THE CLOCK CHIMES THIRTEEN

Paul Monk on Richard Clarke’s muddled account of an intelligence puzzle.

“…the case that Iraq and al Qaeda forged an alliance is far stronger than the conventional wisdom would suggest – and the case against it far weaker.”

- Richard Miniter (2003)[i]

Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, is a polemic directed against the Bush administration for invading Iraq last year. It is, in many ways, a very interesting and highly readable book. If you accept his basic premise, that there was no substantive link between Iraq and al Qaeda, his case is both eloquent and quite persuasive.[ii] The strange thing is that he makes almost no effort to establish that basic premise. He asserts it and scornfully dismisses any and all claims that any such link existed.

This is rather disconcerting. It is all the more so because he demonstrably misrepresents the case that has been made in detail that there was a substantive link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Given how confused and polemical so much of the global debate about the Iraq war has been from the outset, this is dismaying. One might have hoped that the erstwhile head of counter-terrorism analysis for the White House would take pains to set things out as carefully as possible.

Regrettably, he has not. His book is littered with easily avoidable factual errors. He states in his Preface that the book is “flawed”, because it is “a first person account, not an academic history.”[iii] Yet, given his belief that “too many of my fellow citizens were being misled”[iv], allowing a seriously flawed account of the case against his most basic premise to go into print is inexcusable. To get the thing right, he did not need to draw on classified information, only to check sources easily available on the public record and then set out his case as clearly as possible. He did neither.

His belief is that al Qaeda carried out all its terrorist attacks, but especially the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, without state sponsorship. Yet he acknowledges that al Qaeda had close links with a number of states in the 1990s – Sudan, Afghanistan and Iran. It is only Iraq which he claims had no significant links with al Qaeda. In the circumstances, he surely needed to show this, not merely assert it.

The most disconcerting passage in his book is the one in which he dismisses as an “urban legend” the claim that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who orchestrated the 1993 attack on the WTC. This was the hypothesis of the FBI team, led by Jim Fox, who first investigated the matter in 1993-94. They deduced that it was a ‘false flag’ operation, in which the New York based Muslim fanatics involved in the case were left stranded in New York to make the attacks appear to be the work of inspired amateurs, while the Iraqi operatives escaped under false identities.[v]

Clarke makes no mention of Fox. He states simply that this hypothesis was the work of Laurie Mylroie, an independent Iraq specialist. He then completely misrepresents her as having stated that “the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.”[vi] In fact, what Myrloie argued was that Ramzi Yousef was arrested in Pakistan in February 1995, tried and convicted in 1998 and sentenced to 240 years in a US prison, but that the trial judge, Kevin Duffy, remarked, in sentencing the man, “We don’t even know what your real name is.”[vii]

What on earth did Duffy mean? To understand what he meant, why it matters and why Clarke’s misrepresentation of Mylroie’s case borders on the scandalous, it is necessary to look in a bit of detail at what Mylroie found, when she examined the trial records and the FBI’s files and interviewed Jim Fox. Clarke should have done just this himself. His failure to do so and his strange caricature of the Fox/Mylroie hypothesis led James Woolsey, who was CIA Director in 1993-94, to remark, “For Clarke to say something like that is like the 13th chime of the clock. Not only is it bizarre in and of itself, it calls into question...everything from the same source.” [viii]

Ramzi Yousef entered the United States, on 1 September 1992, on an Iraqi passport.  He proceeded to take over the amateurish group of New York Muslims planning a pipe bomb attack on the WTC and turned it into a staggering plot to demolish the whole complex, release clouds of poisoned gas in the process and kill up to 250,000 New Yorkers. He was known among the New York Muslims in the conspiracy as ‘Rashid the Iraqi’. However, once the plot was in being, he went to a Jersey City police station, claiming that his name was actually Abdul Basit Karim and that he had lost his Pakistani passport two days earlier.

On 31 December, he went to the Pakistani consulate in New York, presented partial and inconsistent Xerox copies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit and was granted a temporary passport in that name by skeptical Pakistani consular officials. Fox and Mylroie argued that, whoever Ramzi Yousef actually is, he is not Abdul Basit.[ix] When Yousef was arrested in Pakistan, in February 1995, he was carrying a Pakistani identity card giving his name as Ali Muhammed Baluch. The Pakistani press, as reported in the New York Times, deduced that he was a Baluch working for Iraqi intelligence.[x]

There was a real Abdul Basit, a resident of Kuwait, of Pakistani origin, who, with his whole family, disappeared during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in late 1990 and Ramzi Yousef does not match the description of that man. If he was working for Iraqi intelligence, how would he have obtained doctored copies of the passports of Abdul Basit? From Iraqi intelligence, who would have obtained them from the real Abdul Basit in Kuwait in 1990. If he truly was Abdul Basit, resident of Kuwait, why did he go out of his way to make sure he fled the United States under his ‘true’ identity after setting up the most terrifying terrorist plot of all time?

A British police investigation, following the 1993 WTC attack, concluded that Ramzi Yousef, whoever he really was, was not Abdul Basit.[xi] If he was not, then the very trail used by Yousef to conceal his flight from New York, leads us back to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, the disappearance of the real Abdul Basit and his family at that time, and the possibility that Iraqi intelligence took over his identity for use as a legend. That, at least, was the argument of Laurie Mylroie.

Gil Childers, counsel for the prosecution in the 1998 trial of Ramzi Yousef for the 1993 WTC bombing, on reading Mylroie’s work in 2000, declared  that she had done the investigative work that the US government should have done, but did not do.[xii] James Woolsey, who had been Director of the CIA at the time of the 1993 attack, wrote a Foreword to the revised edition of Mylroie’s book, issued after the 9/11 attacks, in which he described it as a “brilliant and brave book” with a compelling argument. Vince Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, described it as “one of the most brilliant pieces of research and scholarship I have ever read.” Richard Clarke caricatures and dismisses it.

Now consider that when Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was arrested, also in Pakistan, in early 2002, he was in a city known to be the centre of Iraqi intelligence operations in Pakistan; that he, also, claims to be a Kuwaiti of Pakistani origin, but is of uncertain identity; that he worked with Ramzi Yousef on various terrorist projects between 1992 and 1995, but does not appear to have joined forces with al Qaeda until the late 1990s; and that he claims to be Ramzi Yousef’s uncle by marriage. The question that Laurie Mylroie has pointedly asked is, were these individuals part of an Iraqi intelligence operation to avenge the defeat of Saddam in 1991, which formed links with al Qaeda after the 1991 Gulf War and an alliance with it not later than 1998?

What I hoped to find in Clarke’s book was a serious account of this matter. There is no such thing. There is, instead, the strange assertion that Mylroie denied Yousef was in prison in the United States and that he was by Saddam’s side in Baghdad acting as a terrorist mastermind after someone else had been imprisoned. This is accompanied by equally peculiar claims that Mylroie’s argument has been “investigated for years and found to be totally untrue” and that it is “totally discredited”.[xiii] He even claims that Yousef arrived in New York in 1992 without a passport of any kind, when in fact, he arrived on an Iraqi passport. And for none of his claims does he offer any substantiation whatsoever.

He does not even state by whom the alleged investigations into this matter were conducted for years, though he implies that it was by his own NSC staff, who numbered twelve.[xiv] The reality is that, between 1993 and 1998, FBI investigators who pressed for an inquiry into Iraq’s connections with Ramzi Yousef were steered away from this line of inquiry by the Clinton administration. The CIA was not involved in investigating the matter at all, because it was deemed a law enforcement, not a national security issue. Clarke repeatedly expresses scorn for the deficiencies of both the FBI and the CIA[xv], so even had they systematically investigated the Mylroie argument he would have to explain why he accepted their findings. But there is no such explanation, because he does not refer to any specific investigation by anyone nor to any specific findings.

This is all the more remarkable because, in at least two cases, he discusses the findings of other, comparable investigations and exhibits a clear capacity for explaining the grounds for his judgments. The first is the Oklahoma bombing of 19 April 1995. Clarke declares that he is intrigued by the possibility that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trained Terry Nichols, the associate of Timothy McVeigh, in Cebu in how to use explosives with deadly effect – just as Yousef (or Rashid the Iraqi) had earlier trained the rag tag Muslims in New York in how to do a really large scale terrorist attack. It intrigued him, he writes, “because I could never disprove it.” Yet he pronounces the Mylroie hypothesis, which is a great deal better substantiated than this, as “totally discredited” without adducing a scintilla of evidence and while radically misrepresenting what her argument actually is.

The second is the TWA 800 case of 17 July 1996, when a 747 exploded after taking off from New York. In this case he takes some pains to explain several hypotheses about what caused the explosion and why the FBI forensic investigation ultimately concluded that it was an accident. There had been conspiracy theories around and he comments, “Conspiracy theories are a constant in counterterrorism…Dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, however, is dangerous.” Yet this is precisely what he does in regard to Mylroie’s ‘conspiracy theory’.

That Clarke renders an altogether inadequate account of the case does not, of course, entail the conclusion that the Fox/Mylroie hypothesis is correct. The fact that neither Yousef nor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to being an Iraqi agent since being arrested by US authorities, coupled with the Bush administration's incentive to extract such a confession from them, would appear to suggest that something is wrong with the theory that they acted for or on behalf of Saddam Hussein. But it would help to know exactly what. Clarke is no help at all here.

The problem, in other words, is not that Clarke is demonstrably wrong, but that, like so many others participants in this debate (and many another) he passes over objections to his preferred belief with indecent haste and intellectual incoherence. That he could have done better is shown by his far more circumspect treatment of the Oklahoma City and TWA 80 cases. Paradoxiaclly, his determination to dismiss Mylroie leaves her argument unscathed. If you are even a little bit curious, read Mylroie's books and judge for yourself whether her case is plausible.[xvi]  Just don't quote Clarke as an authority on the subject, because his account of it is completely unreliable.