Continued from Part I

US intelligence receives a document scooped up from the Baghdad HQ of the Mukharabat–the Iraqi Intelligence Service–after the war in Iraq. It lists individuals from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia whom the Iraqi regime considered intelligence assets. The dossier includes Osama bin Laden. A leading US Intelligence agency determines it’s authentic.

On March 28, 1992, the Mukharabat compiled this list. It’s 20-pages long, with “Top Secret” marked at the top of each page. On page 14 is a now-familiar name: Osama bin Laden. The authors of the document assert that bin Laden “is in good relationship with our section in Syria.” The list was recovered after the war by the Iraqi National Congress–a group long opposed to Saddam Hussein-and turned over to US officials. The Defense Intelligence Agency determined the document is athentic.

Eleven months after that list was put together, six people were killed and more than one thousand injured in a bombing at the World Trade Center. A top secret CIA document concludes that a “solid case” exists that al Qaeda operatives conducted the attacks. Fragmentary evidence points to Iraqi involvement. An Iraqi terrorist admitted mixing the chemicals for the bomb. Another conspirator made forty-six phone calls to Iraq two months before the plot’s masterminds arrivedi n the US–one from Baghdad. One of the bombers returned to Baghdad with the active assistance of the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan, and received safe haven and financial support form th Iraqi regime for nearly a decade after those attacks.

“bin Laden views any entity which hated Americans or was willing to kill them as an ally,” said the report from a debriefing with a high-level detainee. Abu Zubaydah explained that bin Laden’s “personal goal of destroying the US is so strong that to achieve this end he would work with whomever could help him, so long as al- Qaeda’s independence was not threatened.”

Zubaydah confirmed that bin Laden “approved of contacts and funding for Jund al Islam, a militant Islamic group in nothern Iraq that battled the two anti-Saddam Kurdish factions. Jund al Islam, later known as Ansar al Islam, received money and arms from the former Iraqi regime. The third-ranking official in the group, a man known as Abu Wael, was also an officer in the Iraqi Intelligence Service (the Mahkharabat).

Here is Part I (in case you missed it)

Here is Part III.