If Iraqi intelligence is involved, Woolsey does not believe that necessarily absolves bin Laden. "I'm not comfortable with the formulation of one or the other having done it," he says. "I'm more comfortable with the formulation that it was a partnership, and each one was doing what he does best. Who knows? It may have been that Iraqi intelligence handled part of the logistics, and bin Laden's group provided the people."
Woolsey and other intelligence analysts point to a number of other pieces of evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to Islamic terrorists, ranging from regular gatherings of such groups in Baghdad, to the way Saddam -- whose ruling Baath Party is avowedly atheistic -- has altered the Iraqi flag to include an Islamic blessing. But the trail of evidence most starkly goes back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The similarity of that attack to the Sept. 11 disaster extends beyond the target itself. Perhaps the most striking point is that the mastermind of that plot, when arrested two years later, had been in the process of organizing a highly coordinated mass hijacking of airliners.
And as it happens, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this man -- contrary to the contention of the Clinton administration at the time -- was an agent of Saddam's elite intelligence unit.
A man who calls himself Ramzi Yousef is currently serving a 240-year sentence in federal prison for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which six people died, though even his trial judge noted at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is."
What is known about him is that he entered the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing Yousef's name, and then promptly sought political asylum. Shortly afterward, he began organizing a group of Islamic radicals in the Jersey City, N.J., area who had been planning to pipe-bomb government officials and Jewish leaders in retaliation for the imprisonment of one of their martyrs, Meir Kahane assassin El Sayyid Nosair. However, Yousef promptly escalated the plot into one with a bigger target -- namely, the World Trade Center.
Yousef's real identity has been the particular obsession of intelligence analyst Laurie Mylroie, whose 2000 book, "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," which reads now like a prophecy about the Sept. 11 attacks, and is referenced by many, including Woolsey, who question whether bin Laden was solely responsible for the attacks. Mylroie has an extensive background in Middle East intelligence, and her book is largely based on a thorough examination of the trial documents in the World Trade Center cases.
Mylroie says Yousef's operations were a classic "false flag" in which actions are carried out in a way that makes others look responsible -- and Yousef, she believes, was almost certainly an Iraqi intelligence operative. She points particularly to the circumstances around his flight from the United States after his team of bombers set off their device in 1993 -- which had been intended to kill 250,000 people, toppling one tower into the other and releasing a deadly cloud of cyanide, but which only created a ball of flame that instead burned up the cyanide -- and in short order were arrested.
Yousef fled the country and flew to Karachi, Pakistan, with the passport of a Kuwaiti named Abdul Basit Karim. For the next two years he remained at large, but resurfaced in Manila when a batch of chemicals he was mixing for his next bombing plot caught fire. Forced to flee, he was apprehended a month later in Pakistan, thanks to information on a computer he left behind in the Philippines.
The details of the plot contained on that computer were chilling. Investigators found that Yousef was planning to plant bombs, comprised of a liquid explosive that could get past metal detectors, in coordinated fashion aboard a series of 11 American airliners scheduled to fly at roughly the same time over the Pacific Ocean.
Mylroie believes that even though Yousef was captured, at least some of the logistical planning behind this plan may have lived on with whomever his cohorts might have been, and may well have provided the groundwork for the Sept. 11 attacks on America.
"I don't know if these attacks are part of the same plan -- I haven't seen any evidence of that -- but there are clearly echoes of the logistical side of Yousef's plot in it," she says. "Even more striking is that he plotted to destroy the Trade Center as well. "I don't think it's hard to see the hand of Iraqi intelligence at work here. It's clear a state was involved in the attack because it was so sophisticated, and Iraq is the most likely candidate. They are the only state we are at war with."
Next page: Yousef's connection to Iraq