XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX FRI NOV 30 2001
10:30:08 ET XXXXX
MAG: SUDAN TRIED TO GIVE CLINTON ADMIN FILES ON BIN
LADEN
NEW YORK --VANITY FAIR HAS OBTAINED LETTERS and memorandums that
document approaches made by Sudanese intelligence officials and other emissaries
to members of the Clinton administration to share information about many of the
22 terrorists on the government's most-wanted list, including: Osama bin Laden.
VANITY FAIR is set to unleash the story in January 2002 editions,
publishing sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
MORE
THE MUKHABARAT, A
SUDANESE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, spent the early to mid-1990s amassing copious
amounts of information on bin Laden and his cohorts at a time when they were
relatively unknown and their activities limited, author David Rose reports. From
the fall of 1996 until weeks before the September 2001 attack on the World Trade
Center, the Mukhabarat made repeated efforts to share its files on terrorists
with the U.S. On more than one occasion senior F.B.I. officials wanted to accept
the offers, but were apparently overruled by the State Department.
FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT and her assistant secretary
for Africa, Susan Rice, declined to comment for this story.
ACCORDING TO
TIM CARNEY, THE LAST U.S. AMBASSADOR to Sudan, whose posting ended in 1997, “The
fact is, they were opening the doors, and we weren’t taking them up on it. The
U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan’s willingness to engage us on some serious
questions of terrorism. We can speculate that this failure had serious
implications—at least for what happened at the U.S. Embassies in 1998. In any
case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his
organization.” He tells Rose, “It was worse than a crime. It was a fuckup.”
HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED? CARNEY CONTENDS that U.S. intelligence
failed because it became “politicized”: the message from Sudan did not fit
conventional wisdom at the State Department and the C.I.A., and so it was
disregarded, again and again. Rose writes that the simple answer is that the
Clinton administration had accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism, and refused to
believe that anything it did to prove its bona fides could be genuine. At the
same time, perceptions in Washington were influenced by C.I.A. reports that were
wildly inaccurate, some the result of deliberate disinformation.
ROSE
REPORTS THAT, HAD U.S. AGENCIES EXAMINED the Mukhabarat files in 1996 when they
first had the chance the prospects of preventing subsequent al-Qaeda attacks
would have been much greater. Gutbi al-Mahdi, the Mukhabarat’s director general
between 1997 and 2000, claims that if the F.B.I. had taken his offer in February
1998, the embassy bombings could have been prevented: “They had very little
information at that time: they were shooting in the dark. Had they engaged with
Sudan, they could have stopped a lot of things.” Rose writes that as late as the
end of 1995, bin Laden was not judged important enough by the C.I.A. or the
F.B.I. for anyone to mention him to U.S. Ambassador Don Petterson when Petterson
talked to the Sudanese about terrorism, an indication that the U.S. knew very
little about bin Laden’s organization or lethal capacity. “My recollection is
that when I made representations about terrorist organizations Osama bin Laden
did not figure,” Petterson says. “We in Khartoum were not really concerned about
him.”
SOME OF THE MUKHABARAT’S FILES IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS who played
central roles in the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in
August 1998; others chart the backgrounds and movements of al-Qaeda operatives
who are said to be linked directly to the atrocities of September 11. Among
those profiled:
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, another of those named on the
F.B.I.’s most-wanted list, who set the plot for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings
rolling during two trips he made to Nairobi in the spring of 1998 from Khartoum,
where he was apparently working for al-Qaeda. Rose writes that had the F.B.I.
accepted al-Mahdi’s February offer, it might have foiled Mohammed’s plans by
stepping in when he rented a villa in Kenya, gathered the bombers at the Hilltop
Hotel in Nairobi, or helped stuff a pickup truck with TNT.
Two men
carrying Pakistani passports and using the names Sayyid Iskandar Suliman and
Sayyid Nazir Abbass, who arrived in Khartoum from Kenya a few days after the
1998 embassy bombings and rented an apartment overlooking the U.S. Embassy in
Khartoum. They appeared to be reconnoitering for a possible future attack and
are believed to be members of al-Qaeda. They also stayed at the Hilltop Hotel in
Nairobi—the base used by other members of the embassy-bombing conspiracy. Sudan
arrested the two men and offered to extradite them for trial, but the U.S. did
not respond, instead opting to bomb the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in
Khartoum, which was found to have no connection to bin Laden but made vaccines
and medicine and had contracts with the U.N.
Wadih al-Hage, bin Laden’s
former private secretary, now serving life without parole after his conviction
in New York for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings, who was logged and
photographed in Sudan. He is said to have moved among bin Laden’s cells and
across four continents—information that surely would have been helpful in
cramping al-Qaeda’s style had it been grasped in 1996.
Mamdouh Mahmoud
Salim, a Sudanese born to Iraqi parents and an Afghan-war veteran who worked for
two bin Laden companies until 1995. Salim provides a link to the New York
suicide hijackers. From 1995 to 1998, he made frequent visits to Germany, where
a Syrian trader, Mamoun Darkazanli, had signing powers over his bank account.
Darkazanli has allegedly procured electronic equipment for al-Qaeda. Both men
attended the same Hamburg mosque as Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew
the two planes into the World Trade Center.
ACCORDING TO AL-MAHDI, THE
INTELLIGENCE SERVICE kept tabs on the entire bin Laden “clique”: “We had a lot
of information: who they are, who are their families, what is their education.
We knew what they were doing in the country, what is their relationship with
Osama bin Laden. And [had] photographs of them all.” A senior official from
Egyptian intelligence, who has worked closely with the Mukhabarat, substantiates
the account: “They knew all about them: who they were, where they came from.
They had copies of their passports, their tickets; they knew where they went. Of
course that information could have helped enormously. It is the history of those
people.”
THE MUKHABARAT ALSO UNCOVERED A WEALTH OF information about bin
Laden’s connection to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, including the fact that he hosted
its founder, al-Zawahiri, in 1992. The group has since effectively merged with
al-Qaeda. Yahia Hussien Baviker, the Mukhabarat’s deputy chief since 1998, says,
“These files on the Egyptians could have been of great value to U.S.
intelligence. If we’d had communication with the U.S., we could have been on the
same wavelength. We could have exchanged notes.” A C.I.A. source tells Rose, “If
anyone in the world understands the Egyptian side of this network, it’s Sudan.”
IT WAS NOT UNTIL MAY 2000 THAT THE U.S. SENT A JOINT F.B.I.-C.I.A. team
to Sudan to investigate whether it was harboring terrorists; the country was
given a clean bill of health in the summer of 2001. Just a few weeks prior to
the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration requested Sudan’s information
on al-Qaeda.
THE JANUARY ISSUE OF VANITY FAIR HITS NEWSSTANDS in New
York on December 5 and nationally on December 11.
Developing...
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Filed By
Matt Drudge
Reports are moved when circumstances
warrant
http://www.drudgereport.com for updates
(c)DRUDGE REPORT
2001
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