Cloaks, Daggers and Tractors




The Czechs, who initially denied any meetings between Atta and al-Ani, have given precious few details about what happened during the meeting (or meetings). According to one Czech intelligence official involved in the investigation, precious few exist. "There is evidence of the meeting, but we don't know what it was about," the official said. "If we knew what they said, we'd be much further ahead in the investigation."

Slightly more is known about al-Ani and his dealings in the Czech Republic. In and around Prague, he was known as a man with diversified interests and habits. He smoked Kim cigarettes, and carried around an inhaler for his asthma. He mingled easily with Arabic citizens, sometimes meeting them at the Islamic Center in Brno, as well as with Czech industrialists and politicians, whom he feted at lavish receptions. He was charming and smart, but quick to threaten to get his way.

Al-Ani held the low rank of second secretary at the Iraqi embassy and was charged with granting visas to Iraq or renewing Iraqi passports, a power some say he would sometimes use against Iraqi citizens living in the Czech Republic. According to people who dealt with him, one of al-Ani's central tasks was to talk to Iraqis living around Prague, and pressure them to return to Iraq.

Magid Maged, an Iraqi computer science student living in Prague, said al-Ani would frequent his parent's Prague restaurant and contract them to cater events at the Iraqi residence in Prague's Dejvicka neighborhood. When Maged's family asked him to start paying full price for the catering events, al-Ani allegedly threatened Maged, sending his mother to the hospital with bad nerves.

"Sometimes he would come and ask for a separate room for him and his associates. Mom would ask some of his guests how long they're in town for and they would say, only for a few days," Maged, 21, said. "He would tell my parents this life is not for them, they belong back in Iraq. Come back to Baghdad, Iraq is your home, etc. He told them the Iraqi government would help them open a new restaurant there. Of course, it was all nonsense."

According to a profile compiled by the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella anti-Saddam group headquartered in London, al-Ani is a ranking colonel in the Mukhabarat, the well-funded Iraqi intelligence-gathering and intimidation machine believed to be 4,000 strong and run by Saddam's closest inner circle. He has traveled extensively through Pakistan, India and the Gulf countries on clandestine missions. A member of the Saddam's ruling Ba'ath party since his youth, he speaks fluent English and is highly trained in the art of disguise. In 1991 al-Ani was spotted dressed in shirt and jeans with long hair, a silver chain and sunglasses. He told colleagues he was going on a mission dressed "like a hippie."

He first arrived in Prague sometime in early 1999. Just a few months before, around Christmas 1998, Djabir Salim, the former Iraqi charges d'affairs in Prague, quietly defected to London with a case of encryption keys, several boxes of Iraqi files from the embassy and more than $100,000 - money believed to have been earmarked for an attack on Radio Free Europe. Salim shared his files and plans with British MI-6 agents, which subsequently led to greater scrutiny of Prague's Iraqi embassy.

Prompted by Salim's information, agents from Bezpecnostni Informacni Sluzby (BIS), the Czech counter-intelligence agency, began trailing al-Ani as he made his daily rounds around Prague. The purpose of these rounds included coercing Iraqis to return to Iraq, but he also focused on drumming up business between Czech industrialists and the Iraqi government.

"Al-Ani did a lot of public relations work here for Baghdad," said one associate who asked not to be identified. "First he'd be friendly [and] charming, then he'd lay on the propaganda about Iraq." According to the associate, al-Ani fraternized with representatives of such Czech corporations as CKD, Skoda Plzen, the chemical producer Technoexport and the Brno-based tractor-maker Zetor a.s., which shares ownership ties with the Zetor tractor company in Slovakia. The Slovak Zetor made headlines earlier this year when Wahid el-Hage, the Egyptian al-Qaeda member convicted in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, revealed during his New York trial in February that he had bought tractors and tractor parts there for his boss, Osama bin Laden.

Al-Ani would also host gracious receptions at the Iraqi residence near Dejvicka that echoed with the voices of the political and business elite of the Czech Republic. He helped organize tours for Czech businessmen and government officials going to Baghdad, where the two country's officials would discuss diplomatic relationships and ways to nurture business. A Czech business associate of al-Ani, who also asked not to be named, said the former Iraqi diplomat helped him put together a $25-million telecommunications deal with Baghdad. The deal was inked in March, a month before al-Ani was forced to return to Iraq. When al-Ani was kicked out of the Czech Republic, the deal collapsed.

"It took me nine months to finalize everything. Now there is no contract. What can I say?" the associate said. "For 10 years the Iraqi embassy was dormant, nothing was happening there. Then this relatively young person started to go out, started to meet with Iraqis, and also frequently visiting Czechs. I don't think the Czech government liked that too much."


Besides putting together business deals, al-Ani also met regularly with Arabs of differing countries at the Islamic Center in Brno, and attended Arabic-Czech parties and business mixers around Prague. Al-Ani was also known to take frequent trips to Germany, where the Iraqi intelligence network is big and organized enough to have attracted the attention of the Bundesminsterium des Innern , the German federal intelligence agency. In a 1999 report, the agency warned that the Iraqi intelligence service in Germany had been "actively spying on and infiltrating" Iraqi dissidents living abroad. "For facilitation of entry," the report read, "the Iraqi intelligence services make use of professional clandestine immigration rings which, against payment, smuggle the agents concerned from a neighboring country to Germany." The "neighboring country", German federal officials later admitted, was the Czech Republic.

Mowafaq Fattohi, the Prague-based representative for the INC, the anti-Saddam group, said al-Ani's involvement in getting people - agents as well as average people - across borders between Western and Eastern Europe once led to a fallout between him and Hussein, the charge d'affairs. "There was a conflict between Mr. Husssein an Mr. al-Ani over smuggling people. They didn't like each other much. Hussein was glad to see him go," Mr. Fattohi said. "You're dealing with a country run by an intelligence service. Even if you are not an intelligence agent, you have to conform to what the intelligence agent says. No one can protest."

At the embassy, al-Ani was perceived as the senior official, even though he held a lower diplomatic rank than Hussein or financial affairs attache Shakir Younis. "Everybody knew he was the most important Iraqi official in Prague," said a Prague-based businessman who dealt with al-Ani. "I'd go to the embassy to meet him and the charges d'affairs would make coffee for us, not the other way around."

For decades, representatives of the ruling Ba'ath party in Iraqi embassies around the world have carried the Mukhabarat's less-than-diplomatic duties abroad and have received higher prestige from Baghdad, according to intelligence officials. Abdul Setar al-Duri, Iraq's ambassador to the former Czechoslovakia from 1976 to 1978 now living in England, said a Ba'ath representative held a small office in the embassy's first floor during his tenure. The representative would meet with PLO members around Prague, but not much more was known about him, Mr. al-Duri said. "He was separate from our mission," he said. "You'd see him everyday in the office or at a café, but you never asked him what he did. No one knew, and no one asked."

The Spy and the Martyr


The same mysterious persona cloaks al-Ani's most shadowy deed in Prague: his meeting with Atta. No one - officials, friends or otherwise - knows or is saying much about that meeting. One intelligence officer has said only that it took place in a hotel on April 8. Atta also spent a night in the Czech Republic last summer before taking a Czech Airlines flight to Newark, New Jersey. But Czech officials have not officially confirmed that any meetings with al-Ani took place then.

Speculation has arisen nonetheless about what exactly the meeting between the spy and the terrorist could have comprised - from providing fake passports or money to casually handing over plastic vials full of anthrax.

Those outspoken on the Iraqi connection and unabashed in their intentions to get Washington to turn the war toward Baghdad include former CIA chief James Woolsey, who has launched an anti-Saddam information crusade. Others, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler, who floated the theory that al-Ani handed Atta anthrax in Prague, later admitted that it was only "one of many possibilities."

The truth is that no one may ever know what the meeting was about. The fact that it took place at all deserves scrutiny.

A meeting between al-Ani and Atta would make sense for the simple reason that Al-Ani met many Arabs in his time in Prague - from his secular Iraqis to Islamisist Yemenese. It would also make sense that al-Ani, one of the best-known, most feared and respected Arabs in the region, would draw the attention of someone like Atta in nearby Hamburg, where he lived at the time, if he needed technical help for his Sept. 11 plans.

Further, and most compelling, is the common abhorrence they may have shared for the United States. Ties between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda's network continue to be unearthed, from meetings between top lieutenants to a hijacker's training camp in the Salman Pak neighborhood of Baghdad, and few doubt that Saddam would not have relished a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

But the alleged meeting between al-Ani and Atta also lacks certain logic. Why would an Iraqi spy, well-aware of his surveillance by Czech counter-intelligence agents, get anywhere near someone he knew to be planning the most horrific assault on the US in history? Of all the adjectives used to describe Saddam and his intelligence apparatus, dumb or suicidal are rarely among them. Charles Duelfer, an American who was deputy chairman of the UN agency responsible for disarming Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, said in an Associated Press interview that he doubted there was any "command relationship" between the Iraqi regime and the hijackers. "For [Saddam] to engage in something that would have a fair prospect of being traced back to him, I don't think he's willing to take that chance," Duelfer said.

Also, though they share a common enemy, Saddam and bin Laden stand at ideologically opposed ends of Islamic society. Bin Laden's associates have for years denounced Saddam for being a kafir (infidel) on the basis of his devotion to secular Arab nationalism. Saddam's Ba'ath party, derived from Abdel Nasser's vision of a socialist "greater arabia", has long been an anathema to those who claim to endorse Koranic law.

"Just because both Al-Qaeda and Baghdad are anti-American does not mean that they are allied to each other," Mark Katz, a Middle Eastern scholar at George Mason University, has written in a highly circulated essay. "It is true that ideological opponents have worked together on previous occasions - but usually not for long. One, if not both, of the parties entering such agreements almost always does so with the intention of turning on the other side later when they have achieved their common goal, if not sooner."

Katz finished: "As much as we would like to see Saddam toppled, we need to be aware that the forces in the strongest position to replace him will not necessarily be ones that will be friendly to us."

The exact details of the Atta - al-Ani meeting may never be revealed. The only ones who know for certain are the two involved. Of those, one is dead. The other, according to a friend, may bee too busy to comment. He's currently pursuing a master's degree in international relations at Baghdad University.



Rick Jervis
is an American journalist living in Prague.
He can be reached at r_jervis@hotmail.com.





This content originally appeared in the alternative weekly The Prague Pill. Launched in December 2001 by Micah Jayne and Alexander Zaitchik, the paper ceased publication in June 2003.

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