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Iraqi plots to kill americans { March 29 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/29/international/worldspecial/29INTE.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/29/international/worldspecial/29INTE.html
March 29, 2003
U.S. Says It Has Stopped a Plot to Attack Americans in Mideast
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, March 28 — The United States has broken up suspected plots by Iraqi intelligence agents to attack American targets in two countries in the Middle East, American officials said today. It was the first publicly disclosed effort by the United States to block Iraq from using terrorism attacks to respond to the American-led invasion.
The American officials said the Iraqi operatives had been arrested before they could carry out their attacks, which were to be conducted with conventional weapons, rather than chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.
"In both cases, operatives were arrested and terrorist material confiscated," said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher. "The planned attacks were not successful."
Officials said that one of the suspected plots was broken up in Jordan, and another in a country in the Persian Gulf that they declined to identify. Last Sunday, Jordan expelled five Iraqi diplomats, accusing them of undermining the nation's security.
The C.I.A. warned last fall that the Iraqi government might conduct terrorist operations against the United States if American forces invaded Iraq. The agency said that if the United States did begin a war to oust Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis could resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction in terrorist attacks.
American officials said that they did not see a connection between the two suspected Iraqi operations and Al Qaeda. Instead, officials believe that the operatives arrested in the two plots were working on behalf of the Iraqi intelligence service. The possibility of a terrorist alliance between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda was one of the key elements in the Bush administration's arguments for going to war against Iraq.
The American success in breaking up the apparent Iraqi plots comes after the United States had mounted a diplomatic campaign to urge as many as 60 nations to expel Iraqi diplomats in order to prevent the Baghdad regime from using its embassies as overseas staging grounds for terrorist operations. Iraqi intelligence officers, like those of other countries, operate under diplomatic cover, meaning they pose as diplomats while conducting secret intelligence operations.
The State Department's top counterterrorism official told Congress this week that there was mounting evidence that Iraq has handed over greater control of some of its embassies to its intelligence service. "We have strong indications that Iraqi intelligence officials are assuming stronger authority over Iraqi diplomatic missions overseas," the official told a House committee.
In addition to the two aborted plots in the Middle East, American officials said they have also prevented Iraqi efforts to mount terrorist attacks in several other countries, but they declined to provide details.
In the first Gulf war, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. also were successful in countering Iraq's attempts to mount terrorist operations around the world. After the war, many American intelligence officials came to believe that Mr. Hussein had largely abandoned terrorism as a tool because his intelligence service had failed to carry out a single successful terrorist operation during the war.
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