Bin Laden's Spies

Posted by @ 20 11 200203:05 PM

It's often overlooked that Al Qaeda operates a highly professional intelligence service. The terrorists' expertise in espionage is one more reason why it's wrong to regard them as an unsophisticated, amorphous, loosely stuctured group. These evil folks are highly organized.

Before attacking the USS Cole, as former Defense Secretary William Cohen has reflected, "the conspirators had watched for a year... to see how U.S. warships refueled in Aden." And the 9/11 conspiracy, as Edward Jay Epstein has shown, was similarly fertilized by a vast intelligence-gathering program.

The federal indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui names seven Al Qaeda spies who arrived in the US, in advance of the main body of hijackers, to collect intelligence on vulnerabilities of our aircraft and airports. Over seventeen months, these operatives pieced together a picture of how the planes to be commandeered were protected, so that assault teams could be trained and equipped. From interviews with flight personnel, for instance, the FBI estimates that bin Laden's spies conducted at least a dozen observation missions by riding in first-class cabins on U.S. aircraft, in order to locate the key boxes which would allow them to cockpit entry.

How Al Qaeda became so good at spying; who taught its operatives how to build and underground cells in the urban west; where and when this cunning tradecraft was inculcated -- these questions point up what is, to my mind, the central unsolved mystery of 9/11. Bin Laden himself had always been a financier, and a construction magnate; and his early attempts on Western targets -- the first World Trade Center bombing, for instance -- were not especially well executed or planned. But the November 1995 bombing of a U.S. barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, marked a dramatic improvement; and since then, from all indicators, Al Qaeda has contintually gotten better at its deadly business.

I believe that Al Qaeda operatives were tutored by Iranian intelligence, the Pasdaran. There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that this was the case. A trove of press reports affirm that Iran was running terrorist training camps in the Sudan between 1993 and 1996, while bin Laden and his operatives were there. Youssef Bodansky, head of the Congressional Task Force on terrorism, places Al Qaeda and Iranian agents at numerous terror strategy meetings between October 1994 and March 1995 (this intelligence appears to have come from the Mossad). Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has repeatedly alleged links between bin Laden and Iran. So has fomer CIA officer Robert Baer:

Even before I left the CIA in late 1997, we had learned that bin Laden had suggested to the Iranians that they drop ther efforts to undermine Central Asian governments and instead joint him in a campaign against the United States. We knew, too, that in July 1996 bin Laden’s allies, the Egyptian Gama’at, had been in touch with [Iranian-backed terror mastermind] Imad Mughniyah, whom my own research showed to be behind the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut.

If the Iranians indeed trained Al Qaeda, this would certainly explain why Al Qaeda seems to have such a keen understanding of the U.S. intelligence system. When the Iranians took over our Embassy in Teheran, in November 1979, they seized several rooms of top secret CIA documents. This seems to have been the only occasion in history when a CIA station lost its entire stock of inteligence to the enemy; and the insight these documents provided on U.S. sources and methods has given the Iranians a distinct operational advantage against us. Among other things, as press acounts have disclosed, the Iranians were able to detect many (perhaps even all) CIA agents in Iran between 1987 and 1992, and to turn these agents into disinformants. (These double agents steered our policy toward Iran, by continually alleging that the regime was on the verge of "moderation," and needed only our foreign trade, to strengthen the hands of the "moderates.")

But whether Al Qaeda learned about our spy methods from Iran, or via some other channel, its use of this knowledge to disinform our intelligence community is beyond dispute. To deny or to doubt that our enemy enages in such deception will make only us more vulnerable to it.