However, to my regret I blew off a series of dreams I had two days ago because I had watched a movie the night before 'Boys From Brazil' which was about Josef Mengele creating 94 clones of Hitler and he has the fathers of these adopted boys assassinated when the boys were 14 years old - following the life of Hitler and trying to recreate the life that Hitler had in order to possibly make another Hitler in one of these 94 boys.

The dreams I had following that movie were all about Joseph Mengele and multiple explosions around the country.  Now that I heard Dr. Bill Deagle's audio report, I can look back at that series of dreams and note that I may have been influence to watch 'Boys From Brazil' to trigger that series of dreams. The dream world works in mysterious ways.

You will see in the dream below that it follows the same theme, and when you read that dream followed by the words of Dr. Bill Deagle it broadens the picture a little more to show the reasons why I've been dreaming these things.

So, that said, follow along the path I've laid out for you below:

Dee
 

First see the vision I had on 7-9-99:

I saw a hand with soil on it presenting me with a white cameo like it had been dug up out of the dirt. It was very small like a charm for a bracelet. The cameo was the face of a woman looking toward the left.

I then saw a portion of a web page with the words

RED LINE (This was underlined in red)

BLUE LINE (This was underlined in blue)

That had links to another page and were very small.

Then the RED LINE (underlined in red)

BLUE LINE (underlined in blue)

flipped upside down next to a large white space and they were like attached to it but upsidedown and hanging precariously off the edge.

I spent weeks trying to figure out what that meant and couldn't come up with anything that made any sense though there are many things that it could be.

On the morning of 8-26-99 I had a dream which started out normally but symbolic and I sent it to a few people . Here is the scary part:

8-26-99

I then went to a farm house I don't know what happened to the golden girl child here, but there were other people in the house.

I went to the back door and looked outside. There was a huge apple tree right by the door. The apple tree was in full bloom and I could smell the apple blossoms. They were so sweet and beautiful pinkish white. The flowers were so large, they were almost like orchids. A female voice behind me said, "It's like this all over the world." I stood there and using my imagination, I could see the entire world covered in pinkish white apple trees, smelling like apple blossoms all at once. It was wonderful.

I looked behind the house and saw a small rain shower coming from a small white cloud. Then suddenly, warm snow began blowing across the whole area. It was like rainbow sparkly snow (not like real snow) and it covered everything.

The woman behind me said, "Here is another cloud."

A larger white cloud came over and off the edge of the cloud, over the dried, brown drought colored (light tan) field to the south of the house, poured a shower of dark heavy rain water.. It wasn't the cloud raining, this heavy dark rain water came down over the edge of the cloud, actually bending the cloud over with it's heavy weight.

When the water hit the ground, it exploded back up into the air and became a ring cloud in the sky that was white on the outside, with a huge pitch black ring on the inside and blue sky in the center... like a donut. What was worse was, that there were names of cities in the white ring part. (I couldn't read any of them) (There were about 21 cities names listed in this ring). This happened 6 more times, so there were a total of 7 ring clouds, each one with the names of 21 cities in each ring.

I woke up feeling startled.

NOTE: (The number 21 is an estimate...not an exact known number)

The Book of Joel in the Old Testament has a similar type prophecy. The Book of Joel also was clued in a previous prophecy dream in June. "The Barked Tree" THE BARKED TREE DREAM - A PROPHECY OF JOEL The book of Joel is quoted fully on this dream page.

Now see the news below I took from the web page listed:

Dee

Breaking News http://users.sedona.net/~redstone/bar.htm

July 29th, 1999

(The following is a special report unrelated to the information contained on the CUNBD web site.)

CUNBD has been in direct contact with an agent within a powerful government intelligence agency. This agent's name, address, phone number and position with this intelli-gence agency has been obtained. Other validative info has also been obtained. .

The source reveals, if not confirms, that at least 50,000 U.S. citizens are to be "rounded up" and taken to "concentration camps" by the U.S. Government in collusion with foreign governments and bodies. This may take place sometime after or during September 9th through 13th, 1999.

This mass culling of people will be conducted in raid-like fashion as "targets" are covertly taken from their homes, placed in unmarked vans, transport vehicles, and large Chinook helicopters. NATO, United Nations, and foreign troops will be used for this "round up". The people targeted will be sent to "concentration camps", in the words of the informant, where they will be killed.

Those targeted likely include militia members, anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, and so-called "patriots" and proponents of the U.S. Constitution.

This event will occur in accord with another "planned" event. Sometime during the dates of September 9th through 13th (these dates are tentative) at least ten Neutron bombs will be detonated in all major U.S. coastal cities. Cities named as targets include Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Miami.

The bombs, according to the source, were brought into the U.S. "two weeks ago", or in mid-July, through Port Arthur in Texas. This operation is being facilitated by the Russians.

However, factions of the U.S. and British governments are fully aware of it and will do nothing to stop it. In fact, in concert with the denotation of these nuclear weapons the named governments will plan for the "invasion" of a "peace-keeping" force in the U.S. These forces will also be used in Nazi-like fashion to seize dissidents and so-called "threats".

The informant mentions the "Red list", of which he and 50,000 others are included, along with the "Blue" and "Green" lists. "Those on the Red well be taken to FEMA concentration camps and immediately executed. The Blue will also be taken to FEMA camps and be given the choice between 're-education' or execution. The Green well be 're-educated' then returned to what is left of society", said the source.

The source has also indicated that various para-military personnel are currently being contracted by the Justice Department and the FBI to carry out specialized "assassinations" of key people within the militia and right-wing movements. These planned killings will begin on August 4th of this year and continue on quietly thereafter.

While much of this information has been known for years, we decided to publish it due to the fact that this information appears to be coming from a person deep within government intelligence.

Update

August 19th, 1999

The source reports more information to us:

"To my knowledge it's still scheduled on 9/11/99. However, things change. We made the move on the militia/patriot groups so public that they 'rescheduled' that heinous event. Instead, they slowly move a little closer each week by staging maneuvers. They could be rushed in September, or in October. The militias in Michigan think they will be outright attacked in October. That is what all these rainstorms and landslides are about 'up here'. All man made, and they are used as cover within which to move men, supplies, etc. closer into position. And they practice containment exercises."

We cannot vouch for the accuracy of the above claims!

Firstly, here is the dream symbolism I was given:

"I was shown that there is a political group which is highly distrusted and is known as 'THE 21". They were shown to mow their lawns in circles about 3 feet across such that the center of the circles were slightly higher than the grass around it. The cirles were mowed in perfect rows of these circles.  In a secondary view of the circles, it was like double circles linked together.  Basically, all I was shown was how they mowed their lawns. "

It wasn't until after I did my research and found some references to "THE 21" in two ways that I remembered that I had done this page about the terrorist bombings and it fit together.  The first reference that fit was an article from Great Britain about 21 groups they were prohibiting, linked to Usama Ben Ladin. The other reference was to Hizballah, which I had heard about but didn't pay any attention to in the past.

Here in the United States, we need to pay attention the 'THE 21' with reference to Usama Ben Ladin.

2001-05-03

INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST USAMA BIN LADEN ESTABLISHES NEW ARMY

According to the newspaper Pakistan Observer international terrorist Usama bin Laden has set up and financed a new 35,000-men army (Lashkar) consisting of his supporters, including Arabs, Chechens and Philippinos, reports the RIA Novosti correspondent.

According to the paper's information, Usama Bin Laden has allocated over 15 million dollars for setting up the formation of specially trained and ideologically brainwashed gunmen who are ready at any time to launch an attack against the Northern alliance forces.

A week ago, following the relative winter quiet, fighting was resumed in Afghanistan between the Northern alliance forces and the Taliban movement. Fighting was reported in the Takhan, Bamian and Baghlan provinces, as well as on the approaches to the Panjshir valley.

BASIC FACTS

Full name: Usamah bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Ladin.

Born: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the Islamic year 1377 (1957 or 1958), though some reports say he was born a few years earlier.

Education: schools in Jeddah; King Abd al-Aziz University, Jeddah (management and economics).

Status: married, with children.

The bin Laden family came originally from southern Yemen. A few of them moved north to Saudi Arabia, where they prospered and were joined by the rest of the family following British withdrawal from Aden and the Marxist takeover. Through their construction companies they became the wealthiest non-royal family in the kingdom.

During the Afghan war of the 1980s bin Laden supported the Islamic rebels' struggle against the Soviet Union. He not only paid for thousands of Muslim volunteers from the Middle East to join the mujahideen but also went there himself to fight. Using the resources of his construction business, he blasted guerrilla trails across the mountains and tunnelled into the rock to create underground hospitals and arms dumps.

In 1989 he moved to Sudan. In 1994 he was formally disowned by his Saudi relatives and stripped of his Saudi citizenship for "irresponsible activities".

He has been linked to Islamic terrorism in many countries, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Yemen.

He currently lives in Afghanistan.

Following Usama Bin Laden's Tracks

TRANSCRIPT IN PART

"Dr Bill Deagle called us early in the morning (in Australia, where we're here for the NEXUS Conference) to report a long night of visions and received information about imminent events which left him shaken to the core. We've published this call unedited and immediately. The audio quality is excellent - after the first 30 seconds, during which there's an initial sequence of Skype tones which we'll edit out soonest. If the information Bill Deagle reports is accurate then nothing could be more important.

He is an "intuitive" - and explains it.
He has had this feeling of spasms
Something is going to start on Tuesday, the 7th of October.
He sounds like he is going to cry.
He feels something very strong. He has had this happen before Oklahoma City, before 911, before Katrina, before the attack with nuclear weapons in Seshuan, China - the best way he can describe it is a NIGHT TERROR. Based on the things that happened in the last few weeks, he feels that this thing on Oct. 7th that it's economic - but he feels the people's physical pain of the survivors. It makes him shake inside.

The forces will be unleashed on the 7th in the morning.
He gets WHAT HE CALLS "Spirit knowledge" that the bailout was a "blood sacrifice". People exchange their time for money - and "all money is blood" -
Congress made this blood sacrifice to Lucifer when they approved the bailout which is a sacrifice of America and the next major event will be a false flag operation - but all he knows is the forces will be unleashed on the 7th.

He sees Martial Law coming, he sees the financial collapse, he sees empty shells, he see violence in cities and smells gunpowder, he sees troops marching, he sees blue hats, he sees black ski masks, he sees all kinds of terrorist things happening.

He sees strange signs in the heavens too! He sees a sky that's RED with clouds and objects in the sky, he is not sure what they are... strange things in the heavens.

He thinks there is a "blamed on Alqueda nuclear event in one or more cities" which is preceded by a financial collapse.

HE KNOWS THAT WHAT'S COMING IS MARTIAL LAW.
But it's to prepare us for what is coming. He says the location he is getting is in a warmer climate near the coast with massive population and it's got flat terrain. Places that fit that description top on the list is Los Angeles.

It may be the bank holiday that they said was going to happen that starts this.
He sees submarines both Russia and China coming in.
The bailout is not enough to stop the hemmoraging.

rushed4: according to what we read ... it will be stopped by the good guys Kath_NY: There will be a massive bank run. He advises people to take the money out of the bank and put it in gold and silver, food and water. There is
not ONE single event happening. Starts with financial collapse, Tuesday, followed by nuclear and then pestilence.
Kath_NY: COME ON GOOD GUYS! DO IT NOW!
rushed4: amen
Kath_NY: I'm doing this for Sharen too - she has to pay for download to hear this.
Kath_NY: I'm going to copy all that I wrote and send it to her.
Kath_NY: I'm only 1/2 way done.
rushed4: what a friend you are

Talking about the bailout - where countries are lining up to get their hands on the money.
He believes that we can change this. The worst part of this is the FEAR.
The dark "drinks it for their energy".

rushed4: we will change it

There is a connection with the highest realms that is helping him bring this forward.
He worked inside the "lettered agencies"
He thinks the run on the banks will start in Europe. Then the small banks will start and it will start rolling. He has seen there are two perimeter zones around every city... they will use conventional weapons as well as crowd
control things like pepper spray. The GRID will go down when they close methods of escape.
They will be foreign troops such as Blackwater - who will be about 30 miles out from the cities. They have pepper spray type thing that will take down thousands of people at once.
Store shelves will be completely cleared within 3 hours. But water will be shut off too. Have things you can barter with. Get ready for pestilence, radiation burns and keep in touch with spirit. Primarily exit the large cities going west, north, or south but NOT East.

The plans to LOCK DOWN everyone from the border of Canada has been put into place as of 2003. This is not in his vision - he knows of this.
Mass starvation is going to start this winter. Cloned foods will break down the biology of the people that will make them very weak. There are clones that have escaped from underground labs in Mexico.

rushed4: hmmmmmmmmm, sounds pleasant
Kath_NY: this is the best part - you'll like this

They are trying to convince us that we have no control. We have to rise up above this. He is not about spreading "fear" - but through our inaction we are giving permission to proceed. We should be protesting against the
bailout on Monday morning as a people. DO NOT DRINK IN FEAR - even when we see events starting to transpire. Start being pro-active. Start taking personal events and spiritual events seriously.

You need to take action with your speaking voice. All the prophets would speak when they knew of something coming.

THAT'S JUST ABOUT IT as the internet connection just went down as it ended.

End of broadcast and comments
 

Will the British ban seriously affect the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's support operations from Europe?

Rohan Gunaratna

HE recommendation by Home Secretary Jack Straw to proscribe 21 international "terrorist" groups was approved by the British Parliament recently. The Asian groups proscribed under the new Terrorism Act 2000 were the Al-Qa'ida (Usama Bin Laden network, or UBL network), the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF), the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), the Harkatul Mujahideen (HM), the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JM), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

An anti-LTTE demonstration by hardliners in Colombo caricaturing Norwegian and British standpoints on the question of terrorism, in a photograph taken ahead of the British proscription of the LTTE.

All these groups have built rudimentary to extensive terrorist support infrastructure in the United Kingdom, primarily to advance their political aims and to raise funds for political and military activities. Among these groups, the LTTE has established a network in the U.K. for carrying out state-of-the-art propaganda, raising funds, training cadre and procuring and shipping weapons.

The list of groups was developed by the Home Office after consultations with the internal and external intelligence and security agencies - the MI5 and the MI6 - and the Special Branch of the police. It considered six factors: the nature and scale of the group, its activities, the specific threat it poses to the U.K., the specific threat it poses to British nationals overseas, the extent of the organisation's presence in the U.K., and the need to support other members of the international community in the global fight against terrorism.

All the 21 groups participated in terrorist activity. They attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure in order to achieve political change. The bulk of the groups attacked foreign nationals or foreign interests, including British human and physical targets. For instance, 17 November assassinated the British Defence Attache in Greece, and the Harkatul Mujahideen murdered British tourists in Kashmir. Most of the groups operated in the U.K. through front, cover and sympathetic organisations, carried out propaganda and raised funds. For instance, the LTTE operated through 40 affiliates, such as the United Tamil Organisation, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, the Tamil Centre for Human Rights and the Tamil Information Centre.

Sathasivam Krishnakumar alias Kittu, the former 'commander' of the LTTE, who established the organisation's "international secretariat" in London in 1990. He later moved to France and then to Switzerland and was thereafter killed in a mid-sea confrontation with the Indian Navy in 1993.

Some of these groups, notably the Asian groups, generated funds voluntarily or by intimidating their diaspora and migrant communities. Others are engaged in credit card fraud, trafficking in narcotics and kidnapping. According to the U.K. police, some groups operating through front, cover or sympathetic organisations applied for and received funds from several charities and foundations purportedly for welfare and humanitarian projects. The LTTE, for instance, received grants from borough councils and the national lotteries charities board. Some of the funds generated by the LTTE were monitored and found to have been feeding procurement accounts. The more sophisticated groups, including the LTTE, engaged in legitimate trade, businesses and investments. The LTTE has invested in the gold trade, the film industry, export-import business and in the sale of phone cards.

The LTTE raised up to £ 2 million to £ 3 million a year in the U.K. The bulk of it came from segments of the Sri Lankan Tamil community whose strength in the U.K. is estimated at 120,000; they were subjected to sustained LTTE propaganda primarily disseminated by its offices and cells in the U.K. The LTTE fund collectors visited the homes and workplaces of Sri Lankan Tamils, especially the new arrivals, and demanded a mandatory payment of £ 200-300 each. While part of the funds were laundered in the U.K., the other part was transferred out for military and dual technology procurement.

THE Terrorism Act aims to suppress the support to and encouragement and promotion of domestic and international terrorism. The Act replaces the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974, which was developed mainly to control the Irish terrorist groups. The need for a new law arose because the methods of operation of the terrorist groups dramatically changed in the 1980s and the 1990s. Sathasivam Krishnakumar alias Kittu established the international secretariat of the LTTE in London in 1990. After the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the U.K. authorities served Kittu a quit notice on the grounds that he engaged in extortion of funds from Tamils living in the country. Kittu moved to France, and then to Switzerland, where he lived for a year before boarding the LTTE arms ship m.v. Ahat (also known as Yahata), which was interdicted by the Indian Navy in January 1993. (He died in a mid-sea confrontation on January 14; Frontline, February 12, 1993.)

The misuse of U.K. soil by terrorist leaders is best illustrated by Kittu's activities. He played a critical role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi - he coordinated some of the logistics for Sivarajan, the operations commander of the assassination team. Over the phone, Kittu (who was in Chennai during the International Peace-Keeping Force episode) made arrangements for Sivarajan's stay in Chennai and got some Indian nationals to assist in the assassination plan. Furthermore, Kittu indirectly helped draw up the modus operandi of the assassination. Operating from the U.K., he dispatched the famous video "Death Wish II" through the LTTE's clandestine office in Chennai and thereafter by boat to Jaffna. It showed a beautiful woman presenting a bouquet to a world leader and then assassinating him by activating the explosives strapped to her body.

After Kittu's expulsion from the U.K., the LTTE continued to maintain its secretariat in London but ensured that its head resided outside the country. Kittu was succeeded by John Christian Chrysosthom alias Lawrence Tilagar, also a military-trained LTTE cadre who was based in Paris. In late 1996, Tilagar was succeeded by V. Manoharan, an LTTE activist based in Paris, who was fined 120,000 francs and convicted by the French authorities for possession of heroin. Manoharan remains the head of the international secretariat.

The U.K., along with other affluent countries, emerged as a major centre for disseminating terrorist propaganda, raising funds, recruiting and training cadre and procuring and shipping weapons and dual technology in the 1990s.

LTTE leaders such as Tharmalingam Shanmugam Kumaran alias Kumaran Pathmanthan, the chief procurement officer of the LTTE, visited the U.K.

As a response to such transnational developments that threatened international security and stability, the United Nations formulated a convention on the suppression of the financing of terrorism. The U.K. is a signatory to the convention. With terrorist groups harnessing the advantages of globalisation and becoming increasingly mobile, the U.K. decision is likely to set a trend for countries of the Commonwealth and the European Union to suppress foreign terrorist presence on their soil. Many governments affected by the activities of transnational terrorist groups from their countries have saluted the U.K. for having developed a list of terrorist organisations.

The ruthlessness of the LTTE and its formidable presence in the U.K. are the factors that influenced the U.K. government to include the LTTE in the list of proscribed organisations. But some elements in the Sri Lankan government tried to take credit for the proposed proscription. In reality, there has been grave failure on the part of the Sri Lankan intelligence agencies to provide the U.K. authorities with the kind of high-grade intelligence required for linking U.K.-raised funds to terrorism in Sri Lanka, which is essential to prosecute LTTE activists in the U.K. The failure stems from the current Sri Lankan government's politicisation of the intelligence apparatus in 1995 by replacing its professionals with novices. The internal and external intelligence directorates of Sri Lanka are currently headed by retired officers. The Sri Lankan intelligence apparatus is plagued by inefficiency, inter-agency rivalry, bureaucratic control by the Ministry of Defence, the pressure to gather political intelligence and the lack of coordination with the security forces and the foreign service.

The capacity of the Sri Lankan state to counter the LTTE's international propaganda suffered when Ravinatha Ariyasinghe, the head of the Foreign Ministry's publicity division, was transferred on political grounds. It is not unusual for Sri Lankan politicians to compromise national and strategic interests for short-term gains, political and personal. The self-destruction of the anti-LTTE propaganda cell at a time when the U.K. decided to proscribe the LTTE prevented the Sri Lankan government from effectively lobbying other countries to follow the U.K. example.

In the backdrop of these problems, the West has been slow in taking substantive action against the LTTE. The toleration of terrorist groups by Western governments has led to the growth and expansion of their influence as in the case of the LTTE. For years, the U.K. government informed Sri Lanka that its agencies were monitoring the LTTE's activities on its soil. Like Sri Lanka several countries suffered because of terrorists abusing the U.K.'s hospitality to plan, prepare and conduct their operations from London. For instance, when the LTTE's operational cells in Colombo were hard pressed for cash, the U.K. unit transferred funds to its operatives in the Sri Lankan capital.

The intelligence and security community of the U.K. favoured the idea of permitting these groups to conduct their operations openly, stating that British human and technical mechanisms were monitoring them. With reports of terrorists buying armaments and technologies from the U.K. as well as using it as a base for procurement operations, the authorities realised the difficulty of effectively monitoring foreign terrorist groups based in London. The British government did not give priority to monitoring the LTTE and Indian terrorist groups. As most Asian groups used the U.K. only to conduct support operations, the West Asian groups were considered the most important by the security and intelligence agencies.

The LTTE procured 60 tonnes of high explosives from the Rubezone chemical plant in Ukraine using funds raised in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland and Canada. Sothilingam Shantha-kumar, a Sri Lankan Tamil with a British passport, visited Ukraine and initiated the purchase after paying £ 40,000. The LTTE used the explosives to destroy or damage the Central Bank in 1996, the World Trade Centre in 1997, and the Temple of the Tooth in 1998. The explosives from the consignment continue to kill thousands of civilians and soldiers while Sothilingam Shanthakumar continues to sit in Eelam House, the LTTE's office in London, not far away from the Guys Hospital.

Using their freedom to operate openly in the U.K., the terrorist groups set up fronts to disseminate information to politicise, radicalise and mobilise the diaspora and migrants who had left the conflict zones. They also built lobbying capability in the host countries and mobilised public support for political and violent terrorist activities. The LTTE established the International Broadcast-ing Corporation (IBC) in Vauxhall, London, which continues to transmit LTTE information worldwide.

These LTTE fronts were so bold and deceptive that they even approached the government of Sri Lanka and its organs for funds. The IBC's directors nearly duped a former Sri Lankan High Commissioner, S.K. Wickramasinghe, in London into authorising the grant of government funds. Fortunately, the High Commission's information councillor Aruna Kulatunge presented sufficient evidence to block the transfer of funds.

THE Terrorism Act has been criticised by a few U.K.-based terrorist-infiltrated human rights organisations and a few British politicians. British politicians dependent on the migrant vote are susceptible to pressure from some migrant constituencies to speak against the Act. Terrorist groups with influence over these migrant communities are known to have approached politicians and promised them several thousand votes in return for their support in Parliament.

The proscription of terrorist groups is compatible with the criminal justice system of the U.K. and both the European and international human rights conventions. There is a provision for any proscribed terrorist group or any person affected by the proscription to make an application to the Home Secretary against the step. If the application is rejected, the organisation or individual can appeal to a newly created independent tribunal - the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission.

Throughout the 1990s, many foreign governments, including India, protested against or expressed concern over London turning into a safe haven for terrorist groups. Except a few, the terrorist groups did not stage attacks on U.K. soil but used it as a base for their operations. International pressure on the U.K. to produce a list of terrorist groups increased after the United States State Department released a list of 28 (adding two later) in October 1997.

The governments of Canada and Europe are likely to follow suit. Australia, Canada, France and Switzerland remain major centres for terrorist support activity. These countries, signatories to the U.N. Convention on the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism of 2000, are developing similar legislation.

IN the 21st century, organised crime and globalised terrorism have become major threats to national and international security. In the post-Cold War period, many ragtag groups have become sophisticated by using communication and travel facilities which have become less expensive, and small arms which are readily available. Using porous borders, they challenge the security of many nation states. Furthermore, with the creation of transnational offices and cells, these groups have begun to threaten not only their target states but also their neighbours. Today, the LTTE poses considerable threat to Sri Lankan and South Indian security. Despite being proscribed in India, Malaysia and the U.S., the group continues to operate in these countries, often with the support of corrupt political leaders and bureaucrats.

By examining how terrorist groups operate in countries where they are banned, terrorist behaviour after proscription can be predicted. They are likely to go underground and conduct their support activities. By infiltrating human rights, humanitarian, cultural and political organisations or setting up new ones, they are likely to continue with their support operations. As such, the U.K. authorities will have to see whether the groups have infiltrated any existing organisations or set up new front organisations. The proscribed groups are likely to hire lawyers and challenge the proscription. The LTTE has informed the U.K. authorities that its proscription will hamper future peace negotiations with the Sri Lankan government. The British authorities have reminded the LTTE that the U.K. and Spanish governments have negotiated with terrorist organisations even after their proscription, the Irish Republican Army and Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna respectively. Intelligence assessments by several governments reveal that the LTTE is not serious about peace negotiations and only wishes to have a period of peace so that it can regroup, rearm and retrain its cadre.

The U.K. proscription has made the LTTE and others criminal groups and restricted their activity and mobility in the country. Although the proscription will increase the immediate and mid- term threat to British security, it will reduce the long-term threat. As foreign terrorist groups often learn from one another and occasionally pass on technologies and concepts to domestic terrorist groups, outlawing and disrupting their presence in London will enhance international security in the long term. As terrorist groups are revengeful, the British government is likely to witness terrorist attacks and possible cooperation between the Irish terrorist groups and foreign groups in the immediate and medium term.

Proscription of these groups will legally empower the U.K. authorities to disrupt foreign terrorist infrastructure and prosecute terrorists and their supporters. However, they are unlikely to attack, erode and destroy foreign terrorist support networks on British soil immediately. Unless a foreign terrorist group directly attacks a host government and a host society, that government is unlikely to mount a sustained course of action against the group for fear of earning its wrath.

The U.K. proscription will affect the LTTE's image rather than hamper its support operations. By exploiting the freedoms enshrined in the constitutions of Western countries, the LTTE has built a significant support infrastructure in the rest of Europe. It has begun to shift much of its infrastructure in the U.K. to France and Switzerland. The LTTE is a textbook example of how contemporary terrorist groups behave. To compensate for the loss of one safe haven, it is likely to find another in the neighbouring environment.

Terrorism

The ending of the cold war has dramatically changed the world security environment.

In the 1990's there has been only two interstate wars- Peru and Equador and Iraq and Kuwait- compared to 61 intrastate conflicts. The resurgence of ethnic and religious groups have altered the behaviors of insurgent groups.

With increased globalization, international terrorism is fast emerging as the new threat to world order.

Today, No state can secure its own security without developing cooperative and collective security agreements with its neighbours, if not the region.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fighting for a separate ethnically cleansed Tamil enclave in Sri Lanka, has emerged as one of the most ruthless and dangerous Terrorist groups in the World.

The LTTE receives or derives, sanctuary, finance, weapons, and training from other governments, non governmental organizations and individuals from across the globe.

They have their investments, lawyers, ships, armies and missiles. They tap resources and expertise from a range of sources.

A bulk of their war budget is raised in the West and a bulk of the weapons and explosives used to kill and maim hundreds of men, women and children are also produced in the West.

The LTTE fund their terrorist activities by defrauding western social security systems, extorting money from individuals and businesses, drug trafficking, supplying arms to other terrorist groups for cash, smuggling illegal immigrants into the west for cash and raising funds and obtaining grants by stating that the money is for poor refugees or to adopt orphaned children.

More recently they have been using various housing and educational grants awarded by various central, local and non governmental bodies to syphon off funds to finance terrorism.

The Tamil Tiger Terrorists and their sympathizers often disseminate falsehoods to gain sympathy in the West. In the WEB there are instructions to Tamil Tiger sympathizers as to how they should answer questions asked by Westerners about the Sri Lankan situation. We are pleased to present the following information to clarify the facts relating to the Sri Lankan situation.

Tiger International

by Anthony Davis

Cover story: Sri Lanka

Selvarajah Padmanathan is every immigration official's walking nightmare. An inconspicuous man of medium height and build, the 41-year-old Sri Lankan carries several passports, changes names frequently and has access to multiple bank accounts across the globe. He also has an impressive facility for forging documents.

Using the alias T.S. Kumaran, but better I known simply as "KP," Padmanathan works in a high-pressure job that demands the skills of a businessman, banker and smuggler. Head of a transnational team, he has the job of supplying a l0,000- strong guerrilla army—the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—with the hardware to wage a war that has already claimed over 50,000 lives. Before "KP" retires, the Tamil Tigers' struggle will almost certainly claim thousands more.

For over a decade, Padmanathan has stayed at least one jump ahead of his trackers. Last year he was sighted in Phnom Penh and Bangkok. Today he might be negotiating a shipment of Chinese rocket-launchers with a friendly Australian arms dealer in a five-star Hong Kong hotel. Next week he may be discussing the price of silence with a Thai customs official in a Phuket restaurant.

One thing is certain: KP's job is not getting easier. The Tigers, who since 1983 have campaigned for an independent state in the north and east of Sri Lanka, are now fighting with their backs to the wall. Having lost their capital of Jaffna in a major reverse last December, they have since been squeezed out of the entire Jaffna peninsula, which for five years they ran as a rebel mini-state. And Sri Lanka's Army shows no signs of easing the pressure: since early this month, government troops have hit hard at long-time Tiger bases in eastern Trincomalee and Batticaloa districts.

The increasingly bloody tempo of the war has thrown into sharper focus than ever the international dimension of the LTTE. A complex, shadowy network developed over more than a decade, it mirrors the sophistication of the quasi-governmental structure built by the Tigers in Sri Lanka itself. Drawing on the loyalties and resources of members of a global Tamil diaspora, the network—call it LTTE International Inc.—links commercial companies and small businesses, informal banking channels, a fleet of ships, political offices, aid and human rights organizations, arms dealers and foreign mercenaries.

Led by its 41-year-old supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran the Tigers have become far more than a jungle army in an isolated war. "The LTTE functions like a multinational corpora- tion with resources all over the world," notes one former Tamil militant. "Prabhakaran' s acumen is as much that of a CEO as of a military commander. He knows whom to use for what."

The transnational and often secretive presence of the LTTE and its front organizations is increasingly unsettling governments in Asia and the West. Goaded by Colombo, countries including Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines have expressed concern in recent months over LTTE activities—and in some cases moved against them.

Broadly, say analysts, LTTE International functions on three distinct levels: publicity and propaganda, arms procurement, and fundraising. While the networks overlap to some extent, opentionally they remain separate. The public face of the LTTE is best associated with Lawrence Thilakar, a Jaffna- born Tamil and graduate of Jaffna University who joined the movement in the early 1980s. Soft-spoken in gold-rimmed glasses, the mustachioed Thilakar might be mistaken fbr a university lecturer. But like Prabhakaran in Sri Lanka's northern jungles or Padmanathan in the arms bazaars of East Asia, he is fighting a war no less important for the realization of the Tigers' goals.

For the most part, Thilakar operates from an LTTE office of five in a nondescript Paris apartment block. The spartan room is decorated with posters of Prabhakaran in military fatigues and calendars featuring color pictures of Tamil children killed by government bombing. For years he has traveled widely, repeating a tireless message: victims of discrimination and military oppression, Sri Lanka's Tamil minority can never coexist with the island's dominant Sinhalese majority. Until the Tamils, led by the LTTE, are granted their own homeland, he says, peace is impossible. "The basic blunder on the part of the [Sri Lanka] government is assuming that the Tamil people and the LTTE are different things," Thilakar says. "But the LTTE is the only party struggling for the rights and self-determination of the Tamil people. Other militant parties have given up those ideas."

Thilakar operates at the apex of a quasi-diplomatic organization that composes 38 offices globally. Aside from centers in leading Western states with large Tamil communities, the Tigers are represented in countries as far-flung as Norway and Botswana. The LTTE also works through sympathetic umbrella groups such as the Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations and the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils.

The war for international hearts and minds is conducted at a level of sophistication far more advanced than anything Colombo has reached. Diplomatic missions and news organizations receive daily faxes detailing—albeit selectively —battlefield reports transmitted by satellite phone , links. The LTTE puts out slick videos projecting in , gut-churning detail the results of government air strikes (while editing out LTTE military units the planes are trying to target.) And it uses the Intenet both as a propaganda tool and a means to appeal for funds. On one Eelam page, the reclusive Velupillai Prabhakaran—a man with the record of a ruthless and single-minded autocrat—emerges as a lover of literature and a patron of the arts.

By contrast, the Tigers' arms-procurement network has always been shrouded in secrecy. No lessglobal in its reach than the propaganda wing, it has been painstakingly built up since 1983 and is backed by tens of millions of dollars. At its foundation is Velvettiturai, a sun-bleached fishing port on the north coast of the Jaffna peninsula, colloquially known as VVT. Birthplace of Prabhakaran, it has long been the center of a web of Asia-wide LTTE commercial, maritime and smuggling contacts. For centuries the traders of VVT—from a dis- tinct Tamil seafaring caste—crisscrossed the Bay of Bengal, venturing as far as the South China Sea and Java. With the gaining of independence in 1948, some became smugglers ferrying contraband across the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. "Even before the days of armed struggle VVT had a problem with the army, the police and the state," says Thavarajah, a former Tamil militant who is now a politician. "There was an antagonism, an attitude of resistance. It was inbred in anyone who grew up there."

In the early years of the Tamil militancy, VVT provided the LTTE and its forerunner, the Tamil New Tigers, with both leaders and a marked logistical edge over other militant groups. Even before the bloody anti-Tamil riots in July 1983 that pushed the island into open insurgency, the LTTE had established links in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Between 1983 and 1987 these expanded dramatically as Tndia provided sanctuary, training and weapons for a clutch of Sri Lankan militant factions.

Still, Prabhakaran remained suspicious of Indian motives and the extent of New Delhi's commitment to his own vision of an independent Eelam. Never a favorite of Tndia's external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Prabhakaran began to develop contacts with local politicians and businessmen. That led to the setting up of the first independent arms-manufacturing plants both in Tamil Nadu and on the Jaffna peninsula.

Prabhakaran also began to look abroad for equipment and turned first to VVT commercial contacts in Singapore for help in buying radios. "Prabhakaran thought like any good merchant capitalist from VVT," recalls one militant. "He registered a company in Singapore, invested in Malaysia, started a shipping company in Cyprus, played the share- market in London."

But it was KP who focused on setting up a department specializing in document forging and extending the international network. In 1984, he organized one of the LTTE' s early weapons purchases with an Australian arms dealer who was to remain a trusted business partner. Early shipments were run to India and from there moved in speed boats across the Palk Strait to Jaffna or the northeast coast.

Between 1985 and 1986 the LTTE phased out chartered vessels and allegedly with the help of Pratima Das, a Bombay shipping magnate, began to buy its own ocean-going vessels. The fleet—which today numbers five or six small freighters —was registered under Panamanian, Honduran or Liberian flags, crewed often by VVT Tamils and owned by various front companies. " ninety percent of the time they were transporting legitimate commercial goods: timber, paddy or fertilizer," says Rohan Gunaratna, a noted Sri Lankan authority on the Tigers. "The ships are just one of the LTTE' s commercial ventures."

Then as today Singapore, strategically situated on key shipping lanes with a developed banking infrastructure, was a central hub in the LTTE's weapons-purchasing network. And Yangon, where Prabhakaran's grandfather had owned property, was an early port of call for LTTE freighters. Parallel with the ships came Tiger trading companies established by Padmanathan and associates in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Yangon, Dhaka, Chittagong and elsewhere. "In the mid- Eighties; [the LTIE network] was coming along slowly," says one Sri Lanka analyst. "They had the assistance of the Indians and were getting stuff themselves. It was in the late Eighties Sea that it went into a gallop."

As Prabhakaran had foreseen, that gallop was spurred on by changes in Indian policy toward Sri Lanka. While eager for a federalist solution to the conflict, New Delhi had no desire to see an independent Tamil state on the island, which would have inevitable repercussions on Tamil Nadu state politics. In July 1987, the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord was signed, and Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) troops arrived in northern Sri Lanka. By October, they were involved in a war with the Tigers that was to last until their humiliating withdrawal February 1990. Within months of their departure, the India- backed Tamil National Army collapsed in the face of LTTE attacks and Prabhakaran's domination over the Tamil movement was complete.

The LTTE IPKF war left a deep scar on the institutional psyche not only of the proud Indian Army but also of the intel- ligence service, RAW. "They felt cheated," recalled one senior Tamil militant. "They thought they could control the LTTE, and that was a fatal mistake." There were also practical reasons for RAW' s antagonism. Despite the war in Sri Lanka, the LTTE still ran an extensive network of businesses in Tamil Nadu aided by then chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi, who was dismissed by New Delhi in early 1991. Moreover, in 1990 the Tigers also opened contacts with two Indian insur- gent forces, one in Assam in the northeast, the other in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

But ties to Indian rebels paled beside the act that many close observers argue was Prabhakaran's greatest blunder. On May 21, 1991, Dhanu, an LTTE human-bomb, destroyed herself and Rajiv Gandhi, scion of India’s foremost political dynasty. Prompted both by anger over Gandhi's role in the IPKF intervention and fears that he might move against the LTTE should he return to power, the killing propelled Tiger terrorism onto international radar. It also finally hardened the resolve of India' s security and intelligence establishment against the machine it had helped to create.

It was a sea change. Prior to 1991, the LTTE's activities were of only passing interest to Western or Asian nations. That indifference was reinforced by Colombo's appalling human-rights record and the perception in the West of the Tamil guerrillas as underdogs. Gandhi's killing, however, resulted in a sweeping crackdown on LTTE networks in Tamil Nadu. It also pushed the Tigers into a covert war with RAW, one of Asia's largest intelligence services. India's official line then, as now, was one of non-interference in Sri Lankan affairs. But RAW's covert agenda was to check the LTTE at every possible turn. "There's a RAW campaign against us everywhere," says an angry Thilakar. "RAW is doing the Colombo government' s work for it." By the early 1990s, Padmanathan had substantially diversified the LTTE's arms network. Sources that in the early days relied on West Asian and European dealers—with end-user certificates often obtained from pliable Nigerian officials extended their reach to cover Southeast Asia and Pakistan's booming Afghan arms bazaar. LTTE operatives appear to have had no problems operating in Pakistan. To the extent that Islamabad's security services were aware of their presence, any enemy of India was a friend of Pakistan.

KP himself was spending a lot of time in Bangkok, where a large South Asian community and easy-going Thai ways made for a conducive operating environment. An important LTTE cell was established on the Andaman coast in the Thai town of Trang before it was shifted north to a front company in Phuket. Deals with global arms dealers were also put together in Hong Kong, while Singapore became the favored market for the purchase of "dual-use" items such as computers, electronics, out- board motors and diving gear.

But it was in Myanmar where the Tigers found their cosiest home away from home. LTTE vessels are believed to have begun shipping timber from Myanmar to Thailand in the late 1980s, a line ol business that soon brought them into contact with the Myanmar military. Some time after mid-1990, the contacts resulted in the establishment of an LTTE. base at the small town of Twantay, in the Irrawaddy delta south of Yangon. At the very least, the base is understood to have consisted of a communications and transshipment facility.

Whether the Myanmar military junta as a whole was aware of the situation remains unclear. But analysts doubt that the Yangon Command's military chief, Lt.- Gen. Myo Nyunt, could have been ignorant. European intelligence sources are said to have blown the whistle on the Twantay base. Following protests from Sri Lanka, the facility was quietly closed down last year. Since then, an embarrassed junta has scrambled to assure aggrieved Sri Lankans that the goings- on in the Irrawaddy delta had in fact never occurred.

Twantay was not the only door to close after the Tigers departed. For months, the LTTE made use of an island in the Andaman Sea to train their Sea Tiger naval wing. According to intelligence sources, Norwegian mercenaries assisted in the training of Tiger frogmen in underwater demolition techniques. The Tigers returned to Sri Lanka to teach other fighters whose skills were later displayed in the sinking of a string of Sri Lankan naval vessels.

Gaining an effective anti-aircraft capability—specifically surface-to-air missiles—was another LTTE objective. Tiger guerrillas had training in the use of SAMs courtesy of a RAW course in 1985. But India had been careful never to release missiles to their Tamil pro- teges. Initial efforts to acquire Stingers from the Afghan war-theater proved abortive. It was not until 1994 that KP was able to get his hands on Soviet- made SA-7s. The missiles are believed to have been sold by corrupt Cambodian generals and transported across the Thai border in late 1994. The weapons reached the Sri Lanka coast well before the Tigers resumed hostilities on the island in April 1995. The SA-7s were used to down two aging Avro transport planes on April 28 and 29.

Explosives have also been needed for the LTTE s local munitions production. Traditionally these were shipped across the Palk Strait from India. But even before the anti-LTTE crackdown in Tarnil Nadu, demand for more sophisticated weapons was pushing the LTTE farther afield. The largest single consignment to arrive in Sri Lanka came even as the LTTE was ostensibly talking peace with the government in mid-1994.

In August of that year, an LTTE vessel later identified as M.V. Swanee left the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Nikolayev. It carried 50 tons of TNT and 10 tons of RDX explosives. The consignment had been arranged by a Dhaka front company, Carlton Trading, and the paperwork was up to usual LTTE standards. An end-user certificate purportedly signed by Bangladesh's secretary for defense indicated its military as the approved recipient.

The Swanee arrived off the north- eastern Sri Lanka coast in September, having called at Twantay en route. By that time the ship had a different name. Protected by Sea Tiger speed boats, its deadly cargo was off-loaded and transferred to several jungle bases. Some of the Ukrainian RDX was put to horrific use on Jan. 31 this year: a truck-bomb exploded out- side the Central Bank building in Colombo killing 91 and injuring over 1,400. It was one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history.

But improved intelligence work and stepped-up Indian and Sri Lankan naval patrols have complicated KP's work and cost the LTTE several vessels. One was the M.V. Yahata, which left Phuket in January 1993. By then, the Thai port had become a focus of Indian intelligence interest. (One submarine understood to be Indian had been sighted from the air near the harbor apparently spying on shipping activity.) On board the Yahata—along with a shipment of arms and explosives— was Krishnakumar Sathasivam. Better known as "Kittu," he was the former LTTE Jaffna commander and a close Prabha- karan associate. In the Bay of Bengal, the M.V. Yahata became M.V. Ahat by the simple expedient of painting over the first and last letters in the ship's name. But on Jan. 13, it was intercepted by the Indian Navy and three days later, at a point 700 km southeast of Madras, the final act was played out. Kittu and other Tigers aboard permitted the crew to swim for safety, then detonated explosives on board and went down with the ship.

The biggest LTTE maritime disaster, however, occurred earlier this year. A shipment of weapons, ammunition and explosives believed to have been purchased from Cambodia and worth several million dollars left the port of Phuket in early February aboard the freighter Comex-Joux 3. At sea, in line with LTTE standard procedure, the vessel changed its name to Horizon. But a tip from Western sources in Thailand had already blown the game. On its journey across the Bay of Bengal, the freighter was tracked by the Indian Navy and Orissa-based spy planes of the Aviation Research Center, a RAW sister organization. It was intercepted by Indian naval vessels off Sri Lanka's east coast. On Feb. 14, as the Indians stood guard, Sri Lankan Puccara attack fighters and patrol boats moved in for the kill.

After the heavy Jaffna fighting of late 1995 in which around 600 Tigers were killed, the loss of the Comex-Joux could hardly have come at a worse time. "They expended a hell of a lot of ammunition in the second half of '95," notes one Western military analyst in Colombo. "The loss of that ship was significant." Replacing those munitions and maintaining the Tiger war machine in the field will hinge inevitably on funds raised from an international Tamil diaspora of 450,000 to 500,000. Following the loss of a substantial population and taxation base on the Jaffna Peninsula, the LTTE's international funding is today more important than ever. The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora is concentrated mainly in North America, Western Europe and Australia. Some 140,000 Tamils live in Canada alone, over 85% in the Toronto area. And almost everywhere, political mobilization and the collection of financial donations is a monopoly of the LTTE.

Studies in various countries suggest that expatriate Tamils part with their money for several reasons. Many are, or have been, believers in the Tiger prescription of a separate state as the only long-term solution to their grievances. The war and atrocities committed in the past by Sinhalese security forces have only reinforced that perception.

Some, often illegal migrants or asylum seekers on the fringes of an alien society, see in the well-entrenched LTTE a form of insurance. For others, fear—either for themselves or for relatives in LTTE-controlled areas—is a powerful incentive to aid the cause. "Collection is often a form of blackmail," notes one Sri Lankan analyst. "It might be: we know your mother is on the [Jaffna] peninsula, so pay up".

Hard-knuckle extortion seems to have played a part in LTTE fundraising in Switzerland, where there are some 23,000 Sri Lankan Tamils. According to LTTE sources, Tamil donors are coaxed to part with $40 to $80 each month. Encouragement does not always stop at friendly chats. Following a spate of violent incidents, including several murders, Swiss police finally moved. A nationwide roundup in the early hours of April 10 netted 15 suspects including the LTTE's Swiss chief Nadarajah Muralidaran. He and others are charged with extortion and threats of violence. "Before, there were allegations by . never any witnesses prepared to go public," one Swiss official told Asiaweek. "That now seems to be changing."

In addition to direct donations, LTTE coffers also benefit from investments in small Tamil-run businesses. In many cases these operate on a system of ownership by proxy in which the initial investment is made by the Tigers and profits are subsequently split between the party and the business's ostensible owner. This type of operation is favored in Tamil Nadu. Despite a crackdown in the state the LTTE is, as one Tamil politician puts it, "still doing very well financially."

Rough estimates of the LTTE's monthly revenues are telling. From Switzerland, best guesses are that the Tigers bank $660,000 monthly. In Canada, officers of the Asian Crime Task Force have calculated the Tigers pull in around upto $730,000 monthly. In Britain, sources estimate a monthly income of around $390,000. Says Sri Lankan scholar Rohan Gunaratna: "It's fair to say the LTTE is making at least $2 million per month. And this year over 60% of their income is probably coming from abroad."

Almost inevitably, accusations of drug-running have become a contentious piece of the LTTE's financial jigsaw. In the increasingly hard-fought propaganda war waging between Colombo and the Tigers, the government has not hesitated to claim the L1TE owes its rise in large measure to the Asian heroin trade. "Collection of money from Tamil expatriate sources is insignificant compared to income from narcotics," asserts one senior Sri Lankan diplomat.

Other analysts point to the well-established nexus between international narcotics and arms trafficking. "The fastest and easiest money in this region is drug money,' notes a Bangkok-based analyst of the trade. "And the Tigers would be in a privileged position to move drugs given their transport network." The same analyst also points to close personal ties between leading Myanmar narcotics traders and senior mili- tary figures with whom the LTTE is likely to have had contact.

But hard evidence implicating the and its leadership I in narcotics has been conspicuously lacking. Undisputed is that in the late 1980s Tamil expatriates and asylum seekers emerged as important movers of Afghan and Pakistani heroin via India and West Asia to Europe. Many were arrested and jailed, notably in Italy, and many had contacts with a range of Tamil militant groups including the LTTE. Indeed, one former militant told Asiaweek his first arms-buying visit to Pakistan in 1984 had been in the company of Tamil heroin smugglers.

None of that, though, has served convincingly to indict the LTTE as an organization engaged in the narcotics trade today. Indeed, some governments see Colombo as playing up the drug issue to elicit aid and cooperation for its anti-LTTE struggle. "The government is looking for any hook to get us more engaged," says one Colombo-based diplomat. "They're after the international community to provide the silver bullet."

Nevertheless, international perspectives on the war in Sri Lanka are undoubtedly shifting. In one sense, the LTTE—an uncompromising product of a liberation ideology that grew to maturity at the height of the Cold War—is being overtaken by a transformed global environment. "There's been a significant change in perceptions particularly in countries like Canada and Australia that have big Tamil constituencies," reflects the Western diplomat. "In the past they've been supportive or at least even-handed. That' s definitely changed "

The Tigers mostly have themselves to thank for that. While not all countries are comfortable with Colombo's characterization of the LTTE as a "terrorist organization," recent actions have done nothing to win hearts and minds. If Rajiv Gandhi's murder was Prabhakaran's first great blunder, the unilateral terminating of peace talks and return to war in April 19, 1995, was surely the second. "In many Western countries, the theory that the Sri Lankan government and security forces were hell-bent on genocide held good until April 19," reflects former army commander Lt.- Gen. Gerry de Silva. "But that day was a water- shed."

Then came the globally televised carnage of the Colombo Central Bank bombing, another almost-incomprehensible misstep in the battle for international sympathy. As a result, many governments are increasingly receptive to the diplomatic offensive of Colombo's high-profile Tamil foreign minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. Following pro- LTTE demonstrations in Malaysia earlier this year, Kuala Lumpur banned similar displays and threatened to revoke the visas of foreign organizers. The Philippines has introduced a new requirement for Sri Lankans to have visas, and in India, the LTTE remains a banned organization. In Australia, government officials pointedly turned their backs on a major seminar organized last month by a pro-LTTE . Tamil association that was addressed by Thilakar.

Perhaps as worryingly for the Tigers is the growing number of analysts who argue that support among the Tamil diaspora may be slipping. "The LTTE network is still effective but influence on and support from Tamil communities is less than it was," says Shankar Rajee, a former militant turned politician. "The younger generation who migrated from the war may still be supportive, but many older professionals are more influenced by international perspectives."

Can the Tigers' organization change its stripes and adapt itself to a changing world far removed from the dreams of the 1970s? Or will it fight on against mounting military and diplomatic odds? Recent reports have hinted that in an echo of the Irish Republican Army, the movement may be considering floating a Sinn Fein-style political wing in a bid for greater respectability .

But the LTTE's dilemma may lie in a more fundamental paradox. It may well be that its greatest asset in the past—the unbending, militant vision of Velupillai Prabhakaran—is today its greatest liability. Whether the autocrat at the center of an almost religious cult of uncompromising martyrdom can function as a man of peace in any democratic dispensation remains uncertain. To date, the record is hardly encouraging.

—Anthony Davis is an Asiaweek contributor

AFTER WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING, U.S. NEEDS STRONGER ANTI-TERRORISM POLICY

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING

Iraqi Intelligence (From: http://www.fas.org/irp/world/iraq/956-tni.htm)

The National Interest, Winter, 1995/96

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB:

Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters

by Laurie Mylroie

ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned, tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.

Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy. In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water." [1] Quickly extradited, he is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial this spring.

Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States. But who is he? Is he a free-lance bomber? A deranged but highly-skilled veteran of the Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Is he an Arab, or of some other Middle Eastern ethnicity? Is there an organization--perhaps even a state--behind his work?

These questions have an obvious bearing not only on past events but on possible future ones as well. [2] It is important to know who Ramzi Yousef is and who his "friends" are, because if he is not just a bomber-for-hire, or an Islamic militant loosely connected to other Muslim fundamentalists, Yousef's "friends" could still prove very dangerous to the United States. It is of considerable interest, therefore, that a very persuasive case can be made that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his bombing conspiracies were meant as Saddam Hussein's revenge for the Gulf War. If so, and if, as U.S. officials strongly suspect, Baghdad still secretly possesses biological warfare agents, then we may still not have heard the last from Saddam Hussein.

This essay will focus on three points. First, it will argue that, as things stand now, coordination between the Justice Department and the relevant national security agencies is such that the latter--and thus national security itself gets very short shrift when it comes to dealing with terror incidents perpetrated on U.S. soil. Second, it will look afresh at the evidence from the World Trade Center bombing case and suggest that the most logical explanation of the evidence points to Iraqi state sponsorship. Third, it will assay briefly what dangers the Iraqi regime may still pose to the United States should this analysis prove correct.

A High Wall

THE SUGGESTION THAT Iraq might well have been behind Ramzi Yousef's exploits may initially strike many as implausible. Wouldn't the U.S. government investigation of the World Trade Center bombing have uncovered evidence to that effect, evidence that the press, in turn, would have broadcast far and wide? Wouldn't America's robust anti-terrorist intelligence capacities have focused on such suspicions long ago?

While these are reasonable questions, they reveal a lack of understanding about how the U.S. government works when legal and national security issues of this special sort overlap. A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions. [3]

In effect, the Justice Department puts the prosecution of individual perpetrators--with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the U.S. judicial system--above America's national security interest in determining who may be behind terrorist attacks. Questions of state sponsorship that are of pressing interest to national security agencies are typically relegated to a distant second place, or never properly addressed at all, because the national security agencies are denied critical information. In particular, whenever early arrests are made regarding a terrorist incident on American soil, the U.S. government cannot properly address both the national security question of state sponsorship and the criminal question of the guilt or innocence of individual perpetrators at the same time.

This is precisely what happened in the World Trade Center bombing. In the case of Ramzi Yousef, the perfectly reasonable questions posed above about who this man is and who may sponsor him have never been properly investigated. Instead of the appropriately trained people conducting a comprehensive investigation, the World Trade Center bombing was followed by an undercover operation, in which an informant of dubious provenance led a handful of local Muslims in a new bombing conspiracy, aimed at the United Nations and other New York landmarks. For this conspiracy Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and nine others were found guilty in early October 1995. Yet none of those in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., as it is formally called, was accused of actually participating in the World Trade Center bombing.[4] They were only charged with conspiracy regarding it. The government contended that other followers of Sheikh Omar--four fundamentalists who stood trial in 1994--were actually responsible for puffing it into effect.

But what if Ramzi Yousef, who eluded the grasp of U.S. authorities until after his second bombing conspiracy, is neither a follower of Sheikh Omar nor a Muslim fundamentalist? That if he is an Iraqi agent? From a legal perspective--as the judge in that trial advised the defense team--whether state sponsorship played a role in the World Trade Center bombing was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of Sheikh Omar et al. And indeed, the prosecution did not need to address the question of whether the World Trade Center bombing had state sponsorship in order to obtain the convictions sought against Sheikh Omar and the others.

Indeed, that state sponsorship can be irrelevant to a criminal prosecution was explained most clearly by the federal prosecutors in the New York bombing conspiracies, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., and the lead prosecutor in last year's Trade Center bombing trial, who will also prosecute Ramzi Yousef. When I put it to them that Iraq was probably behind the Trade Center bombing, they replied, "You may be right, but we don't do state sponsorship. We prosecute individuals." Asked who does "do" state sponsorship, they answered, "Washington." "Who in Washington?" No one seemed to know.[6]

Yet by responding to state-sponsored terrorism solely by arresting and trying individual perpetrators, the U.S. government, in effect, invites such states to commit acts of terror in such a way as to leave behind a few relatively minor figures to be arrested, tried, and convicted. Done adroitly, this makes it unlikely that the larger, more important, and more difficult question of state sponsorship will ever be addressed.

The problem is illustrated vividly in the case of Ramzi Yousef since his arrest in February 1995. The Justice Department has passed on very little information to other bureaucracies. The FBI's typical response to any question about Yousef is: "We can't tell you much because of the trial." [7] As a result, the State Department, which is responsible for determining whether a terrorist act had state sponsorship, lacks the most basic information-- even, for example, a point as simple as what passport Yousef was traveling on when he was arrested in Islamabad.

The details of the World Trade Center case are chilling. From the outset, the Justice Department refused to share key information with the national security agencies. The government had two sets of relevant information--foreign intelligence, gathered by the CIA from watching terrorist states such as Iran and Iraq, and evidence gathered by the FBI largely within the United Stares for use in the trial. The FBI flatly told the national security bureaucracies that there was "no evidence" of state sponsorship in the World Trade Center bombing. When the national security agencies asked to see the evidence themselves, the FBI replied, "No, this is a criminal matter. We're handling it." Thus, all that the national security agencies had available to decide the question of state sponsorship was foreign intelligence they themselves had collected.

But many cases of stare-sponsored terrorism cannot be cracked by means of intelligence alone. The crucial element linking the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to Libya, for example, was not intelligence but a piece of physical evidence--a microchip, part of the bomb's timing device, that could be tied to other bombs built by Libyan agents.

After the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI was the only bureaucracy with both the intelligence and the evidence. Even if the FBI did make a serious effort to examine the evidence for state sponsorship--and it is not clear that it did--the Bureau alone is not competent to carry out such an investigation. "They're head hunters", one official in Pentagon Counterterrorism remarked--that is, they are oriented to the arrest of individuals. A State Department expert described the FBI's new Office of Radical Fundamentalism as "a joke", bereft of any genuine Middle East expertise.

But the more fundamental problem is that the Justice Department in Washington seems not to have been interested in pursuing the question of state sponsorship. In fact, the New York FBI office suspected an Iraqi connection early on, but the Washington brass seemingly wanted to tell America that they had already cracked the case and caught most of the perpetrators. It is always easier to go after the small fry than to catch the big fish, and law enforcement is ever vulnerable to the temptation to cut off a conspiracy investigation at the most convenient point.

Thus, five weeks after the World Trade Center bombing, four Arabs were under arrest. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, had fled. Still, at that point in early April 1993, the FBI proclaimed that it had captured most of those involved. The bombing, it claimed, was the work of a loose group of fundamentalists with no ties to any state. The predictable media frenzy followed and, perhaps as a result, some obvious questions were not asked. How could the government know so early in the investigation that those it had arrested had no ties to any state? If the government knew so much so soon, then why did one of those arrested never stand trial for the bombing, and why were three others indicted much later? In short, the Justice Department determined that the bombing had no state sponsorship even before it decided definitively who had been involved.

Moreover, by April it was impossible to have conducted a sufficiently thorough investigation. Such an investigation required, at a minimum, a meticulous examination of all records associated with the defendants to insure that they had had no contact with foreign intelligence agencies--or at least that none could be found. That process simply could not have been accomplished in five weeks. And it must be kept in mind that, at the time, the mastermind of the bomb was a fugitive about whom almost nothing was known. How could anyone therefore declare confidently that he was not a foreign agent, especially in light of the fact that he had entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi"?

Ironically, this sort of problem would not have arisen had the bombing occurred abroad. In such cases there are usually two separate investigations by two different bureaucracies, one to determine state sponsorship, the other to catch the individuals responsible. After the bombing of Pan Am 103, for example, the CLA led an inter-agency intelligence investigation addressing the question of state sponsorship. There was also a separate criminal investigation, headed by the FBI, aimed at individual perpetrators.

But there was no intelligence investigation of the World Trade Center bombing. The CIA is, after all, prohibited from operating in America. Of course, a crack inter-agency team could have been established to examine the question of state sponsorship. But Clinton administration officials set up no such team.

In September 1995, the State Department forwarded to Congress the report of an independent panel, established to examine whether mistakes in security training had contributed to the March 8 assassination of two U.S. consular officials in Karachi--apparent retaliation for Ramzi Yousef's extradition. The report expressed concern about the FBI's lack of cooperation with the national security agencies. Clearly, discontent with the FBI is growing among those agencies as issues such as international crime--and with them the Bureau's international role--assume a mare prominent role in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, one State Department official described the FBI'S unwillingness to share information as "the train wreck coming"--meaning that given the FBI's lack of expertise in international politics, there may well come a time when the Bureau will be sitting on information that, in the hands of others, could have been used to avert a disaster.

One may indeed ask whether the World Trade Center bombing itself is not a harbinger of the train wreck coming. For if Saddam Hussein was behind it, then the Justice Department, in effect, has blinded the national security bureaucracies to a serious danger, namely the possibility that in the extreme Iraq might use biological agents, whether for terrorism in America or in the context of military' action in the region, possibly involving U.S. troops.

Of course, that is an important "if." It is to that issue we now turn.

Dramatis Personae

Ramzi Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim -the key man; likely Iraqi agent.

El Sayid Nosair--murderer of Rabbi Meir Kahane, bomb plot initiator.

Emad Salem--FBI informant with ties to Egyptian intelligence.

Mohammed Salameh--Palestinian fundamentalist, Nosair accomplice and early plotter; left a trail of phone calls to Iraq.

Musab Yasin--Iraqi with New Jersey apartment where Yousef first went.

Abdul Rahman Yasin--Musab's brother, led FBI to apartment where bomb was made; employee of Iraqi government; indicted fugitive, presently in Baghdad.

Nidal Ayyad--Palestinian fundamentalist convicted in the World Trade Center bombing.

Mahmud Abu Halima--Egyptian fundamentalist cab driver convicted in the World Trade Center bombing

Eyyad Ismail--Palestinian from Jordan charged with having driven the van.

Forty-Six Calls to Iraq

ALTHOUGH THE national security agencies never received the World Trade Center evidence, at the conclusion of a trial evidence becomes public. Anyone can examine it, and I did so meticulously. The raw data consist mostly of telephone records, passports, and airplane tickets. Such data reveal nothing directly about state sponsorship, but under close analysis certain facts begin to stand out and certain patterns emerge. And it helps to know the Middle East well.

The story begins in November 1990 when an Egyptian fundamentalist, El Sayid Nosair, shot and killed Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing Israeli-American, in Manhattan. A year later, in November 1991, Nosair's trial became a cause celebre among local fundamentalists, who turned out in force to support their "martyr." Planted among them was an Egyptian, Emad Salem, working as an FBI informant, even as he maintained ties to Egyptian intelligence. In December, the jury returned a bizarre verdict, acquitting Nosair of murder and finding him guilty on lesser charges. An outraged judge gave Nosair a maximum sentence on those lesser charges, and sent him to Attica.

The fundamentalists continued to support Nosair, arranging bus trips from their mosques to visit him in prison. Salem, the FBI plant, remained among them. In early June 1992, with Salem acting as an agent provocateur, Nosair convinced his friends to execute a bomb plot. He wanted them to make twelve pipe bombs, to be used for assassinating his judge and a Brooklyn assemblyman, the others to be used against Jewish targets. A cousin was to organize the plot, and Salem was to build the bombs.

A twenty-six year old Palestinian, Mohammad Salameh, was soon recruited into the plot. Salameh comes from a long line of terrorists on his mother's side. His maternal grandfather fought in the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, and even as an old man joined the PLO and managed to get himself jailed by the Israelis. A maternal uncle was arrested in 1968 for terrorism and served eighteen years in an Israeli prison before he was released and deported, making his way to Baghdad where he became number two in the "Western Sector", a PLO terrorist unit under Iraqi influence.

Despite this pedigree, Salameh himself is naive and manipulable. When one considers that he was arrested in the process of returning to collect the deposit on the van he had rented to carry the Trade Center bomb, it is not so surprising that on June 10, soon after being recruited into Nosair's plot, Salameh made the first of forty-six calls to Iraq, the vast majority to his terrorist uncle in Baghdad. We can only speculate about what Salameh told his uncle, but it seems very likely that he spoke about the bold new project Nosair was organizing, perhaps seeking his help and advice. Salameh's telephone bills suggest that the pipe bombing plot was one of the most exciting events in his life: In six weeks he ran up a bill of over four thousand dollars and lost his phone service.

Iraq is one of the few remaining Stalinist states. Iraqis routinely assume their telephones are bugged, and are even cautious about discussing sensitive issues in their own homes. The more significant the person, the greater the likelihood his activities are monitored--at least that is what Baghdadis assume. My own experience in Baghdad makes clear that when Iraqis want to be sure that a conversation is not monitored, it takes place out of doors. It is thus more than likely that Iraqi intelligence learned of Nosair's bombing plot and Salameh's participation in it through Salameh's phone calls to his uncle. In any event, key preparatory steps to the World Trade Center bombing were taken within days of Salameh's first call-including steps taken in Baghdad.

On June 21, an Iraqi living in Baghdad, Abdul Rahman Yasin (subsequently an indicted fugitive in the Trade Center bombing) appeared at the U.S. embassy in Amman asking for a U.S. passport. Born in America, Abdul Rahman received his passport, which he soon used to travel to this country.

Just at this crucial point, unfortunately, the FBI lost track of the Nosair-Salameh conspiracy. It did not fully trust its informant, Emad Salem, and Salem's ties to Egyptian intelligence; the Bureau severed relations with him in early July when he refused to follow its procedures relating to criminal investigations.

Salameh's phone bills and other evidence raise the distinct possibility that, Iraqi intelligence having learned of Nosair's plans from Salameh's calls to his uncle, Baghdad decided to help out, transforming the plot in the process. If so, the speed of the reaction suggests that Iraqi intelligence may have already been planning some operation against America, and that Salameh1s calls to his uncle provided it with a fortuitous means of carrying it out. Here probably lies the source of Ramzi Yousef s exploits in America.

Enter Ramzi Yousef

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1992, Ramzi Yousef arrived at JFK airport. He presented an Iraqi passport without a U.S. visa, was briefly detained (and fingerprinted) for illegal entry, and granted asylum pending a hearing. Yousef went to stay at the apartment of Musab Yasin, an Iraqi living in Jersey City. So too did Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab's younger brother, who arrived in America from Iraq soon after Yousef. (Musab had an unlisted telephone number under an Israeli-sounding alias, Josie Hadas.)

Musab lived in the same building as Mohammad Salameh. Many young Arab men used their two apartments, praying and eating together; relations were so close that the apartments were connected by an intercom. Once established within this group, Ramzi Yousef befriended Salameh, and the two left to share an apartment elsewhere in Jersey City. From then on, the impressionable Salameh was under Yousef s wing.

Although the principal conspirators had been in place since September, it was not until after the U.S. elections on November 3 that Yousef began to prepare the World Trade Center bomb. In mid-November the first of many calls to chemical companies appears on his phone bills. At the same time, Yousef also began calling surgical supply companies for the gloves, masks, and rubber tubing he needed to make the bomb. In the meantime, two other local fundamentalists were recruited into the plot, Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abu Halima. Ayyad, a Palestinian, was the same age as Salameh and Salameh's friend. Abu Halima, a thirty-four year old Egyptian cab driver, was a friend of Nosair. Abu Halima was older and generally savvier than the two Palestinians.

In January 1993, Yousef and Salameh moved into another Jersey City apartment where the bomb was actually built. Set well back from the street, the building provided seclusion. On February 21 a twenty-one year old Palestinian named Eyyad Ismail arrived from Dallas. Ismail is charged with having driven the bomb-laden van.[8] On February 23, Salameh went to a Ryder rental agency to rent the van to carry the bomb. On the morning of February 26, the conspirators gathered at a local Shell gas station where they topped up the tank--one last explosive touch--before driving to Manhattan. Shortly after noon, the bomb went off, on--let it be well noted--the second anniversary of the ending of the Gulf War.

That evening Salameh drove Yousef and Ismail to JFK airport; Yousef escaped to Pakistan on falsified travel documents, and Ismail flew home to Jordan. But Salameh looks to have been deliberately left behind by Yousef, not provided with money he needed for a plane ticket. Salameh had a ticket to Amsterdam on Royal Jordanian fight 262, which continues on to Amman, dated for March 5, but it was an infant ticket that had cost him only $65. While Salameh had been able to use this ticket to get himself a Dutch visa, he could not actually travel on it Needing more money for an adult fare, he tried to get his van deposit back by telling the rental agency that the van had been stolen. With either desperate or inane persistence, he returned three times before he was finally arrested on March 4.

Salameh had used Musab Yasin's phone number when renting the van, and Abdul Rahman Yasin was picked up the same day in a sweep of sites associated with Salameh. Abdul Rahman was taken to New Jersey FBI headquarters in Newark. He is reported to have been extremely cool, as a trained intelligence agent would be. He was helpful to investigators who themselves faced tremendous pressure to produce answers. He told them, for instance, the location of the apartment that was used to make the bomb, a key bit of information. They thanked him for his cooperation and let him walk out. This, although he had arrived just six months before from Iraq, and might well attempt to return there. And indeed, the very next day, Abdul Rahman Yasin boarded Royal Jordanian 262 to Amman, the same plane Salameh had hoped to catch. From Amman he went on to Baghdad. An ABC news stringer saw him there last year, outside his father's house, and learned from neighbors that he worked for the Iraqi government.

Meanwhile, as U.S. authorities searched for Abdul Rahman Yasin in March 1993, after his "helpful" session with the FBI and before they knew for certain that he had fled, an FBI agent who had worked with Emad Salem in June 1992 speculated:

"Do you ever think that Iraqi intelligence might have known of these people who were willing to do something crazy, and that Iraqi intelligence found them out and encouraged them to do this as a retaliation for the bombing of Iraq. . . . So the people who are left holding the bag here in America are Egyptian. . . or Palestinian. . . . But the other people we are looking for, Abdul Rahman, he is gone. . I hate to think what's going to happen if this guy turns out to be. . an Iraqi intelligence operative...and these people were used." [9]

Mahmud Abu Halima had similar thoughts. As he told a prison companion who later turned state's evidence:

"The planned act was not as big as what subsequently occurred. . . Yousef showed up on the scene. and escalated the initial plot. . . . Yousef used [them]. . .as pawns and then immediately after the blast left the country." [10]

That, indeed, is the most straightforward explanation of the World Trade Center bombing: that it was an Iraqi intelligence operation, led by Ramzi Yousef, with the local fundamentalists serving first as aides and then as diversionary dupes.

Since Yousef's arrest and extradition to the United States, the evidence for this explanation has, if anything, grown stronger. First of all, he is clearly no fundamentalist. According to neighbors, he had a Filipina girlfriend and enjoyed Manila's raucous night life.[11] Yousef's nationality and ethnicity have also become known: He is a Pakistani Baluch.

The Baluch are a distinct ethnic group, speaking their own language, one of several Middle Eastern peoples without their own homeland. They live in eastern Iran and western Pakistan in inhospitable desert terrain over which neither Tehran nor Islamabad exercises much control. Baluchistan is a haven for smuggling, both of drugs and of arms. The Baluch are Sunni and are at sharp odds with Tehran's Shia clerical regime. Through Iraq's many years of conflict with Iran, first in the early 1970s and then during the Iran-Iraq war a decade later, Iraqi intelligence developed close ties with the Baluch on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. Above all, it used them to carry out terrorism against Iran.

Yousef's associates in Pakistan, too, were anti-Shia. This fact, taken together with his Baluch ethnicity, make it nearly impossible that Iran could be behind Yousef. The most recent inquiries, made since Yousef's arrest, have reduced the question to two possibilities: He is a free-lancer connected to a loose network of fundamentalists; or he worked for Iraq. [12]

Of Passports and Fingerprints

THE SINGLE MOST important piece of evidence pointing to Iraq is the passport on which Yousef fled America. It was no ordinary passport.

On November 9,1992, just after the final green light for the bombing had been given, Yousef reported to Jersey City., police that he had lost his passport. He claimed to be Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani born and reared in Kuwait. Then, between December 3 and December 27, Yousef made a number of calls to Baluchistan. Several of them were conference calls to a few key numbers, a geographical plotting of which suggests that they were related to Yousef's probable escape route--through Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan--across the Arabian Sea to Oman, after which the "telephone trail" ends. After Yousef s arrest, a National Security Council staffer confirmed to me that Yousef had indeed fled from the United States through Baluchistan.

On December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports. Consistent with his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost his passport and asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his non-original documentation enough to deny him a new passport. But it did provide him a six-month, temporary passport and told him to straighten things out when he returned "home." This turned out to be good enough for the purpose at hand.

By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what happened.

But why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most intriguing and vital aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a two-year degree in computer-aided electronic engineering, he returned to a job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As Abdul Basit and his family were permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained files on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and his parents in Kuwait's Interior Ministry have been tampered with. Key documents from the Kuwaiti files on Abdul Basit and his parents are missing. There should be copies of the front pages of the passports, including a picture, a notation of height, and so forth, but that material is gone. There is also information in the file that should not be there, especially a notation stating that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26, 1990, transiting to Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.

Who put that notation into Abdul Basit's file and why? Consider the circumstances of the moment. The Kuwaiti government had ceased to exist, and Iraq was an occupation authority; bent on establishing control over a hostile population amid near-universal condemnation, as an American-led coalition threatened war. The situation was chaotic as hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing for their lives. While the citizens of Western countries were pawns in a high stakes game, held hostage by Iraq, little attention was paid to the multitude of Third World nationals bent on escape. It truly boggles the imagination to believe that under such circumstances an Iraqi bureaucrat was sitting calmly in Kuwait's Interior Ministry taking down the flight plans--including the itinerary and final destination--of otherwise non-descript Baluchis fleeing Kuwait. Rather, it looks as if Iraqi intelligence put that information into Abdul Basit's file to make it appear that he left Kuwait rather than died there, and that, like Ramzi Yousef, he too was Baluch.

Moreover, Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards, removing the original with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with one bearing those of Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators because no two people's match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so decisive makes them the perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus, after U.S. authorities learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they sent his fingerprints (taken by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at JFF airport when he was briefly detained for illegal entry) to Kuwait, asking if they matched those of Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said that they did, everyone assumed the question settled--forgetting that Kuwait's files were not secure during the Iraqi occupation.

Pakistan also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently resident abroad, at the embassy in the country in which they live. On August 9, Baghdad ordered all embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close. Most did, including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his family that should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The Pakistani government now has no record of the family.

What does all this suggest? To me it suggests that Abdul Basit and his family were in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they probably died then; and that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to create an alternative identity for Ramzi Yousef. Clearly, only Iraq could reasonably have: 1) known of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his family; 2) tampered with Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all switching the fingerprint cards; and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit and his family from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait.

Of course, the best way to verify or falsify this would be to check with people who knew Abdul Basit before August 1990. To this end, Brad White, a former Senate Judiciary Committee investigator and CBS newsman, contacted an overseas source he knew in the United Kingdom who had looked into the matter. Two people had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown photos of Yousef, were unable to make a positive identification. They both felt that while there was some similarity in looks, it was not the same person. "Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is probably not Basit", White was told.[13]

Logic and circumstance also suggest the same conclusion. Is it likely to be mere coincidence, after all, that during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait key documents were removed from Abdul Basit's and his parents files, while the same files were filched in their entirety from the Pakistani embassy? Moreover, Abdul Basit had no criminal record in Britain, nor did he or his parents have any security record in Kuwait. The first concrete knowledge we have of Ramzi Yousef/Abdul Basit comes in early 1991, around the end of the Gulf war when he showed up in the Philippines seeking contact with a Muslim group there. Introduced as "the chemist", he proposed to collaborate in bombing conspiracies. Now, how did a young man who had led a seemingly normal life up until August 1990 suddenly become a world class terrorist six months after Iraq invaded his country of residence? Where did he get such sophisticated explosives training in just six months? (The real Abdul Basit's degree, remember, was in electronic engineering, not chemistry, which Swansea Institute does not even teach.)

And where are Abdul Basit's parents? They never returned to Kuwait after its liberation, nor have they appeared anywhere else. Did they too take up a life of crime after decades of abiding by the law?

Ramzi Yousef's arrest has made it easy enough to resolve a key question and perhaps produce important evidence implicating Iraq in the World Trade Center bombing: Is "Ramzi Yousef" really Abdul Basit or not? Let those who remember Abdul Basit from before August 1990 meet Yousef in person and tell us. It sounds simple and logical, but strangely, the Justice Department has shown no interest in arranging such a meeting. Moreover, it has decided to try, the bomber as Ramzi Yousef even though no one, including Yousef by now, maintains that that is his real name. If the government believes that Yousef is really Abdul Basit, why doesn't it try him as Abdul Basit? Why is the Justice Department uninterested even in definitively determining his identity, even though doing so might help get to the bottom of the matter. I recently asked a Justice Department official, who maintains his confident view that Yousef is indeed Abdul Basit, "Why don't you bring the people who knew Abdul Basit to the prison to meet Yousef, so they can say for sure if they are the same?" "But you", I was told, "are interested in an intelligence question." Earlier I had been told, "It does not matter what we call him. We just try a body."

And so back we come to the high wall. As before, those who have the information about Ramzi Yousef and his bombing conspiracies are not concerned with the question of state sponsorship, or at least consider it secondary to their trials; while those who are concerned with state sponsorship are denied the information that they need to investigate the question properly.

Threats From Baghdad

MOST MEMBERS OF the U.S. national security bureaucracies think that Saddam Hussein has largely lain low since the Gulf War, constrained by economic sanctions and swift American reactions to his occasional feints to the south. But if in February 1993, Saddam ordered his agents to try to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, and if, in January 1995, Iraq sponsored an effort to destroy eleven U.S. airplanes in the Far East, then Saddam has not been quiescent.

This, simply put, is why it is important to find out who Ramzi Yousef is and who may have put him up to his murderous work. Maybe Iraq had nothing to do with him, despite all the circumstantial evidence suggesting otherwise. But if it did, then the otherwise peculiar, bombastic, and extremely violent statements emanating from Baghdad might make more sense than they at first seem to.

In the fall of 1994, Baghdad's official press, in essence, threatened that Saddam might use his remaining unconventional agents, biological and chemical, for terrorism in America, or in missiles delivered against his enemies in the region if and when he became fed up with sanctions.[14] On September 29, 1994, following an otherwise cryptic statement of Saddam Hussein's, the government newspaper, Babil, warned: "Does the United States realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a missile that can cross to countries and cities?"

Other threats followed almost daily;

When peoples reach the verge of collective death, they will be able to spread death to all. [15]

When one realizes that death is one s inexorable fate, there remains nothing to deter one from taking the most risky steps to influence the course of events. [16]

We seek to tell the United States and its agents that the Iraqi patience has run out and that the perpetuation of the crime of annihilating the Iraqis will trigger crises whose nature and consequences are known only to God.[17]

These statements occurred in the context of Saddam's second and abortive lunge at Kuwait, which was thwarted by the swift U.S. deployment to the region. Saddam then turned around and formally recognized Kuwait, removing what then seemed to be the last major obstacle to lifting sanctions, and the Iraqi press soon began to call 1995, "the year of lifting sanctions."

But that was not to be. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) started to uncover evidence of a large, undeclared biological program. As Baghdad's disappointment grew, the Iraqi press began to repeat the threats it had made in the fall. The number two man in Iraq's information ministry warned, "Iraq's abandonment of part of its weapons-the long-range missiles and chemical weapons. . does not mean it has lost everything."[18] Al-Quds al-Arabi, a London paper financed by Baghdad and close to the Iraqi regime, cautioned. "Iraq still has options. But they are all destructive options. Yet if the Americans continue to humiliate them, they will have no option but to bring the temple down on everyone's head."19

After Baghdad succeeded in getting a clean bill of health from UNSCOM in mid-June on its chemical and missile programs, it finally acknowledged in July having had an offensive biological program and having produced anthrax and botulinim. But it denied that it had ever tried to weaponize those agents and, in any case, claimed to have destroyed them in the fall of 1990. The claim was neither credible nor verifiable, particularly as Iraq produced no documents detailing their destruction. Indeed, the Iraqi "revelations" may even have been meant as a threat, an attempt to intimidate the United Nations by hinting at what Baghdad was still capable of doing.[20]

In early August 1995, as Iraq pressed UNSCOM for a clean bill of health on its biological program, Hussein Kamil--Saddam's cousin and son-in-law, and the man responsible for overseeing the build-up of Iraq's unconventional weapons program defected. This precipitated a flood of stunning revelations from Baghdad. They included the admission that Iraq had indeed weaponized botulinim and anthrax. At the very same time that it had earlier claimed to be destroying those agents, the Iraqi regime now acknowledged that it had been stuffing them into bombs and missiles. Yet Iraq still claimed that whatever biological agents it had produced had been destroyed, even as it still failed to produce any documents to confirm their purported destruction.

It looks as if Iraq is holding on to prohibited weapons of mass destruction, even as it insists that sanctions be lifted. Why? In early September, a former adviser to Saddam Hussein predicted that Iraq would not give up any more unconventional agents. Instead, Saddam would probably employ them for blackmail and brinkmanship to get sanctions lifted. And failing that, he would use them.[21] General Wafiq Samarrai, former head of Iraqi military intelligence, told me much the same: "Tell the allies that they have to destroy Iraq's biological agents before Saddam can use them." Iraq could attack its neighbors by missile, or America through terrorism. The United Stares might retaliate with nuclear weapons, but by then "the disaster will already have happened", Samarrai warned. [22]

Would Saddam actually do such a thing? When asked about the possibility of Saddam's using biological agents for terrorism in America, UNSCOM chairman RoIf Ekeus replied, "It is obviously possible."[23] Yet such thoughts seem far from the minds of most U.S. officials, who believe that Saddam is trapped by sanctions and can do no real harm. They feel no urgency about bringing Saddam down; they sense no danger.

Unfinished Business

YET IF RAMZI YOUSEF is in fact an Iraqi intelligence agent, there obviously is a danger. Even if we cannot yet be absolutely certain of this, so many American and allied lives are potentially at stake that it seems the least a responsible government can do is to make every reasonable effort to find out. As Saddam Hussein senses his ever-increasing isolation and sees the prospects for lifting sanctions receding, his desperation may lead him to order other, and even more ghastly, deeds.

If Saddam Hussein still hungers for revenge, the question of Ramzi Yousef's terrorism is much too important to be left solely to the Justice Department, while the FBI continues to withhold critical information from the national security bureaucracies.

The following are among the steps that could and should be taken to address the issue of whether Iraq is behind Ramzi Yousef and to strengthen America's anti-terrorism efforts generally:

Bring those who knew Abdul Basit Karim before August 1990 to meet Yousef in prison and pronounce definitely if they are one and the same man.

Demand the immediate and unconditional extradition of Abdul Rahman Yasin from Baghdad.

Establish a "tiger team", drawn from the best and brightest within the national security bureaucracies, to examine all the information in the U.S. government's possession related to Yousef and his bombing conspiracies. Yousef's apparent use of chemical agents in New York and his threat to use them in the Philippines deserve special attention.

Establish appropriate procedures so that whenever a terrorist attack occurs against U.S. targets that might be state-sponsored, a qualified team will address the question of state sponsorship regardless of whether the terror occurs on U.S. soil or whether early arrests are made.

Individually, the pieces of this puzzle--the elusive identity and affiliation of the World Trade Center bomber; the series of explicit threats against the United States issuing from Baghdad; the question of Iraqi biological capabilities--raise troubling questions. Taken together, they provide the outline of a very frightening possibility. The lack of coordination between the Departments of Justice and State may have created a niche for terrorism within America's borders; while the lack of any adequate response to the two major bombing conspiracies may have already begun to undermine the credibility of the threat of deterrence. So far, State Department officials have been content to leave the issue of Iraq's possible resort to biological terrorism on the back burner, secure in the belief that the threat of nuclear retaliation will be sufficient deterrent. But Saddam has previously miscalculated the American reaction to his provocations. It would be reassuring to know that, somewhere in the policy-apparatus of the State Department, someone is looking seriously at the possibility of future terrorist acts and at the requirements of effective deterrence.

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Laurie Mylroie, formerly of Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College. is currently with the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia. She was co-author of the bestseller, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Random House 1990), and has just completed a sequel, 'Study of Revenge': Saddam's Terror Against America, January 1993-??

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1. Washington Post, October 7,1995.

2. Indeed, there is good reason to suspect an Iraqi hand in the November 13,1995 bombing of the U.S. military office in Riyadh.

3. Interview with Vincent Cannistraro, former Chief of Counterterrorism Operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. There is no formal or legal reason for the FBI position and standard practice. It is largely a matter of protecting bureaucratic turf.

4. Wall Street Journal, September 22,1995. This point was repeatedly made in the New York Times--April 4,7, 9 and 26; June 22 and 28; July 26 and 30; August 2 and 22; October 2, 1995.

5. Ken Wasserman, lawyer for one of the defendants in Sheikh Omar et. al. to the author.

6 Author's meeting with federal prosecutors in New York, January, 1995, arranged by the New York District Attorney's office. Another Trade Center prosecutor, since retired, expressed his frustration with the FBI to a Yale Law School alumni gathering, complaining that they had done no "overall policy review." Allan Gerson, former Chief Counsel of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations (1981-5), to the author-

7. Sources in the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon all told me that those at the working level were not getting information from the FBI on Yousef, and were all very unhappy about it,

8. lsmail was indicted in September 1994 and arrested in August 1995 at his family home in Jordan. He was identified by comparing Yousef's telephone records to the passenger manifests of planes leaving JFK the night of the bombing. I believe that Ismail was probably an unwitting participant and meant to be caught. After Yousef was arrested in February, he mentioned the existence of another conspirator and expressed surprise that he had not yet been arrested.

9. John Anticev to FBI plant Emad Salem. Salem taped most of his phone conversations, including those with the FBI.

10. FD-302, [Proffer Session], p.3, Mohammad Abdul Haggag.

11. New York Times, February 12,1995.

12. See Charles Wallace, Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1995; David Ottaway and Steven Croll, Washington Post, June 5, 1995; Maryanne Weaver, New Yorker, June 5, 1995.

13. Brad White to the author, September 23,1995.

14. See Laurie Mylroie and James Ring Adams. "Saddam's Germs", The American Spectator, November 1995.

15. a1-Jumhuriyah, October 4, 1994.

16. al-Jumhuriyah, October 5, 1994.

17. al-Jumhuriyah, October 8, 1994.

18, Al-Iraq, April 11, 1995.

19. Al-Quds al-Arabi, June 15,1995.

20. This was suggested by Frank Gaffney in a Center for Security Policy "Decision Brief," July 7,1995.

21 "Saddam Nears End-game," The Guardian, September 4, 1995.

22. Telephone interview with Samarrai, in Damascus, September 1995.

23. McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, August 28, 1995.

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THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT
THE CURSE!!!!!

PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION

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