18 April 2002
Ex-smuggler describes Iraqi plot to blow up U.S. warship
(Article from the Christian Science Monitor on 04/03/02) (1990)
[This article first appeared in The Christian Science Monitor on April
3, 2002, and is reproduced with permission. (c) 2002, The Christian
Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved. (Republication not
permitted in Kuwait.)]
Ex-smuggler describes Iraqi plot to blow up U.S. warship
Saddam Hussein was allegedly planning nine terrorist operations.
By Scott Peterson
Staff Writer Of The Christian Science Monitor
SULEIMANIYEH, NORTHERN IRAQ -- Iraq planned clandestine attacks
against American warships in the Persian Gulf in early 2001, according
to an operative of Iranian nationality who says he was given the
assignment by ranking members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle.
The alleged plan involved loading at least one trade ship with half a
ton of explosives, and -- sailing under an Iranian flag to disguise
Iraq's role -- using a crew of suicide bombers to blow up a US ship in
the Gulf.
Does the fighting in Middle East increase or decrease the need to
topple Saddam?
The operative, who says he smuggled weapons for Iraq through Iran for
Al Qaeda during the late 1990s, says he was told that $16 million had
already been set aside for the assignment -- the first of "nine new
operations" he says the Iraqis wanted him to carry out, which were to
include missions in Kuwait.
The first plot, remarkably similar to the attack on the USS Cole on
Oct. 12, 2000, was never carried out. The status of the other nine
operations remains unclear.
The smuggler, Mohamed Mansour Shahab, now in the custody of Kurdish
opponents of Mr. Hussein in northern Iraq, says he was first told of
the role he was to play in the plan in February 2000 -- one month
after an apparently unrelated attempt in Yemen to target a US
destroyer, the USS The Sullivans, failed when the bombers' boat,
overloaded with explosives, sank. Suicide bombers later succeeded in
striking the USS Cole in Yemen, leaving 17 US sailors dead and a
gaping 40-by-40 foot hole in the side of the warship.
Terror's footprints
If this Iranian smuggler is telling the truth, it would represent the
first information in nearly a decade directly linking Baghdad to
terrorist plans. No evidence has surfaced to date that Iraq was
involved in the Sept. 11 attacks or the bombing of the Cole. But
President George W. Bush has declared Iraq part of an "axis of evil,"
and makes no secret of his determination to end the rule of Saddam
Hussein as part of his "war on terrorism."
The last publicly known terrorism involvement by Baghdad was a failed
assassination plot against Bush's father, former President George H.
W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait in 1993. The elder Bush orchestrated
the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
"The Iraqis may have been waging war against the US for 10 years
without us even knowing about it," says Magnus Ranstorp, at the Center
for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews
University in Scotland. "Iraq may have fought, using terrorism as the
ultimate fifth column, to counter US sanctions and bombing. Plausible
deniability is something Iraq ... would want to ensure, putting layer
upon layer to hide their role."
Part of the justification for any future US strike against Iraq may be
the kind of information provided by the young-faced, nervous Iranian
smuggler, now held in the US-protected Kurdish "safe haven" of
northern Iraq.
Mr. Shahab spoke last weekend in an intelligence complex run by the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two rival armed Kurdish
factions that control northern Iraq. He did not appear coerced to
speak, and bore no physical signs that he had been mistreated since
his arrest on May 16, 2000.
Still, shaking nervously and swallowing repeatedly, he at first
refused to answer questions, saying that he was concerned about his
family's safety in Iran. Two days later -- after learning that part of
his smuggling history and role in several killings had already been
made public in the New Yorker magazine -- he agreed to describe
information that he had previously withheld, about Iraq's plan to
target US warships.
"If this information is true, it would be in the interest of the US,
and of all the world, for the US to be here to find out," says a
senior Kurdish security officer involved in the case. Kurdish
investigators were initially skeptical of some parts of Shahab's
story. But the investigators say they later independently confirmed
precise descriptions of the senior Iraqi officials Shahab says he met,
by cross-examining a veteran Iraqi intelligence officer in their
custody, and checking other sources.
Wearing a pale-green military jacket, dark-blue sweat pants and worn
plastic sandals, Shahab softly recounts how he smuggled arms and
explosives for Al Qaeda and the Iraqis. He at times flashes a boyish
smile -- the same disarming grin he uses in images on a roll of film
he was carrying when arrested. Shahab also claims to be an assassin.
The photos -- shown to the Monitor -- show Shahab killing an
unidentified man with a knife. He grins at the camera as he holds up
the victim's severed ear.
During a two-and-a-half-hour interview, Shahab describes the origin of
the plot to blow up US warships, while his hands work nervously. He
received an urgent phone call early in 2000, from a longtime Afghan
contact named Othman, who told him to go to a meeting in Iraq. In
February 2000, Shahab says he was taken to the village of Ouija, the
birthplace of Saddam Hussein near Hussein's clan base at Tikrit, in
north central Iraq.
At the meeting, he says, were two influential Iraqis, fellow clansmen
of Saddam Hussein: Ali Hassan al-Majid -- Mr. Hussein's powerful
cousin and former defense minister -- and Luai Khairallah, a cousin
and friend of Hussein's notoriously brutal son Uday. Mr. al-Majid is
known among Iraqi Kurds as "Chemical Ali," for his key role in the
genocidal gassing and destruction of villages in northern Iraq that
killed more than 100,000 Kurds in 1987 and 1988.
The Iraqis said they considered Shahab to be Arab, and not Persian,
and could trust him because he was from Ahvaz, a river city in
southwest Iran rich with smugglers and close to the Persian Gulf,
Iraq, and Kuwait. It is known as "Arabistan" because of the number of
Arabs living there.
Nine missions
Al-Majid and Mr. Khairallah spoke of the nine operations: "We've
allocated $16 million already for you," Shahab remembers them telling
him. "We start with the first one: We need you to buy boats, pack them
with 500 kilograms of explosives each, and explode US ships in Kuwait
and the Gulf."
The plan was "long term," Shahab says, and meant to be carried out a
year or so later, in early 2001, after he had carried out another
mission to take refrigerator motors to the Taliban. Each motor had a
container attached holding an apparently important liquid unknown to
Shahab. He says he doesn't know if all nine operations mentioned were
similar to the boat plan, or completely different. Some were to take
place in Kuwait.
The attack against a US vessel, Shahab recounts al-Majid and
Khairallah explaining, was to be "a kind of revenge because [the
Americans] were killing Iraqis, and women and children were dying"
because of stringent UN sanctions, which the US backed most strongly.
"They said: 'This is the Arab Gulf, not the American Gulf,' " Shahab
recalls, referring to the large US naval presence in the area.
The Iraqis knew that Shahab, with his legitimate Iranian passport and
wealth of smuggler contacts, would have little trouble purchasing the
common 400-ton wooden trading boats. He would have raised few eyebrows
sailing under an Iranian flag -- the only ships in the area, since UN
sanctions prohibit such Iraqi trade.
Shahab was to rent or buy a date farm along the water at Qasba, on the
marshy Shatt al-Arab waterway that narrowly divides Iraq and Iran,
just a few hundred yards from the Iraqi port city of Fao. Using a
powerful small smuggling boat, he says he would have been able to
reach Kuwaiti waters from Qasba in just 10 minutes.
Iraqi agents were to provide the explosives and suicide squad; Shahab
was to handle the boats and the regular crew. "The group that worked
with me would sail the ship, and not know about the explosives,"
Shahab says. "When we crossed out of Iranian waters, we were to kill
the crew, hand over the ship to the suicide bombers, and then leave by
a smuggler's way."
The job, Shahab said, "was easy for me, I could start at any time."
Shahab said the Iraqis told him they "had a lot of suicide bombers in
Baghdad" ready to take part in such an operation.
But the plans were never finalized for Shahab, and after delivering
the refrigerator motors to the Taliban, he was arrested in northern
Iraq in May 2000, with his roll of film, as he tried to avoid Iranian
military exercises going on along the border to the south. Though
carrying a false Kurdish identity card, his accent gave him away at
the last PUK checkpoint.
Iraqi experts say that such a plot is plausible, since Saddam
Hussein's multiple intelligence services are sophisticated and smart.
"Anything is possible," says Sean Boyne, an Ireland-based Iraq
specialist, who writes regularly for Jane's Intelligence Review in
London. "Certainly Saddam has gone to great trouble to shoot down [US
and British] aircraft" patrolling no-fly zones in northern and south
Iraq, Mr. Boyne says. "He has invested heavily in his antiaircraft
system. He is eager to have a crack at the Americans."
That impulse may also help explain the presence of a training camp at
Salman Pak, a former biological-weapons facility south of Baghdad. It
includes a mock-up Boeing 707 fuselage, which Western intelligence
agencies believe has been used for several years to train Islamic
militants from across the region in the art of hijacking. A senior
Iraqi officer who defected told The New York Times last November that
the regime was increasingly getting into the terrorism business. "We
were training these people to attack installations important to the
United States," an unnamed lieutenant general said. "The Gulf War
never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States.
We were repeatedly told this."
Still, the political situation Saddam Hussein finds himself in today
-- in light of the example of decisive US military action in
Afghanistan -- may not be as conducive to a strike at the US as it was
when Shahab says he first heard of the plan to blow up a US warship.
In recent months, Boyne notes,
Iraq has engaged in a region-wide charm offensive to portray itself as
a victim, and to build Arab and European support against any US
attack. Baghdad is even pursuing warmer ties with Kuwait (at the Arab
League summit last week) and with Iran, in an attempt to gain mileage
from Iran's anger at being listed as part of Washington's "axis of
evil."
While the Bush administration focuses on Iraq's apparent pursuit of
weapons of mass destruction -- in the absence of UN weapons
inspectors, who were kicked out in 1998 -- clues to Iraq's true role
may lie in the credibility of the 29-year-old smuggler from Ahvaz.
Why is he talking now? "Afghanistan is finished, so now I feel free to
speak," says Shahab, who was given the name Mohamed Jawad by
accomplices in Afghanistan. Asked if he fears the wrath of senior
members of the regime in Baghdad, who still hold power, Shahab
replies: "I lost everything. For many years I worked with
assassinations and killing -- it doesn't make a difference to me."
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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