TigerHawk

Last week I finished former spy Robert Baer's first novel, Blow The House Down. The story involves a retired CIA agent's efforts to expose corrupt links between his former employer, Iran and various al Qaeda operatives, and a theory that ties Iran to the attacks on September 11. Baer weaves fictional dialogue from actual people -- particularly the famed John O'Neill -- right into the story with such realism that it becomes very difficult to separate the reality from the informed speculation from the storytelling. One almost gets the sense that Baer knows something that the 9/11 Commission missed. Indeed, William F. Buckley, Jr. blurbs the back of the book, writing "Engrossing and challenging -- how do you act when you know what really happened on September 11? Baer is so persuasive, one wonders whether he in fact did know. He certainly writes as if he did."

Baer is also the author of the fascinating non-fiction memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, and so supplements his novel with an "author's note" that relates what we do know about Iran and al Qaeda. I've reproduced it (hoping that Baer and his publisher will forgive this transgression in return for my endorsement), along with a few annotations:

In August 1996, in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden came to his door to greet a man with a close-cropped beard and dressed in a starched white shirt with a straight collar and a lightweight synthetic suit. Bin Laden led the man into his sparse living room, where they sat on either end of a couch. The two were alone. What they had to say they wanted to remain between then, but bin Laden was delighted by the visit.

Recently expelled by the Sudanese, who had seized all his property, Osama bin Laden had arrived in Jalalabad basically broke. Rumors about his having a huge inheritance and trafficking in narcotics and "blood diamonds" were simply not true. [Lawrence Wright says as much in The Looming Tower. - ed.] He had been reduced to living off the Taliban's meager hospitality, but bin Laden had another problem: The Sudanese also had betrayed most of his networks to Western intelligence. By August 1996, bin Laden needed all the friends he could get. Now, an unlikely one had come to his door.

The visitor's Arabic wasn't fluent, but it was good enough for bin Laden to understand the proposition the man had crossed Afghanistan in the midst of a civil war to deliver: Al Qaeda and Iran, he said, should conduct joint terrorist activities against the United States.

A month earlier, bin Laden had sent a feeler to Tehran, suggesting Iran turn its attention from fighting the Taliban and destabilizing Central Asia to attacking the United States. Still, the idea of a cooperative effort must have startled him. Bin Laden was a Wahhabi Muslim, a sect despised by all Shia, but especially by the Iranians.

Rather than respond right away, bin Laden changed the subject. Afghanistan, he told his visitor, was pitting Shia Muslims against Sunni Muslims, and Israel and the United States were using the divide to destroy Islam.

The hour was late by now, and the visitor said he would have to go. As they rose, bin Laden put his hand on the man's shoulder and told him he would accept Iran's offer but only on the condition that their cooperation remain a secret, kept even from his own Qaeda inner circle. The visitor shook bin Laden's hand to close the deal, telling him they would be in touch.

When news of the meeting hit the CIA, alarm bells went off, at least with the Iran watchers. Bin Laden's visitor was an Iranian intelligence opoerative with American blood on his hands. Less than two months before, he's been involved in the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen. Surely, this new partnership promised a new, even more lethal strike against the United States. The only questions were where and when. Those were answered on August 5, 1998, when truck bombs took down our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, killing more than 250 people.

After the embassy attacks, the Justice Department indicted senior Qaeda members on charges of conspiring with Iran to commit terrorism against the United States. But there was one thing hauntingly odd about the indictments. While bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda were named, inclujding some known only by alias, no Iranian was. Not even the one bin Laden had made his original bargain with in Jalalabad. The same thing would occur three years later when indictments came down for the Khobar attack. Iran was named, but no Iranian.

By then, I admit, I was beyond dismay. When I served in Lebanon in the eighties, there seemed to be, in effect, a blanket immunity for Iran. We knew which Iranians bombed our embassy and the Marine barracks. We knew the names of Iranians kidnapping Americans. And it wasn't as if the Iranians were trying very hard to cover their tracks. The first American hostage kidnapped by the Pasdaran was moved out of Lebanon and held in Evin prison in Tehran. When Bill Buckley was held in Balabakk at the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, he and the other hostages could see their Pasdaran guards from their cells. We knew the names of the local Pasdaran commanders. But they were never named, let alone indicted.

I remember thinking that the odd relationship had reached some kind of crescendo when the Reagan administration clandestinely sent missiles to Iran -- through Israel no less -- that ended up in the hands of the Pasdaran, the same crew killing and kidnapping Americans in Lebanon. But things got even stranger when Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages deal, gave a Pasdaran officer a tour of the White House late one night and later met in Europe with another Pasdaran officer who had been involved in Buckley's kidnapping. This was truly crazy, insane. Then along came the meeting in Jalalabad, and Khobar Towers, and the embassy bombings, and 9/11, and the bizarre grew commonplace.

The blue-ribbon commission that investigated 9/11 did finger Iran, at least to a degree. Iranian intelligence assisted some of the hijackers transiting Iran to Afghanistan, making sure their passports were not stamped. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind behind the slaughter, had a cozy relationship with Iran, too. KSM, as he's known in intelligence, circles, stashed his family back there when he was wanted by the United States for trying to assassinate President Clinton and blowup twelve U.S. airliners over the Pacific. When three of the future hijackers flew from Beirut to Iran in 2000, a particularly nasty Hizballah operative with close ties to Iran was on the same plane.

All that's in the 9/11 report, as is the fact that KSM apparently wasn't a member of Al Qaeda. In the commission's word: "KSM states he refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to bin Laden, thereby retaining a last festige of his cherished autonomy." Did he then have an "allegiance" to Iran? The commission doesn't offer an opinion, only recommending that Iran's role in 9/11 be studied further. It should. But what's striking in the 9/11 commission's report is the same thing that was striking in the indictments for the embassy bombings and Khobar Towers: No Iranian -- or even the Hizballah operative traveling on the plane with the 9/11 hijackers -- is named.

Stack up the intelligence we had against Saddam Hussein next to what we had on Iran, especially if we go all the way back to the Tehran embassy takeover in 1979, and it's obvious that the United States went to war against the wrong country in March 2003. Why? I don't pretend to know for sure, but maybe the answer has something to do with a grand balance-of-power scheme: Depose Saddam and give Iraq to the Shia, sow conflict between the Shia and Sunni across the Middle East, and drive a fatal wedge between the Indo-European Persians and the Semite Arabs. Divide and conquer -- an ancient strategy.

Amid the blind stumblings of the Iraq war, the evidence for a master plan is thin, but there is some. In 1996, a group of neocons who would go on to become architects of the Iraq invasion wrote a paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." [Link. - ed.] It's mostly drivel, but in one telling part of the paper calls for bringing down Saddam and containing Syria, all of which has come to pass. Once again, though there was no plan for Iran. It's as if the neocons like the country just the way it is.

Or maybe the far left has it right: The White House warmongerers are all about power and money, especially oil money. After all, Exxon's revenues soared to over $100 billion a quarter in 2005, and even Dick Cheney's Halliburton climbed out of the red in the wake of the Iraq war. [This bit is, of course, asinine. - ed.]

Whatever the actual truth, the absence of convincing evidence leaves the field open to a fictional one. That's what I try to get at in Blow the House Down. Like any fictional truth ["Fake but accurate"? Fiction can be food for thought, but it isn't "truth" by any measure. - ed.], this one stands, I hope, on a firm foundation of reality. Aside from the above indictment of Iran, here are the facts I've drawn from:

• The FBI forced John O'Neill into retirement by giving his personnel file to the New York Times. O'Neill died on September 11. He was last seen running towards the South Tower, where his office as on the thirty-fourth floor.
• Freddie Woodruff's murder remains open on FBI books. The Bureau is unsure whether he was murdered or died from a stray round.
• Two Saudi officials -- one suspected of being a Saudi intelligence agent -- were in contact with two of the hijackers in California almost two years before 9/11.
• John Millis [a real person and a pivotal character in Baer's novel - ed.] was assigned to Peshaware in the late eighties, at the same time bin Laden was living there. On June 2, 2000, Millis was suspended as House intelligence committee staff director. He committed suicide on the same day.
• One of Beirut AP correspondent Terry Anderson's captors spoke with a French accent and claimed to have attended the American University of Beirut.
• Another American abducted in Lebanon, Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, told investigators after his release that one of his captors had blue eyes and red hair.
• In October 2000, the Kuwaitis detained two of the 9/11 hijackers transiting from Iran. The record of their interrogation has never been made public.
• The character of Prince Al Sabah is based on a real Gulf prince who tried to warn the United States that KSM planned to use commercial airlines in suicide operations inside the United States.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI found no evidence that anyone benefited financially from 9/11, but experts acknowledge that the use of encrypted trades, fiduciary agents, and multiple accounts makes it nearly impossible to determine whether anyone has benefited from foreknowledge of a disaster like 9/11.
• By January 2000, the CIA knew two bin Laden terrorists and future hijackers had entered the United States and taken up residence in California. The CIA failed to tell the FBI until August 2001. The 9/11 Commission concluded that had the FBI arrested the two on material witness warrants -- both men were involved in the attack on the USS Cole -- 9/11 might never have happened.