PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Abu Nidal, September 11 and Saddam
The terrorist network may be closer knit than we think.
Numerous groups had reason to wish the death of the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, reported to have committed "suicide" in his Baghdad home--albeit with multiple gunshot wounds. The likely conspirators include the Israelis, the PLO leadership, Gulf states he successfully blackmailed, or former friends--like Moammar Gadhafi and Syria--that he might have crossed in one deal or another.
But just as plausible is the scenario that Abu Nidal was finished off by his on-again-off-again host, Saddam Hussein, in an effort to thwart U.S. military action.
The story starts with Ziad Jarrah, comrade of Mohamed Atta and pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11. In the heady news cycle following the attacks, details of family ties of the hijackers received little attention in the U.S. The son of a prominent Lebanese family, Jarrah--secular and fun-loving--came to Germany for college in 1996 and ended up in the terrorist cell run by Atta.
A constant figure in Jarrah's life in Germany was his great-uncle, Assem Omar Jarrah. According to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, Assem Jarrah worked for a long time as an informer for the Stasi, the East German secret service, while maintaining connections to Nidal's terror group.
According to Stasi files described by Der Spiegel last November, a note on the back of Assem Jarrah's file specified he had contacts with people in "Operation Trader"--Stasi code for the Abu Nidal group, which staged several operations in Germany and recruited agents among Arab students. The elder Jarrah, who allegedly also worked for Libya as a double agent, was among the students Nidal's men approached.
Following German reunification, Assem Jarrah established two firms, selling chemicals and medical equipment to Middle Eastern clients like Libya. Based on the accounts of former employees, Der Spiegel describes visits to suspicious facilities in the middle of a Libyan desert. After living in Germany for 18 years, Ziad's uncle disappeared two months before the attacks of Sept. 11, saying he was heading back to his native Lebanon.
In his 1999 book, "Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police," former AP reporter and White House communications director John O. Koehler describes the inroads Nidal's organization made among students like Assem Jarrah. In one particular chapter, the author discussed a luncheon between Stasi's Col. Rainer Wiegand and two of his informers, both Lebanese science students, during which the informers reveal they are targeted for recruitment by Nidal. After confirming their story, he advises them to play along.
"It could, of course, be pure coincidence that the uncle of one of the hijackers had worked for two intelligence agencies and had relations with another group and ran a pharmaceutical company doing business related to chemicals in the Middle East," cautions Gunther Latsch, an investigative journalist at Der Spiegel and an expert on the Stasi.
Mr. Latsch notes, however, that, despite the initial denials from the Jarrah family, Ziad was very close to his great uncle: "He was the one who picked him up at the airport when he first came to Germany. The uncle paid for his apartment. He really took care of him." Extended family connections in the Middle East, and their social import, are often overlooked by Western audiences. But the case of Ziad Jarrah and his uncle is worth careful scrutiny.
Then there were the visits to Prague by Atta. On two separate occasions, Atta--not a man given to the earthly pleasures of sightseeing--traveled to Prague to meet Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi agent later expelled from the Czech Republic as a spy. Since the information surfaced last fall, there have been numerous efforts to bury the story--the most tangible evidence linking Sept. 11 to Baghdad. The Czech government, however, had little reason to question its own intelligence on the Atta trips and stood by the story. Last month, a high-ranking White House official confirmed the meeting.
Details such as these do not sufficiently describe the broader relations that lie behind Sept. 11. But they do hint that behind the façade of religious fanaticism sits the old network of "terrorism international"--that same web of underground groups and the rogue states which support them. One day, when investigators get to the bottom of Sept. 11, there might after all be more familiar names than the faceless al Qaeda operatives we have seen on grainy video clips.
Ms. Aydintasbas is a writer based in New York.
