Bush must soon focus on Yasin, Iraqi sponsors

  • Jim Hoagland / Washington Post columnist
  • Saturday, October 13, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — Eight years have passed since Abdul Rahman Yasin bade hasty farewell to New York and flew to Baghdad. There he initially passed the time by fielding telephone calls placed by solicitous FBI agents and finding a niche in Saddam Hussein’s police state. By all appearances, Yasin has lived a quiet, secluded life there.

If President Bush is serious about the war he has declared on terrorists and those who harbor them, that must now change. The fate of Abdul Rahman Yasin — and his Iraqi sponsors — becomes a key measure of this White House’s commitment to stamping out terrorism with a global reach.

Bush on Wednesday named Yasin as one of the world’s 22 "Most Wanted Terrorists" for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Bush’s list is headed by Osama bin Laden and his cohorts in al Qaeda, the terror group accused of finishing the destruction of the New York landmark begun by Yasin and others.

There is no doubt about Yasin’s whereabouts after the 1993 outrage. The FBI agents who perfunctorily questioned Yasin in New York and were conned by his pleasant manner quickly understood their mistake in letting him go. They got his brother to telephone Yasin in Baghdad repeatedly to ask him to come back for more questioning. Guess what? Mr. Yasin sent his regrets.

In 1998, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh said publicly that the fugitive was "hiding in his native Iraq." The Iraqi National Congress (INC), the leading anti-Saddam movement, earlier obtained a photograph of Yasin in Baghdad and provided it to Washington. Every indication points to Yasin not having left Iraq since then, a senior U.S. official tells me.

The visibility that Bush has focused on Yasin stands in welcome contrast to the quiet neglect and bungling that marked the handling of this case by the FBI and CIA during the Clinton years.

But publicity is only a first step. Homeland defense chief Tom Ridge must break down the bureaucratic walls and defensive reactions that have crippled what should be a key component of the U.S. anti-terror campaign: a thorough examination of the accumulating evidence of Iraq’s role in sponsoring the development on its soil of weapons and techniques for international terrorism.

Exploring this role was given low priority by U.S. agents as it became clear the Clinton White House did not want to hear about or deal seriously with Iraq. Defectors ranging from Khidhir Hamza, one of Saddam’s chief nuclear scientists, to lowly intelligence officers have been met with a cold shoulder and reluctance by the FBI, CIA, DIA et al. to listen to, assess and then share the information about terrorism the defectors possess.

Take Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a 47-year-old former Iraqi army captain who from 1994 until 1998 was a military instructor in the elite militia known as Saddam’s Fighters. He escaped with his family into Iraqi Kurdistan and then to Turkey in 1999 and received U.S. permission to settle as a refugee in Fort Worth, Texas, last May.

Alami, a soft-spoken man with the engaging quiet smile endemic to the Tigris and Euphrates delta, guardedly outlined to me here Wednesday details of the training given for airliner hijacking and assassinations in the Salman Pak area of Baghdad while he was there. The Iraqi National Congress had tracked Alami to Fort Worth and made him available for an interview here while he sought a meeting with the FBI.

Discussing Iraq’s links to terrorism with an American was a novel experience, Alami said. The Immigration and Naturalization Service official who interviewed him in Turkey for his refugee visa did not probe his military specialties.

More surprising: An Iraqi ex-intelligence officer who has told the INC of specific sightings of "Islamicists" training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak as recently as September 2000 says he was treated dismissively by CIA officers in Ankara this week. They reportedly showed no interest in pursuing a possible Iraq connection to September 11.

Neither defector presented a smoking gun tying Iraq to the al Qaeda terror assault. And neither is an angel who should be believed automatically. Moreover, focusing on al Qaeda and Afghanistan now is the right immediate priority for Bush.

But the mounting evidence of Iraqi involvement in the brand of terror practiced by al Qaeda can no longer be swept under the rug or minimized. Abdul Rahman Yasin’s presence in Baghdad makes Iraq part and parcel of this war on killers and their protectors. It is time for Washington to act on knowledge postponed but now inescapable.

Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.

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