly after appearing before a parliamentary committee to deny he was the BBC’s main source, Kelly apparently committed suicide, forcing Blair to order a public inquiry into his death.
That inquiry, conducted in public by a British law lord, is already producing some embarrassments for both of the main antagonists. Witness testimony and documentary evidence suggests that not all BBC journalists felt comfortable with the “sexing up” allegation. Supervisors of the BBC reporter who initially reported the charge believed that his story could have been worded better and that he should be supervised much more closely in the future.
But documents dumped into the record by the inquiry team also raise new questions about the validity of the Blair government’s information about Saddam’s weapons capabilities. British intelligence sources initially told journalists that the 45-minute claim came from a high-ranking source still in place inside the Iraqi military. But the judicial inquiry last week made public a briefing note, apparently prepared by the Foreign Office for use by government spokesmen, which seemed to admit that the data did not come directly from an Iraqi military source but rather from a third party who was in touch with the Iraqi military source.
“… It came from a reliable and established source, quoting a well-placed senior officer,” the briefing note says, referring to the 45-minute claim. According to the briefing note, “against the background of other reporting at the time, the reporting was assessed as credible.”
Nonetheless, the apparent acknowledgement that the 45-minute claim was based on intelligence hearsay has certainly not enhanced the declining credibility of Blair’s government. By contrast, the Bush White House appears to have faced little consequence, even though it repeated the same claim without checking it with the CIA.
