The Western Nightmare: Saddam and Bin Laden Versus the World

The Western Nightmare: Saddam and Bin Laden Versus the World

Iraq's half-built chemical arsenal, and the planet's most prolific terrorist - Julian Borger and Ian Black on a marriage made in hell.

Saturday February 6, 1999
The Guardian

It must have been a bitterly cold and uncomfortable journey. In the last days of December, a group of Iraqi officials crossed the Hindu Kush border from Pakistan to Afghanistan on their way to keep an appointment deep in the remote eastern mountains.

At the head of the group was a man by the name of Farouk Hijazi, President Saddam Hussein's new ambassador to Turkey and one of Iraq's most senior intelligence officers. He had been sent on one of the most important assignments of his career - to recruit Osama bin Laden.

Thus the world's most notorious pariah state, armed with its half-built hoard of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, tried to embrace the planet's most prolific terrorist. It was the stuff of the West's millennial nightmares, but United States intelligence officials are positive that the meeting took place, although they admit that they have no idea what happened.

This was not the first time that President Saddam had offered Mr Bin Laden a partnership. At least one approach is believed to have been made during the Saudi dissident's sojourn in Sudan from 1990 to 1996. On that occasion, the guerrilla leader turned the emissaries away, out of a pious man's contempt for President Saddam's secular Ba'athist regime.

But this time round Mr Bin Laden's options have been rapidly diminishing. His hosts, the hardline Taliban militia which rules Afghanistan under Islamic auspices, have vowed publicly to stand by him. But they are at the same time discussing with his worst enemies - the Saudi monarchy and the American government - his eventual departure from Afghan soil.

Mr Bin Laden must surely have felt the noose begin to bite when he heard the news of the Taliban's meeting this week with a US assistant secretary of state, Karl Inderfurth, in Islamabad.

But the most wanted man in the West may be at his most dangerous when cornered. And the increased pressure makes the prospect of a Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden alliance, once an improbable marriage of opposites, seem a more credible threat.

The US has been braced for more bombings since the attacks on its east African embassies in Tanzania and Kenya last August, in which more than 250 people died, most of them Africans. Retaliatory US cruise missile strikes followed, against Mr Bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant believed (mistakenly as US intelligence now privately admits) to be producing the nerve gas VX on his behalf.

US embassies throughout the Middle East have been on alert since December, when the CIA found what it called 'strong and credible evidence' of an imminent attack by members of Mr Bin Laden's multinational organisation al-Qaeda (the Base).

The CIA also claimed to have foiled a plot last September by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, an al-Qaeda affiliate, to bomb the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, The Egyptian suspects were deported to Cairo.

The US government has spent $2 billion (£1.2 billion) on counter-terrorist measures since the August embassy bombings. The Pentagon has set up national guard rapid response teams in 10 states around the country.

Overseas, US embassy windows are being coated with protective film to prevent them disintegrating into lethal shards under the impact of a blast. And the FBI is kitting out a Gulfstream 5 long-range business jet to fly specialist teams of agents at short notice to a terrorist incident anywhere in the world.

Amid these preparations are signs that the threat of non-conventional terrorist attacks looms ever larger on the American horizon. The justice department has distributed equipment and training grants to local fire departments to help them deal with possible chemical or biological weapons incidents, and it recently organised a huge multi-agency operation, codenamed Poised Response, to rehearse a co-ordinated reaction to such an attack on Washington.

But it is not just the US which finds itself in the putative firing line. Since RAF bombers took part in air strikes on Iraq in November, British citizens have also become primary targets.

Talking to the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat a month after the air strikes on Iraq, Mr Bin Laden explicitly added British civilians to his 'divinely-ordained' list of targets.

'The British and American people have widely voiced their support for their leaders' decision to attack Iraq, which makes all those people, in addition to the Jews who occupy Palestine, into people warring [against God],' he warned.

As Mr Bin Laden plans more attacks on the 'infidels' he regards as a contaminating presence at the Islamic holy sites of his home country, American and British intelligence services plot their own strategy. They aim to block his moves and contain him while waiting for a chance to strike themselves.

It is an unending game of chess between terrorism and counter-terrorism in which last year's multi-million dollar cruise missile strikes are merely the bluntest of weapons.

Even before the embassy bombings in Africa, US special forces had been rehearsing daring 'grab raids' aimed at fighting their way into Mr Bin Laden's mountain lair in Afghanistan and either abducting or assassinating him. But such an operation would almost certainly involve high American casualties and - like missile attacks - would require highly accurate information about the whereabouts of Mr Bin Laden.

According to journalists who visited him in December, the ascetic Saudi radical is these days more cautious than ever, continually shifting between tented camps and caves and never using satellite phones lest they betray his position to the US spy satellites that constantly hover overhead.

There has been at least one assassination attempt in recent months, carried out by Saudi intelligence.

Mr Bin Laden accused the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz (whom he also blamed for stripping him of Saudi citizenship in 1994) of offering $267,000 to three men to carry out the execution.

The terrorist financier told a Pakistani journalist that one of the would-be assassins, Siddiq Ahmed, had confessed, but did not say what had happened to him.

Prince Salman denied the accusation, saying that he had never heard of Siddiq Ahmed. But Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of CIA counter-terrorist operations, who maintains close contact with US and Middle Eastern intelligence networks, said an assassination bid did indeed take place.

'The Saudis hired someone among his followers to poison him, probably in November. He suffered kidney failure but recovered, at least partially,' Mr Cannistraro said.

Whether as a result of the assassination attempt or not, Mr Bin Laden is unwell, said Mr Cannistraro.

'There is definitely something wrong. The intelligence people here described him as gravely ill.'

Mr Bin Laden has denied such reports and claimed that he remains sufficiently vigorous to play football and ride horses. But the journalists who met him in December said he was walking stiffly and leaning on a walking stick. And when a Pakistani reporter, Rahimullah Yusufzai, filmed him hobbling, Mr Bin Laden's aides erased the tape.

While waiting for a chance to grab Mr Bin Laden or get a clear shot at him, his enemies are constantly striving to narrow his room for manoeuvre and fold up his sprawling financial network one bank account at a time.

'He's certainly feeling the pinch; he can't use his satellite phone and he can't travel for fear of being kidnapped,' said one British counter-terrorism expert.

'He's pretty much in a box and there are signs that action against his financial resources may have started to work.'

Mr Cannistraro believes that Mr Bin Laden's financial resources (originally estimated at up to $300 million) are dwindling fast.

'He went through his personal fortune long ago,' he said. 'He gets some income from trading through his companies. But his major source of income these days is fundraising, mostly among religious businessmen in the Gulf.'

The Saudi royal family, presumably stirred into action by last year's bloodbaths in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, have closed down a number of Mr Bin Laden's front charities, and have been tightening the screws on their erstwhile Taliban clients, whose 'embassy' in Riyadh was closed down in September.

The Taliban's guiding light, Mullah Omar, has also rejected the entreaties of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi general intelligence, who visited Afghanistan twice last year in an attempt to lever Mr Bin Laden out of his hiding place.

'Prince Turki also returned empty handed,' Mr Bin Laden crowed soon after the last attempt in November.

'It is none of the business of the Saudi regime to come and ask for handing over Osama bin Laden, who was stripped of his identification card, which is his right by birth, and whose assets were frozen, and who was forced to sever all relations with his kin.'

The Taliban's reluctance to surrender Mr Bin Laden is understandable. An estimated 300 of the multi-ethnic volunteers under his command are thought to have died in the war against the Soviet Union, turning the Saudi guerrilla leader into a legend in Afghan hearts - and in his own mind. He once claimed to have 'reduced the Soviet Union to a myth'.

But even the fanatics of the Taliban are dependent on a steady supply of funds, if only to wipe out their adversaries' last remaining pockets of resistance. And in the last few months the Saudis have cut the flow of cash to a trickle.

Mamoun Fandy, a politics professor at Washington's Georgetown University, believes that the pressure will eventually take effect. In his new book, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent, to be published later this month, Mr Fandy writes: 'The Taliban protection is not likely to continue forever. Taliban as a movement is subject to global pressures, especially from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Previously, under pressure from both, Sudan expelled Bin Laden from its territory. Under similar pressure, the Taliban may find it profitable to do likewise.'

In fact, in recent interviews with Mr Fandy, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah said he had won the personal assurances of Mullah Omar that Mr Bin Laden's welcome was not indefinite.

'Omar promised Crown Prince Abullah that 'once things settled down' in Afghanistan, it would be no place for Osama. It is a matter of time,' Mr Fandy said.

This week's meeting between US and Taliban officials in Islamabad shows how the sands can shift, less than a year after Mullah Omar sent Bill Richardson (who was then the US ambassador to the United Nations) away empty handed from secret talks about Mr Bin Laden in Kabul last April.

It is at this moment, with Mr Bin Laden increasingly vulnerable, that the Iraqi offer of shelter materialised from the mysterious figure of Farouk Hijazi.

Mr Hijazi's arrival as Iraqi ambassador to Ankara last year was seen by Western intelligence analysts as President Saddam's attempt to beef up his espionage and weapons procurement network in the region.

Despite being Palestinian born, the secret policeman won the Iraqi ruling family's favour by the zeal with which he went about executing their opponents, both in Iraq and abroad. In the past decade he rose to become the head of external operations in the special security organisation run by President Saddam's son Qusay.

An attempt to place him in North America failed when Canada refused to accept him as ambassador. After a few months' hesitation, Turkey consented to his nomination late last year.

In a telling sign of the true function of the embassy, the outgoing ambassador, Rafi Daham al-Tikriti, was made head of the Iraqi mukhabarat intelligence service on his return to Baghdad.

Ahmed Allawi, who has been keeping tabs on Hijazi for the opposition Iraqi National Congress, said: 'Turkey is the Iraqis' biggest intelligence station abroad, and Hijazi is deeply involved in the secret overseas operations of the mukhabarat. He is the perfect man to send to Afghanistan.'

Mr Fandy believes that if Mr Bin Laden had to leave his Afghan stronghold he would prefer to seek refuge in the mountains of Yemen.

Although he was born in Riyadh, his family came from the Hadramout region of southern Yemen, and he has since cultivated contacts with the influential Sanhane tribe.

But Mr Fandy argues that even Yemen would not offer an entirely safe haven if the Saudi monarchy was determined to root him out. 'Saudi Arabia can threaten the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh more than Bin Laden can threaten the Saudis.'

If Mr Bin Laden can be winkled out, it will be a significant victory for the West's billion-dollar counter-terrorism machine, but no one on either side of the Atlantic believes it will spell the end of hostilities with radical Islamic groups.

'It's dangerous to characterise him as the be all and end all of this problem,' said one British-based expert. 'Political Islam is on the rise and terrorist groups will continue to organise in spite of all the security measures. And Bin Laden has faithful lieutnants so even if he's assassinated the phenomenon isn't going to go away.'

The paradox of the Bin Laden manhunt is that its target is, in many ways, the joint creation of the Saudi and Western intelligence services, a result of their covert war to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.

Even then, some had qualms about cultivating that sort of client. 'We did worry then about these wild bearded men,' admits one British official. 'But there was a lot of naivety around.'

Under the great organising principle of the cold war, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan doing their double act against the evil empire, their enemy's enemy was their friend.

Yet after the Soviet army left Afghanistan, it soon became clear that a dangerous genie had been let loose, as thousands of Egyptians and Algerians, Saudis and Yemenis, fired up by their victory over a superpower, went home to give a critical edge to indigenous Islamic fundamentalist movements which had yet to turn violent.

Now, while trying to undo the mistakes of the past, the US and Britain have to steel themselves for Mr Bin Laden's promised next move.

If his flirtation with Baghdad is consummated, the struggle with the implacable zealot from Saudi Arabia could be drifting towards an exceedingly bloody end-game.