The penultimate piece of evidence linking Yousef to Iraqi intelligence, Mylroie says, is his assumption of the identity of Abdul Basit Karim. There really was an Abdul Basit, who was a Kuwaiti educated in Britain, but who was living in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990. He also was four inches shorter than Yousef, who generally bears little resemblance to the man.
Despite that, Yousef's fingerprints appear in Basit's official Kuwaiti file. Mylroie collected an array of evidence, including missing pages and a strikingly out-of-place notation, that the file was tampered with extensively, all indicating that Yousef had assumed the identity of someone killed during the Iraqi invasion. Creating such identities is common for agents involved in "wet" operations by Soviet-style intelligence agencies.
And in the case of Yousef/Basit, the only such organization that could have done so was Iraq's.
Saddam Hussein rose to power through the ranks of Iraqi intelligence, and consolidated his grip on the nation in the 1970s by dramatically expanding the power and scope of his intelligence and security forces. Over the years, that power has if anything grown and intensified, particularly in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War.
Today's Iraqi intelligence agencies cover a broad range of activities, from Saddam's personal protection force to handling political dissent. But by far the most powerful and feared of these is the Iraqi Intelligence Service, or Mukhabarat. Its powers range from electronic surveillance to counterintelligence and special operations; notably, its mysterious "Office Sixteen" exists solely for training agents for clandestine operations abroad, including lessons in the use of terror techniques.
The Mukhabarat received considerable notoriety in 1994, when U.S. intelligence uncovered proof that Iraqi agents had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait. In retaliation, President Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.
The missiles found their mark, but the response was nonetheless inadequate in impressing Saddam, since few of the spy agency's personnel were lost. "The only thing the Clinton administration did was launch a few cruise missiles at an empty building in the middle of the night," says Woolsey, who was CIA chief at the time. "That probably made him laugh even harder."
Woolsey believes Saddam was already laughing at the Americans because of their failure to uncover his likely involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. At the time, the plot's mastermind, Yousef, was still at large, and investigators were still focusing on the sacrificial lambs he had left behind -- one of whom, desperate for airfare, had actually attempted to redeem his deposit on the truck used in the bombing.
The FBI's chief in New York at the time, Jim Fox -- who had a background in counter-terrorism -- was in fact doggedly pursuing the likelihood of Iraqi complicity in the bombing. Several of his agents had uncovered what he believed were strong indications that Mukhabarat agents had enacted the plot, including information from foreign intelligence agencies.
But Fox was replaced in mid-1994 for ostensibly bureaucratic reasons, and his successors chose not to keep pursuing the state-sponsorship angle, saying they had found no evidence of it. Instead, they focused on convicting the perpetrators they had in hand, including a second set of bombing conspirators associated with a blind Muslim cleric in Jersey City named Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.
Mylroie believes the Clinton administration made a conscious effort to downplay the Iraqi connection because it was wedded to a policy designed to "contain" Saddam rather than confront him. Woolsey demurs, suggesting that the problem was more a pragmatic one, given the American system of justice and the difficulty often associated with obtaining conspiracy convictions.
Despite their often overlapping interests, a high bureaucratic wall exists between American security and law-enforcement agencies, and that wall proved crucial in the World Trade Center cases, particularly Ramzi Yousef's. With the Justice Department firmly in charge, national security concerns such as the possibility of state sponsorship of the terrorism took a back seat to the reality of prosecuting the case in U.S. courts.
"There's nothing nefarious about that," says Woolsey. Conspiracy cases in particular can be quite complex and difficult for obtaining convictions, and he thinks the prosecutors were mostly intent on trying to keep the case simple for the sake of putting the men behind bars: "They were only doing what good prosecutors do."
But in the process, the chance of establishing whether or not Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence agent carrying out Saddam's orders was lost. If the Iraqi dictator was in fact involved, then the message he got was clear: He could sponsor covert terrorism in America and get away with it.