WASHINGTON — When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq begins, dictator Saddam Hussein will launch a terror offensive that will be joined by extremists around the world, according to new intelligence bulletins obtained by the New York Daily News.
The warnings also report that Hussein’s henchmen in foreign embassies are “awaiting the go-ahead signal from Baghdad,” but one source indicated to The Daily News that the operatives were under surveillance.
“We are quite familiar with who these agents are,” the source said.
The bulletins distributed by the Defense Intelligence Agency on Feb. 11 and 13 were the strongest warnings yet about the likelihood of terrorism once war begins, and for the first time predicted an uprising that would spread from al-Qaida to terror organizations that are not Islamic.
“Anti-U.S. terrorist attacks during any conflict with Iraq are a certainty,” the defense agency informed intelligence and policy leaders in a Feb. 13 memo. “Indigenous terrorist groups in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Peru, Chile, Japan and Southeast Asia are the most likely to have some kind of terrorist response to U.S. military action in Iraq.”
The Pentagon alerted its commanders in the U.S., Bahrain and Qatar this month that it was raising the terror threat level from “significant” to the maximum level, “high.”
The classified memos express an unnerving certainty that terrorists will retaliate for a U.S. invasion of Iraq and contradict public statements by top officials who have insisted the nation’s color-coded threat alert is not tied to a looming war.
— James Gordon Meek, New York Daily News (KRT)
