The United States has evidence of an orchestrated Iraqi attempt to spy on United Nations weapons inspectors using hidden microphones and agents, allowing Baghdad to stay one step ahead of the search for banned weapons, US sources said this week.
One intelligence insider in Washington said the Iraqi secret police had infiltrated the inspectors’ offices in Baghdad and Mosul, and that intercepted communications proved that the Iraqis often knew in advance exactly where the inspectors planned to mount a search.
”There is very good intelligence that Iraqi intelligence has penetrated the UN compounds. There are Iraqis inside those compounds and there are microphones in there, and so before the inspectors arrive, they move the stuff out of the back door,” the insider said.
He added that as well as communications intercepts proving Iraqi infiltration of the UN teams, the US also had satellite photographs of suspect sites showing Iraqi activity in advance of the inspectors’ visits.
He said, however, these pictures were ”not decisive” because it was not clear from them whether anything was being removed from the sites.
”Much of this stuff is smaller than the size of a sink. That’s the problem. You can’t see it from the air,” he said.
In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night President George W Bush referred to the Iraqi attempt to thwart inspections when he said: ”From intelligence sources, we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the UN inspectors — sanitising inspection sites, and monitoring the inspectors themselves.”
There is now a debate within the Bush administration about how much of this evidence the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, should take with him next Wednesday when he is due to meet the UN Security Council in New York in an attempt to convince other member states of Saddam Hussein’s bad faith, and the pointlessness of prolonging the inspections.
Making public some of the US intercepts, one US official said, would make it clear which telephones or computer communications were being intercepted. He pointed out that as soon as it was publicised that Osama bin Laden’s satellite telephone conversations were being intercepted in Afghanistan he switched phones.
A senior source at the Security Council said that Powell will present material on Wednesday that the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has not seen. He said the presentation was likely to relate to further examples of concealment rather than to actionable intelligence that would constitute a smoking gun.
The presentation may also provide evidence of other claims of Iraqi deception Bush made on Tuesday night. He said: ”Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. And intelligence sources indicate that Saddam has ordered that scientists who cooperate with UN inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.”
It is unclear what the status of Wednesday’s meeting will be, diplomatic sources said. In his speech, Bush said the US would ask the Security Council to convene and consider the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance. Those precise words are used in the UN resolution as a precursor to a possible trigger for war.
Meanwhile, Bush used his State of the Union address to paint a terrifying picture for Americans of another attack like September 11 — but this time with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair reinforced the message by telling the British House of Commons: ”We do know of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. We cannot be sure of the exact extent of those links.”
However, a number of well-placed sources in the British civil service insisted there was no intelligence suggesting such a link.
Establishing the link is essential to persuading the public that Iraq represents an imminent threat, and Bush insisted that hard evidence in the shape of ”intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody” proved the connection was real.
But the intelligence analysts in the US and Britain on whose work the president’s claim was supposedly based say the connections are tangential at best, and the available evidence falls far short of proving a secret relationship between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden. One intelligence source in Washington, who has seen CIA material on the link, described the case as ”soft”.
That case relies heavily on a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian member of the al-Qaeda leadership who was wounded in the leg during the US-led bombing of Afghanistan. In late 2001, according to US intelligence sources, he sought medical treatment in Iran but was deported and fled to Baghdad, where his leg was amputated. Telephone calls he made to his family in Jordan were intercepted. The question is whether Saddam’s regime knew who he was and whether it offered him assistance.
”Yes, we have him telling his family I’m here in Baghdad in hospital, but he’s not saying: ‘And by the way, I’m getting all this help from Saddam,”’ said a well-informed source in Washington.
According to Jordanian intelligence, Zarqawi left Baghdad after his surgery and travelled to northern Iraq where he joined up with Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamist group controlling a string of villages on the Iranian border of the Kurdish self-rule area. The group harbours up to 120 al-Qaeda members and is fighting a turf war with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
While evidence of Ansar al-Islam’s links to al-Qaeda are comparatively strong, its links with Saddam remain largely circumstantial. Villages in the area around Ansar territory have reported seeing Iraqi Mukhabarat agents making contact with Ansar operatives. There are also reports that TNT seized from Ansar during one of their assassination attempts on Kurdish officials was produced by the Iraqi military and that arms are sent to the group from areas controlled by Saddam.
The Ansar-Baghdad debate in US intelligence circles reflects a rift between the CIA and a special intelligence office set up in the Pentagon by the Under-Secretary for Defence, Douglas Feith. The CIA tends to be sceptical and hostile to the Iraqi National Congress, which has produced many defectors. The Pentagon is readier to listen to them, and has established a separate channel of information to the White House, outside the control of the CIA director, George Tenet.
Bush said the evidence for a Baghdad-Bin Laden connection also came from ”statements by people now in custody”. But according to a US official familiar with CIA thinking on the issue, the senior al-Qaeda members in captivity, such as Abu Zubeidah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, have not implicated Iraq.
Others among the hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects in custody in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere ”may either be saying what we want to hear, or they want us to go to war with Iraq. Or it may be true. We just don’t know,” the official said. — Â