WASHINGTON (KRT) — Senior Pentagon officials who want to expand the war against terrorism to Iraq authorized a trip to Great Britain last month by former CIA director James Woolsey in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein played a role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. officials told Knight Ridder.
The unusual, semi-official trip was at least the second such mission undertaken this year by Woolsey, a leading proponent of the theory that Iraq masterminded both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and last month’s suicide hijackings, said the officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The one-time CIA chief acted with the blessing of senior Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith, current and former U.S. officials said. Wolfowitz’s office did not respond to inquiries Wednesday about Woolsey’s travels.
Woolsey, in two telephone conversations this week, declined to discuss his trips to England last month and in February. “I have nothing to say about my trips to the U.K.,” he said Wednesday.
A U.S. official who asked that neither his name nor his agency be identified said Woolsey traveled to Britain on a U.S. government plane in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks, accompanied by a team of Justice and Defense Department officials.
The former intelligence chief was seeking proof that the man who planned the first attack on the World Trade Center, who lived in England in the late 1980s, was an Iraqi agent, officials said.
Wolfowitz and several other officials have argued repeatedly in interagency meetings that the United States should bomb Iraq and topple Hussein after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and others have successfully deflected those arguments so far, arguing that such an attack would fracture the international coalition President Bush has assembled.
Powell, Vice President Cheney and other U.S. and British officials have said there is no evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta, one of the suicide hijackers, met with a low-level Iraqi intelligence officer, in Prague in June 2000, but U.S. officials said they don’t know whether the meeting had anything to do with the terrorist attacks 13 months later. Woolsey’s trips, however, suggest that the debate about whether, when and how to expand Bush’s war on terrorism is far from over.
Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon “are seized” with the idea that Iraq was behind the attacks, and want to finish the job Bush’s father started in the 1991 Persian Gulf war by toppling Hussein, said a senior U.S. official. According to this theory, Iraq’s intelligence apparatus supported Osama bin Laden, accused of sponsoring the terrorist attacks.
The argument that Saddam was behind the 1993 attempt to topple the World Trade Center was advanced by scholar Laurie Mylroie in her book, “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War against America.”
The man convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing used the alias Ramzi Yousef but was arrested with a Pakistani passport bearing the name Abdul Basit. He is now in a U.S. prison.
Mylroie writes that Iraqi intelligence officers likely stole Basit’s identity during Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, where a man named Abdul Basit lived at the time. She and Woolsey point to the fact that Basit and his family disappeared during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and to physical differences between Basit and the man in custody.
FBI and CIA specialists met with Mylroie in the mid-1990s to examine her evidence, but concluded there was nothing to it, said a former government official with knowledge of the events.
Woolsey went to England to determine whether Basit’s fingerprints matched Yousef’s, current and former officials said.
Several of those with knowledge of the trips said they failed to produce any new evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks.