Iraq News by Laurie Mylroie
The central focus of Iraq News is the tension between the considerable, proscribed WMD capabilities that Iraq is holding on to and its increasing stridency that it has complied with UNSCR 687 and it is time to lift sanctions. If you wish to receive Iraq News by email, a service which includes full-text of news reports not archived here, send your request to Laurie Mylroie .
I. L. MYLROIE, JAN, 93 SHOOTINGS OUTSIDE THE CIA, WASH TIMES, JUN 25 97
II. L. MYLROIE, FEB 93 TRADE CENTER BOMBING, TNI, WINTER 95/96
I. L. MYLROIE, THE SHOOTINGS OUTSIDE THE CIA
The Washington Times
June 25, 1997
Facts could link Kansi to NYC bombers; Attack at CIA was first in series
By Laurie Mylroie
Special to the Washington Times
Mir Aimal Kansi, arrested June 15 in connection with the Jan.25,
1993, shootings outside the CIA, reportedly has confessed.
But these shootings may be linked to earlier terrorist attacks. It
probably is essential to learn whether Mr. Kansi acted alone or whether
his terrorism was part of something bigger, even as Mr. Kansi himself
may not know very much about it or may not tell.
The CIA shootings marked the start of a series of dramatic attacks
against Americans, which included the World Trade Center bombing in
February 1993, and a plot in January 1995 by the mastermind of that
bombing to down 11 U.S. airliners in the Philippines. These attacks, and
others, occurred during President Clinton's first term, even as he
declared terrorism to be America's top national security challenge in
the post-Cold War era.
Yet not one major terrorist attack was carried out against Americans
in the previous four years, when George Bush was president. A new wave
of terrorism began five days into Mr. Clinton's presidency. The answer
to that emerges from consideration of the CIA shootings and the Trade
Center bombing, the links between them, and the links between each and
Iraq.
Let's start with the CIA shootings.
Mr. Kansi was born into a wealthy family in Quetta, the provincial
capital of Pakistani Baluchistan. He is a Pashtun, a minority group in
Baluchistan but the dominant ethnic group across the border in
Afghanistan.
Far from being a fundamentalist, as some had thought, Mr. Kansi moved
in a leftist milieu. As a student at Baluchistan University, he
associated with the Pashtun Student Organization, the student branch of
a radical, left-wing, Pashtun nationalist party--the PKAMP--which
advocated a separate province for Pashtuns within Pakistan and even
unity with the Pashtuns of Afghanistan.
The PKAMP was headed by a prominent tribal leader, Mahmoud Khan
Achakzai, whose tribal area straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Mr. Achakzai was well-known locally for his association with
Najibullah, the Soviet-backed Afghan ruler, who fell to the
U.S.-supported Muslim insurgency in 1992. Mr. Achakzai also supported
Iraq during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis. Kurdish refugees then in Quetta
told me that the PKAMP was the most pro-Iraqi of any organization in the
city.
Preparations begin
In late 1990, after the death of his father the year before, Mr.
Kansi made an unexplained trip to Germany and then came to the United
States in early 1991, set-tling in Virginia. He had no permanent
residence, frequently shifted apartments and often just stayed with
friends.
On Jan. 15,1993, two years after moving to America, Mr. Kansi
suddenly began preparations for his attack on the CIA. He bought an
assault rifle, trading it in a week later for the AK-47 he would use
three days after that for his shooting spree at Langley.
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was engaged in his last spitting match with
Mr. Bush. A series of Iraqi challenges led the United States to attack
Iraqi anti-aircraft sites in the last days of Mr. Bush's presidency.
Jan.20, Mr. Clinton's inauguration day, was quiet, but there were
more Iraqi challenges the next three days followed by more U.S. strikes.
On Jan.23, a prominent Iraqi journalist denounced "responsible elements
... in the Pen-tagon and the CIA." Two days later, Mr. Kansi struck.
The next day, Jan.26, Mr. Kansi left Washington, flying to New York's
John F. Kennedy Airport. He took a Pakistan International Airlines
flight to Karachi, from where he traveled to Quetta, and then went
north, across the Afghan border, taking refuge in a Pashtun tribal area.
Mr. Kansi would receive protection there, while any authorities who
came looking for him would be recognized as strangers.
A month after the CIA shootings, the World Trade Center bombing
occurred, on Friday, Feb. 26, roughly the second anniversary of the Gulf
war's end. The mastermind, who had entered the United States on an Iraqi
passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, fled on a Pakistani passport,
along the same route Mr. Kansi had taken just the month before.
Yousef was convicted last summer with two others in the plot to bomb
11 U.S. planes in Manila. He is to go on trial in New York next month in
the World Trade Center bombing.
On the night of the Trade Center bombing Feb.26, Yousef boarded the
same PIA flight from JFK to Karachi that Mr. Kansi had taken. From
Karachi, Mr. Yousef traveled on to Quetta, just as Mr. Kansi had done.
But Yousef is a Baluch, a state-less people, living in western
Paki-stan and eastern Iran. Rather than cross into Afghanistan, Yousef
crossed into Iran, traveling through Iranian Baluchistan, where he
disappeared.
A possible trial run
The CIA shootings and the Trade Center bombing were the most
significant acts of international terrorism to occur in the United
States since 1975, when a Croatian terrorist bomb killed 11 at New
York's La Guardia Airport.
The two events occurred within a month of each other; the key
fugitives fled along the same route, to the same remote provincial
capital, and each used obscure ethnic affiliations to facilitate his
escape. Was that all just coincidence? Or could there be an explanation?
Mr. Kansi is not a trained intelligence agent. Yousef is. Could Mr.
Kansi's flight have been meant as a trial run for the route Yousef would
use a month later?
Mr. Kansi's flight would have shown what, if any, extra security
measures would be in effect at JFK after a major terrorist act; what, if
any, coordination would occur between U.S. and Pakistani authorities;
and how any such coordination might affect travelers arriving in
Pakistan from the United States after a terrorist incident.
A second such link exists between the shootings and the Trade Center
bombing.
Telephone toll records, when available, are very important for
investigating a conspiracy. Phone records exist for the Trade Center
bombing, introduced into evidence during the trial of Mohammad Salameh
and three fundamentalists.
They include Yousef's telephone records as well as those of another
indicted fugitive, Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi-American who returned to
Baghdad after the bomb-ing, where he was seen by an ABC News stringer in
1994.
Israel's [assistant] military attache was the first to explain to me
the signifi-cance of long phone calls. He suggested that a 95-minute
call, made two days after the bombing, was a reporting call. Indeed, on
further examination, the number to which the call was placed--an office
in Islamabad--proved exceedingly suspect.
There were four calls to that number. All four occurred in proximity
to two events: the shootings outside the CIA and the Trade Center
bombing. And all four were on the phone records of the apartment in
which the Iraqi fugitive had lived in the United States.
Moreover, Soviet-style intelligence agencies, like Iraq's, typically
use a phone in a place like an office for communications with sensitive
individuals.
It is difficult to tell who took the call, because many people have
access to the phone, while the most important conversations, as
reflected by their length, regularly occur after hours, when the
unknown co-conspirator would be alone.
Long phone calls
That is true of calls to the Islamabad number on the Trade Center
records.
The first call occurred on Friday, Jan.22, and lasted 65~minutes.
Friday is a holiday in Muslim Pakistan.
The next call was for five minutes, on the evening of Jan.26, after
Mr. Kansi's flight had departed JFK. The next call was on Feb.27, the
day after the Trade Center bombing, at 9:30 p.m. Pakistani time, for 37
minutes. And the final call was Feb.28 at 10:45 p.m. Pakistani time, for
95 minutes.
Although the contents of those calls are not known, it might be
speculated that the long call, three days before the CIA shootings,
involved final arrangements for Mr. Kansi's mission, the information
relayed to him in some fashion, with Mr. Kansi kept at one remove from
those directing the operations.
The short call on Jan.26 may have confirmed Mr. Kansi's departure,
while the two lengthy calls after the Trade Center bombing may both have
been reporting calls.
Do the proximity of these suspect calls to the CIA shootings and the
Trade Center bombing suggest a connection between the two, perhaps
directed from Islamabad? What if it can be demonstrated to a high
standard that Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent? Would that make a
difference?
The key is the passport on which Yousef fled. It is linked to a file
in Kuwait, which was tampered with to create a false identity for
Yousef, law enforcement sources said. Only Iraq could reasonably have
tampered with that file while it oc-cupied Kuwait, they said.
In December 1992, Yousef took photocopies of the current and expired
passports of a young Pakistani, Abdul Basit Karim, who was born and
raised in Kuwait, to the Pakistani consulate in New York. Yousef claimed
to be Mr. Basit, saying he had lost his passport, and asked for a new
one.
But Yousef is not Mr. Basit. The indictments issued against Yousef
through September 1994 charged him with fraudulently obtaining the Basit
passport, tantamount to the claim that Yousef was not Mr. Basit.
More important, Yousef's and Mr. Basit's heights do not match. A law
enforcement official, reading off the FBI arrest card, told me that
Yousef was "a titch" under 6 feet.
"You mean closer to 6 feet than 5-foot-11?"
"Yes," he replied.
I met with two of Mr. Basit's instructors in Britain, where, in
1989, he received an engineering degree before returning to Kuwait. They
said that Mr. Basit was much shorter than 6 feet. They were certain of
that.
Kuwait's Interior Ministry has a file on Mr. Basit. But documents
were removed from the file while information was put in that should not
have been, the law enforcement sources said. And Yousef's fingerprints
are in Mr. Basit's file, they said.
But everyone's fingerprints are unique. If Yousef is not Mr. Basit,
how did his fingerprints get into Mr. Basit's file? Someone switched
them.
And the only party that reasonably could have done so, and otherwise
tampered with the file, was Iraqi intelligence. Mr. Basit and his family
seem to have died during Iraqi's occupation of Kuwait, since they were
not found, while Yousef apparently assumed Mr. Basit's identity for his
terrorist activity.
To demonstrate that Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, all that is
necessary is for those who knew Mr. Basit from before Iraq's invasion of
Kuwait to meet with Yousef and pronounce definitively whether he is Mr.
Basit.
New York FBI agents long suspected an Iraqi hand in the Trade Center
bombing but did not know how to demonstrate that conclusively. And the
White House thought it took care of the problem when it attacked Iraqi
intelligence headquarters on June 26, 1993, two days after the arrest of
the second set of New York bombing conspirators.
The strike was in response to Iraq's attempt to assassinate Mr. Bush,
as Mr. Clinton said. But it was also almost certainly meant for the
Trade Center bombing, too.
Laurie Mylroie is an associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
an independent think tank based in Philadelphia.
II. L. MYLROIE, WHO IS RAMZI YOUSEF & WHY IT MATTERS
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/iraq/956-tni.htm
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