Never Mind
Michael Isikoff, whom conservatives and libertarians thought was a pretty good reporter when he was being inconvenient to Bill Clinton, says that the only story that seemed to tie the September hijackers directly to Iraq is…a load of crap.
Then, in the chaotic days after September 11, a Czech intelligence source inside Prague’s Middle Eastern community saw Atta’s picture in the media and reported that he had seen the same person meeting [Iraqi diplomat and likely spy] al-Ani at the Iraqi Embassy five months earlier. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman publicly confirmed the story to CNN during a visit to Washington last November. But the uncorroborated report, some Czechs now concede, should have generated more skepticism. “These [informants] tend to tell you what you want to believe,” says Oldrich Cerny, the former director of Czech intelligence.On closer scrutiny, however, the evidence became even less convincing. Although Atta had indeed flown from Prague to the United States in June 2000, the Czechs had placed the alleged meeting in April 2001. The FBI could find no visa or airline records showing he had left or re-entered the United States that month. The bureau does have records showing Atta was in Virginia Beach— where officials suspect he was casing U.S. naval facilities in the area - and Florida in April. “Neither we nor the Czechs nor anybody else has any information he was coming or going [to Prague] at that time,” says a U.S. official.
But intelligence officials have been reluctant to set the record straight— both out of reluctance to embarrass an allied government and because so many anti-Saddam hawks in the Bush administration had embraced the story.
No doubt Admiral Woolsey is still out there somewhere, looking for clues and reminding the dozen or so W.T. Tyler fans in the world of the pathetic Frank Dudley in Last Train From Berlin. Isikoff:
To be sure, administration hardliners aren’t ready to give up. Newsweek has learned that Pentagon analysts are still aggressively hunting for evidence that might tie Atta, or any of the other hijackers, to Saddam’s agents. It may yet turn up, but for now, at least, the much touted “Prague connection” appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.
