The Washington Times
September 11 report alludes to Iraq-al Qaeda meeting
By Bill Gertz
July 30, 2003
The 850-page congressional report on September 11 intelligence failures
says that a key terrorist organizer may have met with an Iraqi intelligence
officer in the months before the attack.
Mohamed Atta, one of the pilots of the two hijacked jets that hit the
World Trade Center, "may have traveled" to Prague to meet an Iraqi
intelligence officer, the report said, quoting CIA Director George Tenet.
Whether Atta and Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani met in the
Czech capital remains one of the mysteries of the September 11 plot.
A senior U.S. official said yesterday that U.S. intelligence and law
enforcement agencies differ on whether the meeting occurred.
The reported meeting has been cited by some officials as a link between
the al Qaeda terrorist network and Iraqi intelligence.
Intelligence officials who are part of the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group
are searching Iraq for any information that could establish connections
between al Qaeda and the Iraqi intelligence service, including information
about any meeting between Atta and al-Ani.
"We haven't ruled out the possibility of [the meeting] happening," a
senior U.S. official said yesterday. "But we have no evidence to demonstrate
conclusively that it did."
The Czech government notified the State Department in October 2001 that
its domestic security service, known by the acronym BIS, had monitored a
meeting in Prague between Atta and al-Ani in April 2001 - five months before
the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The Czechs said they had obtained the information from an informant who
identified Atta from a photograph.
A Czech Embassy spokesman was unavailable yesterday. A Czech diplomat
said he had no new information on the case.
In the congressional report, the joint inquiry said Atta traveled to the
Czech Republic in June 2000 on his way back to the United States after a
meeting with al Qaeda conspirators in Germany.
Later, the report states that CIA's Mr. Tenet told the committee: "Atta
may also have traveled outside of the U.S. in early April 2001 to meet an
Iraqi intelligence officer, although we are still working to corroborate
this."
According to the report, "Atta may have traveled under an unknown alias:
the CIA has been unable to establish that he left the United States or
entered Europe in April under his true name or any known alias."
The U.S. official said yesterday that the FBI is more skeptical than the
CIA that the meeting took place.
"The FBI says Atta was in the United States a day or two on either side
of the Prague meeting date," making it very difficult for him to have had
the meeting, the official said.
Eleanor Hill, the Joint Inquiry staff director, said yesterday the brief
reference to the Prague meeting was all that was released in the
unclassified report.
She declined to comment when asked whether there were more details on
the meeting in the 28-page section that was withheld from publication that
identifies "foreign sources of support" for the September 11 plot.
Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said last year he took issue
with U.S. press reports that the meeting did not take place. "I believe the
counterintelligence services more than journalists," Mr. Gross told a Prague
newspaper.
Mr. Gross told reporters last year that Atta visited Prague twice in
2000 and then met al-Ani, who was expelled from the country on April 22,
2001, for intelligence activities.
U.S. officials said Czech intelligence is 70 percent certain the meeting
took place at the Iraqi Embassy in Prague.
The Bush administration made no reference to any Prague meeting in the
months leading up to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.
The intelligence community released information indicating that an al
Qaeda "associate," Abu Zarqawi, ran a terrorist training camp in northern
Iraq with the support of Iraqi intelligence.
