The entire document is online at
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/iraq/956-tni.htm, but this second portion
seemed most relevant.
<<< Starchild >>>
The National Interest, Winter, 1995/96
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB:
Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters
by Laurie Mylroie
[excerpt]
ALTHOUGH THE national security agencies never received the World
Trade Center evidence, at the conclusion of a trial evidence becomes
public. Anyone can examine it, and I did so meticulously. The raw data
consist mostly of telephone records, passports, and airplane tickets. Such
data reveal nothing directly about state sponsorship, but under close
analysis certain facts begin to stand out and certain patterns emerge. And
it helps to know the Middle East well.
The story begins in November 1990 when an Egyptian fundamentalist,
El Sayid Nosair, shot and killed Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing
Israeli-American, in Manhattan. A year later, in November 1991, Nosair's
trial became a cause celebre among local fundamentalists, who turned out in
force to support their "martyr." Planted among them was an Egyptian, Emad
Salem, working as an FBI informant, even as he maintained ties to Egyptian
intelligence. In December, the jury returned a bizarre verdict, acquitting
Nosair of murder and finding him guilty on lesser charges. An outraged
judge gave Nosair a maximum sentence on those lesser charges, and sent him
to Attica.
The fundamentalists continued to support Nosair, arranging bus trips
from their mosques to visit him in prison. Salem, the FBI plant, remained
among them. In early June 1992, with Salem acting as an agent provocateur,
Nosair convinced his friends to execute a bomb plot. He wanted them to make
twelve pipe bombs, to be used for assassinating his judge and a Brooklyn
assemblyman, the others to be used against Jewish targets. A cousin was to
organize the plot, and Salem was to build the bombs.
A twenty-six year old Palestinian, Mohammad Salameh, was soon
recruited into the plot. Salameh comes from a long line of terrorists on
his mother's side. His maternal grandfather fought in the 1936 Arab revolt
against British rule in Palestine, and even as an old man joined the PLO
and managed to get himself jailed by the Israelis. A maternal uncle was
arrested in 1968 for terrorism and served eighteen years in an Israeli
prison before he was released and deported, making his way to Baghdad where
he became number two in the "Western Sector", a PLO terrorist unit under
Iraqi influence.
Despite this pedigree, Salameh himself is naive and manipulable.
When one considers that he was arrested in the process of returning to
collect the deposit on the van he had rented to carry the Trade Center
bomb, it is not so surprising that on June 10, soon after being recruited
into Nosair's plot,
Salameh made the first of forty-six calls to Iraq, the vast majority to his
terrorist uncle in Baghdad. We can only speculate about what Salameh told
his uncle, but it seems very likely that he spoke about the bold new
project Nosair was organizing, perhaps seeking his help and advice.
Salameh's telephone bills suggest that the pipe bombing plot was one of the
most exciting events in his life: In six weeks he ran up a bill of over
four thousand dollars and lost his phone service.
Iraq is one of the few remaining Stalinist states. Iraqis routinely
assume their telephones are bugged, and are even cautious about discussing
sensitive issues in their own homes. The more significant the person, the
greater the likelihood his activities are monitored--at least that is what
Baghdadis assume. My own experience in Baghdad makes clear that when Iraqis
want to be sure that a conversation is not monitored, it takes place out of
doors. It is thus more than likely that Iraqi intelligence learned of
Nosair's bombing plot and Salameh's participation in it through Salameh's
phone calls to his uncle. In any event, key preparatory steps to the World
Trade Center bombing were taken within days of Salameh's first
call-including steps taken in Baghdad.
On June 21, an Iraqi living in Baghdad, Abdul Rahman Yasin
(subsequently an indicted fugitive in the Trade Center bombing) appeared at
the U.S. embassy in Amman asking for a U.S. passport. Born in America,
Abdul Rahman received his passport, which he soon used to travel to this
country.
Just at this crucial point, unfortunately, the FBI lost track of the
Nosair-Salameh conspiracy. It did not fully trust its informant, Emad
Salem, and
Salem's ties to Egyptian intelligence; the Bureau severed relations with
him in early July when he refused to follow its procedures relating to
criminal
investigations.
Salameh's phone bills and other evidence raise the distinct
possibility that, Iraqi intelligence having learned of Nosair's plans from
Salameh's calls to his uncle, Baghdad decided to help out, transforming the
plot in the process. If so, the speed of the reaction suggests that Iraqi
intelligence may have
already been planning some operation against America, and that Salameh's
calls to his uncle provided it with a fortuitous means of carrying it out.
Here probably lies the source of Ramzi Yousef s exploits in America.
Enter Ramzi Yousef
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1992, Ramzi Yousef arrived at JFK airport. He
presented an Iraqi passport without a U.S. visa, was briefly detained (and
fingerprinted) for illegal entry, and granted asylum pending a hearing.
Yousef went to stay at the apartment of Musab Yasin, an Iraqi living in
Jersey City. So too did Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab's younger brother, who
arrived in America from Iraq soon after Yousef. (Musab had an unlisted
telephone number under an Israeli-sounding alias, Josie Hadas.)
Musab lived in the same building as Mohammad Salameh. Many young
Arab men used their two apartments, praying and eating together; relations
were so close that the apartments were connected by an intercom. Once
established within this group, Ramzi Yousef befriended Salameh, and the two
left to share an apartment elsewhere in Jersey City. From then on, the
impressionable Salameh was under Yousef s wing.
Although the principal conspirators had been in place since
September, it was not until after the U.S. elections on November 3 that
Yousef began to prepare the World Trade Center bomb. In mid-November
the first of many calls to chemical companies appears on his phone bills.
At the same time, Yousef also began calling surgical supply companies for
the gloves, masks, and rubber tubing he needed to make the bomb. In the
meantime, two other local fundamentalists were recruited into the plot,
Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abu Halima. Ayyad, a Palestinian, was the same age
as Salameh and Salameh's friend. Abu Halima, a thirty-four year old
Egyptian cab driver, was a friend of Nosair. Abu Halima was older and
generally savvier than the two Palestinians.
In January 1993, Yousef and Salameh moved into another Jersey City
apartment where the bomb was actually built. Set well back from the street,
the building provided seclusion. On February 21 a twenty-one year old
Palestinian named Eyyad Ismail arrived from Dallas. Ismail is charged with
having driven the bomb-laden van.[8] On February 23, Salameh went to a
Ryder rental agency to rent the van to carry the bomb. On the morning of
February 26, the conspirators gathered at a local Shell gas station where
they topped up the tank--one last explosive touch--before driving to
Manhattan. Shortly after noon, the bomb went off, on--let it be well
noted--the second anniversary of the ending of the Gulf War.
That evening Salameh drove Yousef and Ismail to JFK airport; Yousef
escaped to Pakistan on falsified travel documents, and Ismail flew home to
Jordan. But Salameh looks to have been deliberately left behind by Yousef,
not provided with money he needed for a plane ticket. Salameh had a ticket
to Amsterdam on Royal Jordanian fight 262, which continues on to Amman,
dated for March 5, but it was an infant ticket that had cost him only $65.
While Salameh had been able to use this ticket to get himself a Dutch visa,
he could not actually travel on it Needing more money for an adult fare, he
tried to get his van deposit back by telling the rental agency that the van
had been stolen. With either desperate or inane persistence, he returned
three times before he was finally arrested on March 4.
Salameh had used Musab Yasin's phone number when renting the van,
and Abdul Rahman Yasin was picked up the same day in a sweep of sites
associated with Salameh. Abdul Rahman was taken to New Jersey FBI
headquarters in Newark. He is reported to have been extremely cool, as a
trained intelligence agent would be. He was helpful to investigators who
themselves faced tremendous pressure to produce answers. He told them, for
instance, the location of the apartment that was used to make the bomb, a
key bit of information. They thanked him for his cooperation and let him
walk out. This, although he had arrived just six months before from Iraq,
and might well attempt to return there. And indeed, the very next day,
Abdul Rahman Yasin boarded Royal Jordanian 262 to Amman, the same plane
Salameh had hoped to catch. From Amman he went on to Baghdad. An ABC news
stringer saw him there last year, outside his father's house, and learned
from neighbors that he worked for the Iraqi government.
Meanwhile, as U.S. authorities searched for Abdul Rahman Yasin in
March 1993, after his "helpful" session with the FBI and before they knew
for certain that he had fled, an FBI agent who had worked with Emad Salem
in June 1992 speculated:
"Do you ever think that Iraqi intelligence might have known of these people
who were willing to do something crazy, and that Iraqi intelligence found
them out and encouraged them to do this as a retaliation for the bombing of
Iraq. . . . So the people who are left holding the bag here in America are
Egyptian. . . or Palestinian. . . . But the other people we are looking
for, Abdul Rahman, he is gone. . I hate to think what's going to happen if
this guy turns out to be. . an Iraqi intelligence operative...and these
people were used." [9]
Mahmud Abu Halima had similar thoughts. As he told a prison
companion who later turned state's evidence:
"The planned act was not as big as what subsequently occurred. . . Yousef
showed up on the scene. and escalated the initial plot. . . . Yousef used
[them]. . .as pawns and then immediately after the blast left the country."
[10]
That, indeed, is the most straightforward explanation of the World
Trade Center bombing: that it was an Iraqi intelligence operation, led by
Ramzi Yousef, with the local fundamentalists serving first as aides and
then as diversionary dupes.
Since Yousef's arrest and extradition to the United States, the
evidence for this explanation has, if anything, grown stronger. First of
all, he is clearly no fundamentalist. According to neighbors, he had
a Filipina girlfriend and enjoyed Manila's raucous night life.[11] Yousef's
nationality and ethnicity have also become known: He is a Pakistani
Baluch.
The Baluch are a distinct ethnic group, speaking their own language,
one of several Middle Eastern peoples without their own homeland. They live
in eastern Iran and western Pakistan in inhospitable desert terrain over
which neither Tehran nor Islamabad exercises much control. Baluchistan is a
haven for smuggling, both of drugs and of arms. The Baluch are Sunni and
are at sharp odds with Tehran's Shia clerical regime. Through Iraq's many
years of conflict with Iran, first in the early 1970s and then during the
Iran-Iraq war a decade later, Iraqi intelligence developed close ties with
the Baluch on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. Above all, it
used them to carry out terrorism against Iran.
Yousef's associates in Pakistan, too, were anti-Shia. This fact,
taken together with his Baluch ethnicity, make it nearly impossible that
Iran could be
behind Yousef. The most recent inquiries, made since Yousef's arrest, have
reduced the question to two possibilities: He is a free-lancer connected to
a loose network of fundamentalists; or he worked for Iraq. [12]
Of Passports and Fingerprints
THE SINGLE MOST important piece of evidence pointing to Iraq is the
passport on which Yousef fled America. It was no ordinary passport.
On November 9,1992, just after the final green light for the bombing
had been given, Yousef reported to Jersey City., police that he had lost
his passport. He claimed to be Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani
born and reared in Kuwait. Then, between December 3 and December 27, Yousef
made a number of calls to Baluchistan. Several of them were conference
calls to a few key numbers, a geographical plotting of which suggests that
they were related to Yousef's probable escape route--through Pakistani and
Iranian Baluchistan--across the Arabian Sea to Oman, after which the
"telephone trail" ends. After Yousef s arrest, a National Security Council
staffer confirmed to me that Yousef had indeed fled from the United States
through Baluchistan.
On December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New
York with photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports.
Consistent with his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost
his passport and asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his
non-original documentation enough to deny him a new passport. But it did
provide him a six-month, temporary passport and told him to straighten
things out when he returned "home." This turned out to be good enough for
the purpose at hand.
By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real
name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would
someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to
get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he
had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems
that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy
documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact
Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And
that is pretty much what happened.
But why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most
intriguing and vital aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul
Basit Karim, a Pakistani born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea
Institute, a technical school in Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a
two-year degree in computer-aided electronic engineering, he returned to a
job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As Abdul Basit and his family were
permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained files
on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and his parents in Kuwait's Interior
Ministry have been tampered with. Key documents from the Kuwaiti files on
Abdul Basit and his parents are missing. There should be copies of the
front pages of the passports, including a picture, a notation of height,
and so forth, but that material is gone. There is also information in the
file that should not be there, especially a notation stating that Abdul
Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26, 1990, transiting to
Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their way to Pakistani
Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.
Who put that notation into Abdul Basit's file and why? Consider the
circumstances of the moment. The Kuwaiti government had ceased to exist, and
Iraq was an occupation authority; bent on establishing control over a
hostile population amid near-universal condemnation, as an American-led
coalition threatened war. The situation was chaotic as hundreds of
thousands of people were fleeing for their lives. While the citizens of
Western countries were pawns in a high stakes game, held hostage by Iraq,
little attention was paid to the multitude of Third World nationals bent on
escape. It truly boggles the imagination to believe that under such
circumstances an Iraqi bureaucrat was sitting calmly in Kuwait's Interior
Ministry taking down the flight plans--including the itinerary and final
destination--of otherwise non-descript Baluchis fleeing Kuwait. Rather, it
looks as if Iraqi intelligence put that information into Abdul Basit's file
to make it appear that he left Kuwait rather than died there, and that,
like Ramzi Yousef, he too was Baluch.
Moreover, Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards,
removing the original with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with
one
bearing those of Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators
because no two people's match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so
decisive makes them the perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus,
after U.S. authorities learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they
sent his fingerprints (taken by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service at JFF airport when he was briefly detained for illegal entry) to
Kuwait, asking if they matched those of Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said
that they did, everyone assumed the question settled--forgetting that
Kuwait's files were not secure during the Iraqi occupation.
Pakistan also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently
resident abroad, at the embassy in the country in which they live. On
August 9,
Baghdad ordered all embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close.
Most did, including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his
family that should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The
Pakistani government now has no record of the family.
What does all this suggest? To me it suggests that Abdul Basit and
his family were in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they
probably
died then; and that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to
create an alternative identity for Ramzi Yousef. Clearly, only Iraq could
reasonably have: 1) known of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his
family; 2) tampered with Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all
switching the fingerprint cards; and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit
and his family from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait.
Of course, the best way to verify or falsify this would be to check
with people who knew Abdul Basit before August 1990. To this end, Brad
White, a former Senate Judiciary Committee investigator and CBS newsman,
contacted an overseas source he knew in the United Kingdom who had looked
into the matter. Two people had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown
photos of Yousef, were unable to make a positive identification. They both
felt that while there was some similarity in looks, it was not the same
person. "Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is probably not Basit", White was
told.[13]
Logic and circumstance also suggest the same conclusion. Is it
likely to be mere coincidence, after all, that during Iraq's occupation of
Kuwait key
documents were removed from Abdul Basit's and his parents files, while the
same files were filched in their entirety from the Pakistani embassy?
Moreover, Abdul Basit had no criminal record in Britain, nor did he or his
parents have any security record in Kuwait. The first concrete knowledge we
have of Ramzi Yousef/Abdul Basit comes in early 1991, around the end of the
Gulf war when he showed up in the Philippines seeking contact with a Muslim
group there. Introduced as "the chemist", he proposed to collaborate in
bombing conspiracies. Now, how did a young man who had led a seemingly
normal life up until August 1990 suddenly become a world class terrorist
six months after Iraq invaded his country of residence? Where did he get
such sophisticated explosives training in just six months? (The real Abdul
Basit's degree, remember, was in electronic engineering, not chemistry,
which Swansea Institute does not even teach.)
And where are Abdul Basit's parents? They never returned to Kuwait
after its liberation, nor have they appeared anywhere else. Did they too
take up a life of crime after decades of abiding by the law?
Ramzi Yousef's arrest has made it easy enough to resolve a key
question and perhaps produce important evidence implicating Iraq in the
World Trade Center bombing: Is "Ramzi Yousef" really Abdul Basit or not?
Let those who remember Abdul Basit from before August 1990 meet Yousef in
person and tell us. It sounds simple and logical, but strangely, the
Justice Department has shown no interest in arranging such a meeting.
Moreover, it has decided to try, the bomber as Ramzi Yousef even though no
one, including Yousef by now, maintains that that is his real name. If the
government believes that Yousef is really Abdul Basit, why doesn't it try
him as Abdul Basit? Why is the Justice Department uninterested even in
definitively determining his identity, even though doing so might help get
to the bottom of the matter. I recently asked a Justice Department
official, who maintains his confident view that Yousef is indeed Abdul
Basit, "Why don't you bring the people who knew Abdul Basit to the prison
to meet Yousef, so they can say for sure if they are the same?" "But you",
I was told, "are interested in an intelligence question." Earlier I had
been told, "It does not matter what we call him. We just try a body."
And so back we come to the high wall. As before, those who have the
information about Ramzi Yousef and his bombing conspiracies are not
concerned with the question of state sponsorship, or at least consider it
secondary to their trials; while those who are concerned with state
sponsorship are denied the information that they need to investigate the
question properly.
Threats From Baghdad
MOST MEMBERS OF the U.S. national security bureaucracies think that
Saddam Hussein has largely lain low since the Gulf War, constrained by
economic sanctions and swift American reactions to his occasional feints to
the south. But if in February 1993, Saddam ordered his agents to try to
topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, and if, in January 1995,
Iraq sponsored an effort to destroy eleven U.S. airplanes in the Far East,
then Saddam has not been quiescent.
This, simply put, is why it is important to find out who Ramzi
Yousef is and who may have put him up to his murderous work. Maybe Iraq had
nothing to do with him, despite all the circumstantial evidence suggesting
otherwise. But if it did, then the otherwise peculiar, bombastic, and
extremely violent statements emanating from Baghdad might make more sense
than they at first seem to.
In the fall of 1994, Baghdad's official press, in essence,
threatened that Saddam might use his remaining unconventional agents,
biological and chemical, for terrorism in America, or in missiles delivered
against his enemies in the region if and when he became fed up with
sanctions.[14] On September 29, 1994, following an otherwise cryptic
statement of Saddam Hussein's, the government newspaper, Babil, warned:
"Does the United States realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a
missile that can cross to countries and cities?"
Other threats followed almost daily;
When peoples reach the verge of collective death, they will be able to
spread death to all. [15]
When one realizes that death is one s inexorable fate, there remains
nothing to deter one from taking the most risky steps to influence the
course of events. [16]
We seek to tell the United States and its agents that the Iraqi patience
has run out and that the perpetuation of the crime of annihilating the
Iraqis will trigger crises whose nature and consequences are known only to
God.[17]
These statements occurred in the context of Saddam's second and
abortive lunge at Kuwait, which was thwarted by the swift U.S. deployment
to the region. Saddam then turned around and formally recognized Kuwait,
removing what then seemed to be the last major obstacle to lifting
sanctions, and the Iraqi press soon began to call 1995, "the year of
lifting sanctions."
But that was not to be. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) started
to uncover evidence of a large, undeclared biological program. As Baghdad's
disappointment grew, the Iraqi press began to repeat the threats it had
made in the fall. The number two man in Iraq's information ministry warned,
"Iraq's abandonment of part of its weapons-the long-range missiles and
chemical weapons. . does not mean it has lost everything."[18] Al-Quds
al-Arabi, a London paper financed by Baghdad and close to the Iraqi regime,
cautioned. "Iraq still has options. But they are all destructive options.
Yet if the Americans continue to humiliate them, they will have no option
but to bring the temple down on everyone's head."19
After Baghdad succeeded in getting a clean bill of health from
UNSCOM in mid-June on its chemical and missile programs, it finally
acknowledged in July having had an offensive biological program and having
produced anthrax and botulinim. But it denied that it had ever tried to
weaponize those agents and, in any case, claimed to have destroyed them in
the fall of 1990. The claim was neither credible nor verifiable,
particularly as Iraq produced no documents detailing their destruction.
Indeed, the Iraqi "revelations" may even have been meant as a threat, an
attempt to intimidate the United Nations by hinting at what Baghdad was
still capable of doing.[20]
In early August 1995, as Iraq pressed UNSCOM for a clean bill of
health on its biological program, Hussein Kamil--Saddam's cousin and
son-in-law, and the man responsible for overseeing the build-up of Iraq's
unconventional weapons program defected. This precipitated a flood of
stunning revelations from Baghdad. They included the admission that Iraq
had indeed weaponized botulinim and anthrax. At the very same time that it
had earlier claimed to be destroying those agents, the Iraqi regime now
acknowledged that it had been stuffing them into bombs and missiles. Yet
Iraq still claimed that whatever biological agents it had produced had been
destroyed, even as it still failed to produce any documents to confirm
their purported destruction.
It looks as if Iraq is holding on to prohibited weapons of mass
destruction, even as it insists that sanctions be lifted. Why? In early
September, a former adviser to Saddam Hussein predicted that Iraq would not
give up any more unconventional agents. Instead, Saddam would probably
employ them for blackmail and brinkmanship to get sanctions lifted. And
failing that, he would use them.[21] General Wafiq Samarrai, former head of
Iraqi military intelligence, told me much the same: "Tell the allies that
they have to destroy Iraq's biological agents before Saddam can use them."
Iraq could attack its neighbors by missile, or America through terrorism.
The United Stares might retaliate with nuclear weapons, but by then "the
disaster will already have happened", Samarrai warned. [22]
Would Saddam actually do such a thing? When asked about the
possibility of Saddam's using biological agents for terrorism in America,
UNSCOM chairman RoIf Ekeus replied, "It is obviously possible."[23] Yet
such thoughts seem far from the minds of most U.S. officials, who believe
that Saddam is trapped by sanctions and can do no real harm. They feel no
urgency about bringing Saddam down; they sense no danger.
Unfinished Business
YET IF RAMZI YOUSEF is in fact an Iraqi intelligence agent, there
obviously is a danger. Even if we cannot yet be absolutely certain of this,
so
many American and allied lives are potentially at stake that it seems the
least a responsible government can do is to make every reasonable effort to
find out. As Saddam Hussein senses his ever-increasing isolation and sees
the prospects for lifting sanctions receding, his desperation may lead him
to order other, and even more ghastly, deeds.
If Saddam Hussein still hungers for revenge, the question of Ramzi
Yousef's terrorism is much too important to be left solely to the Justice
Department, while the FBI continues to withhold critical information from
the national security bureaucracies.
The following are among the steps that could and should be taken to
address the issue of whether Iraq is behind Ramzi Yousef and to strengthen
America's anti-terrorism efforts generally:
-Bring those who knew Abdul Basit Karim before August 1990 to meet Yousef
in prison and pronounce definitely if they are one and the same man.
-Demand the immediate and unconditional extradition of Abdul Rahman Yasin
from Baghdad.
-Establish a "tiger team", drawn from the best and brightest within the
national security bureaucracies, to examine all the information in the U.S.
government's possession related to Yousef and his bombing conspiracies.
Yousef's apparent use of chemical agents in New York and his threat to use
them in the Philippines deserve special attention.
-Establish appropriate procedures so that whenever a terrorist attack
occurs against U.S. targets that might be state-sponsored, a qualified team
will address the question of state sponsorship regardless of whether the
terror occurs on U.S. soil or whether early arrests are made.
Individually, the pieces of this puzzle--the elusive identity and
affiliation of the World Trade Center bomber; the series of explicit
threats against the United States issuing from Baghdad; the question of
Iraqi biological capabilities--raise troubling questions. Taken together,
they provide the outline of a very frightening possibility. The lack of
coordination between the Departments of Justice and State may have created
a niche for terrorism within
America's borders; while the lack of any adequate response to the two major
bombing conspiracies may have already begun to undermine the credibility of
the threat of deterrence. So far, State Department officials have been
content to leave the issue of Iraq's possible resort to biological
terrorism on the back burner, secure in the belief that the threat of
nuclear retaliation will be sufficient deterrent. But Saddam has previously
miscalculated the American reaction to his provocations. It would be
reassuring to know that, somewhere in the policy-apparatus of the State
Department, someone is looking seriously at the possibility of future
terrorist acts and at the requirements of effective deterrence.