A Lone Wolf on
U.S. Intelligence, Iraq Marches On
WASHINGTON � To her friends
and admirers, she�s a lone voice in the wilderness pushing an issue that the
intelligence community establishment refuses to confront. To her detractors, she�s an
eccentric perennial gadfly who cannot get beyond an obsession with a single
issue: Iraq�s involvement in terrorism.
Say what you will about Laurie Mylroie, author of
the just released book, �Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State
Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror� (Reganbooks), but one thing�s for
sure: she has opinions, they are unorthodox but strong, and she is willing to
stick up for them and has meticulously accumulated data to back up her
claims.
An Iraq expert with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Ms.
Mylroie�s new book �her third � is an attempt
at exposing what she considers a colossal intelligence failure leading up to the
attacks of September 11, 2001.
Proving the veracity of her thesis �that Saddam
Hussein was involved in the attacks as well as the World Trade Center attack in
1993, and that Washington bureaucracies are deliberately undermining the war on
terrorism � has been her mission, even as it falls on deaf ears amongst
the vast portion of official Washington.
Ms. Mylroie�s basic underlying premise is that
state sponsorship of terrorism, now thought to be far less a concern than the
so-called �loose networks� of terrorists like Al Qaeda, is still a threat to
America, and that Iraq was one of the greatest
threats.
�The 1990s was, as I write in the book, a time
when everything was about peace and prosperity � almost as if it were our right
� because we�re the world�s only superpower, we�re so wonderful,we don�t even
have to work at it. Part of what feeds that is a sense that the Arab-Israeli
conflict is about to end. That�s what people really believed,� she said. �And
over that period of time, all of the people involved in the peace process don�t
want to hear that they�ve got another problem on their
hands.�
That problem, she says, was Saddam Hussein. With
the high-profile defection of
Saddam�s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, to Jordan in 1995, America and the world
learned of the advanced stage of Saddam�s weapons of mass destruction programs,
particularly biological weapons. But Washington wasn�t interested in hearing
about it, she said.
She was born in Moscow, Idaho, 50 years ago.The
daughter of a Canadianborn microbiologist father and a biochemist mother, she
decided to forgo the science route, instead choosing to focus on the Middle
East,hoping to add something to the study of the
subject.
After graduating from Cornell and then Harvard
University in 1985, she became an assistant professor at Harvard until 1990. She
first stormed into the spotlight that year when she cowrote, with New York Times
reporter Judith Miller, �Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.� The book
became a no. 1 best-seller. She has since written a second book,
which shed light on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and challenged the
notion that the terrorism of the 1990s was not state sponsored, �Study of
Revenge.�
She also spent time at the U.S. Naval War College
and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where she worked under
Martin Indyk, who would play several key roles on the Middle East file in the
Clinton administration. Ms. Mylroie was even recruited to the Clinton campaign
in 1992, serving as his adviser on Iraq.
Those who know her describe her as a dedicated and
meticulous researcher; a stubborn but caring person and a brave soul who is
motivated by factors other than fame or glory.
�Laurie has a lot of guts and is a thorough
researcher and a fine writer,� says the former director of central intelligence,
James Woolsey, who shares her
views on Iraq�s involvement in terrorism. �Someday the nation will recognize
that it owes her a big debt of gratitude for the diligence with which she has
pursued the terrorism issue.�
Ms. Mylroie and Mr. Woolsey were key witnesses in
the federal court case, tried in New York�s southern district, which found Iraq
was involved with Al Qaeda in the September 11 attacks and paved the way for
payouts to victims�
families.
�She put a lot of info together about Iraq�s
involvement in 9/11 and support for terrorism,everything from the way they have
their holidays set up to articles they published in their newspapers before �
just a variety of insights that dealt specifically with how the Baath Party
provided material support for many terrorist groups including Al Qaeda,� said
the co-counsel in the case, Jim Beasley Jr. �She was able to give us a big
picture timeline that was very persuasive.�
Over dinner at a Washington restaurant, Ms.
Mylroie recounts the gist of her new book as a series of rhetorical questions
with a strong hint of frustration in her voice.
�Why have the CIA and State Department been
allowed to make the same mistake for over a decade? Why have they been allowed
to favor the Baath Party for over a decade? Why are the people who made the
mistakes that left us
vulnerable on September 11 still in important positions in the CIA and State?
Why is the CIA constantly leaking information that constantly undermines the
president?�
The most important overlooked point in the
intelligence community, she maintains, are the identities of the masterminds of
both the 1993 and 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
Ms. Mylroie claims that the identities of such
figures as the mastermind of the 1993 attack, Ramzi Yousef, and the 2001
mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are based on documents that pre-date
Kuwait�s liberation, and thus may have been tampered with when Iraq invaded and
occupied that country.
�The official U.S. position is that at the core of
this terrible terrorism starting in the �93 World Trade Center bombing
culminating in September 11 is that there�s a family
� an unusually talented and vicious family � Ramzi Yousef, his childhood friend
Abdul Hakim Murad, his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two brothers and a
cousin�there�s no precedent for a family being at the center of a terrorist
organization.�
�The alternative explanation is that they are
Iraqi intelligence agents given false identities or �legends� as they are called
while Iraq occupied Kuwait,� she said. �Why wasn�t this
pursued?��
The late director of the New York FBI, Jim Fox,
who led the investigation into the 1993 attacks, is said by colleagues to have
shared Ms. Mylroie�s view. She says a number of
high-powered officials in the Bush administration do too.
But if this is the case, and Iraq was behind
September 11, why doesn�t the Bush administration make that case to the public?
It�s a bureaucracy problem, she says.
�There was tremendous resistance within the
bureaucracy, which in this case means the CIA, talking about a link between Iraq
and Al Qaeda, not to mention Iraq and 9/11, and that�s because they made a big
mistake,� Ms. Mylroie said. �If the information that was available to the CIA
had been in the hands of a private security firm, and 9/11 happened, there would
have been lawsuits and firings. No one has been held
accountable, no one has been forced to change their assessment, so they fight
back and they discredit this stuff.�
Middle East experts like CNN�s Iraq analyst and
author of the best-selling book �The Threatening Storm,� Kenneth Pollack, and
Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, earn Ms. Mylroie�s scorn in her new book for what she says is a
readiness to adjust their view on Iraq to fit the prevailing view of the
day.
She is particularly critical of an essay in the
January/February 1999 issue of the foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs, �The
Rollback Fantasy,� which argued against working with the democratic Iraqi
opposition to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
One of the co-authors of �The Rollback Fantasy,�
Gideon Rose, said Ms. Mylroie�s views are suspect.
�The vast majority of serious professional
observers think she�s completely wrong,� he said, noting that most observers
acknowledge that Saddam is bad guy and has been involved in terrorism in the
past, �but the notion that Saddam has been connected to major terrorism in the
�90s past the assassination attempt on President Bush is not widely held by
serious professionals.�
Mr. Rose said that this view is �one of the things
that separates serious professionals from the
amateurs.�
He is representative of the majority of the
foreign policy establishment in Washington. But Ms. Mylroie marches on,
determined to convince anyone who will listen of the validity of her
claims.
�Much of human history is correcting mistakes,�
she says. �Slavery only ended in this country 140
years ago and even then, I�m not sure how long it was in Washington that you had
separate washrooms and drinking fountains for blacks. Just because everyone
believes something doesn�t make it right.�
Others criticize her for a flip-flop on Iraq. In
the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, she leaned to Iraq. Looking back on that
period now, she concedes she was �mistaken.�
�The Iraqis spoke in terms that were,I guess you�d
call them moderate, being disengaged from the Arab-Israeli conflict. I felt a
thug like Saddam could learn a lesson and be a thug that was helpful to you. I
felt Iran was a bigger threat and that a smart thug could learn a lesson,� Ms.
Mylroie said.
�I very much respect her research. I think she
digs into data skillfully and indefatigably,� said a retired Pentagon official,
Richard Speier. �The way she took the evidence from the trial of the first World
Trade Center bombers and raised some very serious questions that as far as I
know haven�t been addressed seriously�It�s astonishing that people in a position
to really investigate these matters don�t really do so.�
As a testament to Ms.
Mylroie�s quirkiness, Mr. Speier recalled an incident where they were having a
meal together, discussing Iraq�s involvement in terrorism.When he hinted that
there might be a chance that the government had information that she didn�t,
thus leading them to conclusions different than hers, she�d hear nothing of
it.
�I cautioned her,�Look, the bureaucrats in the
government have information we don�t have, and you have to allow for that
possibility.� And she was furious and walked home from the restaurant by
herself, it had to have been a few miles,� he said.
The only way to fix this bureaucracy problem, she
says, is to have �far reaching intelligence reform,� including a presidential
commission.
�We�re dealing with something for which we have
yet to have a clear understanding or explanation. There�s more that we don�t
know than we do know. And so it defies anybody to definitely say yes or no Iraq
was or was not involved,� said a former Republican congressman from Maine who
works as a defense analyst, Jim Longley. �What Laurie has done, and I think very
cogently, is she has lifted the curtain off of facts that some people are
frankly all too interested in ignoring.�
