Atta in Prague?
By
EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN November 22,
2005; Page A14
PRAGUE -- On Oct. 27, 2001, the New York Times reported
(erroneously) that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta "flew to the Czech Republic
on April 8 and met with [an] Iraqi intelligence officer," helping to give
credence to the so-called "Prague connection." It subsequently cast doubt
on it, editorializing in November 2005 that the alleged meeting between
the hijacker and the Iraqi was part of President Bush and his team's
"rewriting of history" based on nothing more than a false tale "from an
unreliable drunk." But was the putative Prague connection solely an
invention of the Bush administration -- or was it the product of an
incomplete intelligence operation?
To sort out the confusion, I met earlier this month in
Prague with Jiri Ruzek, chief at the time of the Czech counterintelligence
service (BIS). Mr. Ruzek is in a position to know what happened. He
personally oversaw the investigation of Iraq's alleged covert activities
that began, with full American collaboration, nearly two years before Mr.
Bush became president and resulted, some five months before the 9/11
attack, in the expulsion of Ahmad al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence officer
alleged to have met with Atta. I also spoke with ex-Foreign Minister Jan
Kavan, who headed the intelligence committee to whom Mr. Ruzek reported,
and to Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek, who, as deputy foreign minister at the
time, handled the al-Ani expulsion for the foreign ministry. According to
them, here's how the Prague connection developed.
The proximate cause for BIS interest in al-Ani was a
sensational revelation of Jabir Salim, the Iraqi consul who defected in
Prague in December 1998. Mr. Salim said in his debriefings that the
Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, had given him $150,000 and tasked
him with carrying out a covert action against an American target in the
Czech Republic: Using a freelance terrorist, he was to blow up the
headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Wenceslas Square, in the heart of
Prague.
This intelligence about state-sponsored terrorism was taken
very seriously by both America and the Czech Republic. The U.S., for its
part, doubled security at the Radio Free Europe facility and began its own
countersurveillance, including photographing suspicious individuals in
Wenceslas Square. The BIS did what counterintelligence services do in such
circumstances: They sought to penetrate the Iraq Embassy by recruiting
Arabic-speaking employees familiar with its operations. The source the BIS
used, according to Mr. Ruzek, was neither unreliable nor a drunk.
Ahmad al-Ani was Jabir Salim's replacement at the embassy.
Soon after he arrived in March 1999, he was picked up by U.S.
countersurveillance cameras. The interest in him intensified after the BIS
learned from its penetration of the embassy that he was attempting to
acquire explosives and contact foreign-based Arabs. Then, on April 9,
2001, the BIS's source in the embassy reported that al-Ani had gotten into
a car with an unknown foreign Arab. After the car managed to elude BIS
surveillance, concern mounted that he was in the process of recruiting his
bomber, and, since the BIS could not find the mystery Arab, Mr. Ruzek
decided to act pre-emptively. He recommended to Foreign Minister Kavan
that al-Ani be immediately expelled from the Czech Republic. He was given
48 hours to get out of Prague on April 19 -- and he returned to
Baghdad.
On Sept. 11, Mohammed Atta's picture was shown on Czech
television, and the next day, the BIS's source in the Iraq embassy dropped
a bombshell. He told his BIS case officer that he recognized Atta as the
Arab who got in the car with al-Ani on April 9. Mr. Ruzek immediately
relayed the secret information to Washington through the CIA liaison. The
FBI sent an interrogation team to Prague, which, after questioning and
testing the source, concluded that there was a 70% likelihood that he was
not intentionally lying and sincerely believed that he saw Atta with
al-Ani. The issue remained whether he had mistaken someone who resembled
Atta for the 9/11 hijacker. Meanwhile, records were found showing that
Atta had applied for a Czech visa in Germany in 2000, and made at least
one previous trip to Prague (from Bonn, by bus, on June 2, 2000, flying to
Newark, N.J. the next day).
Less than a week after Mr. Ruzek shared the BIS's
confidential information with American intelligence, it was leaked. The AP
reported, "A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the
United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service
that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into
the World Trade Center, met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi
intelligence agent." CBS named al-Ani as the person meeting with Atta in
Prague.
Mr. Ruzek was furious. He considered what he had passed on
to the FBI to be unevaluated raw intelligence, and its disclosure not only
risked compromising the BIS's penetration in the Iraq embassy but also
greatly reduced the chances of confirming the intelligence in the first
place. In Baghdad, al-Ani, through an Iraqi spokesman, denied ever meeting
Atta. In Prague, Czech officials who had not been fully briefed added to
the confusion. Prime Minister Milos Zeeman, wrongly assuming that the
meeting had been confirmed, stated on CNN that Atta and al-Ani had met to
discuss Radio Free Europe, not the 9/11 attack.
Meanwhile, pressure on Mr. Ruzek mounted. Richard Armitage,
Colin Powell's deputy, complained to Prime Minister Zeeman that Mr. Ruzek
was not cooperating in resolving the case, even though Mr. Ruzek had
extended unprecedented access to the FBI and CIA, access that included
allowing their representatives to sit on the task force reviewing the
case. He was also warned by a colleague in German intelligence that he
could become entangled in a heated hawk-versus-dove struggle over
Iraq.
Mr. Ruzek decided that if this was an American game, he did
not want to be a part of it. So he threw the ball back in the CIA's court,
taking the position that if al-Ani did meet Atta for a nefarious purpose,
it would have been not on his own initiative but as a representative of
the Mukhabarat. The answer was not in Prague but in Iraq's intelligence
files; and the CIA and FBI would have to use their own intelligence
capabilities to obtain further information about al-Ani's assignment. That
more or less concluded the Czech role in the investigation.
The FBI had by this time established that Atta checked out
of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach and cashed a check for $8,000 from a
SunTrust account on April 4, 2001, and was seen again in Florida on April
11, 2001. But it could not account for his movements during this period
(or how he used that money), though there was no record of Atta using his
passport to travel outside the U.S. The CIA also drew a blank, and
Director George Tenet, testified on June 18, 2002 before a Joint Committee
of Congress: "Atta allegedly traveled outside the U.S. in early April 2001
to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are still working
to confirm or deny this allegation. It is possible that Atta traveled
under an unknown alias since we have been unable to establish that Atta
left the U.S. or entered Europe in April 2001 under his true name or any
known aliases."
Al-Ani was captured by the CIA in Baghdad in 2003, and he
remains in detention in Iraq. Though no one has been allowed to interview
him, he told the CIA that he was not anywhere near Prague at the time of
the meeting. Although Mr. Ruzek termed al-Ani's claim of being elsewhere
"pure nonsense," the CIA had evidently found it could go no further with
the vexing case. Mr. Tenet, on March 9, 2004, told a closed session of the
Senate Armed Service Committee, "Although we cannot rule it out, we are
increasingly skeptical such a meeting occurred."
Before 9/11, when the investigation into al-Ani's
activities was initiated, both the CIA and the BIS took deadly serious the
allegation of state-sponsored terrorism directed against Radio Free
Europe. Both agencies cooperated in attempting to thwart it, accepting the
information furnished by the BIS penetration agent as sufficiently
reliable to expel al-Ani. After 9/11, with Iraq now on the Bush
administration's agenda, the subject of state-sponsored terrorism became a
political hot potato, as Mr. Ruzek learned, that could easily burn anyone
who touched it. So hot that if the CIA even questioned al-Ani about the
instruction he had concerning blowing up Radio Free Europe, it never
disclosed the answers to the BIS. So, like many other intelligence cases
that become politicized, the Prague connection, and all that led up to it,
was consigned to a murky limbo.
Mr. Epstein, author of "The Big Picture" (Random
House, 2005), is writing a book on the 9/11 Commission.
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