http://www.drudgereport.com/matt91h.htm

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX FRI NOV 30 2001 10:30:08 ET XXXXX

MAG: SUDAN TRIED TO GIVE CLINTON ADMIN FILES ON BIN LADEN

NEW YORK --VANITY FAIR HAS OBTAINED LETTERS and memorandums that document
approaches made by Sudanese intelligence officials and other emissaries to
members of the Clinton administration to share information about many of the
22 terrorists on the government's most-wanted list, including: Osama bin
Laden.

VANITY FAIR is set to unleash the story in January 2002 editions, publishing
sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

MORE

THE MUKHABARAT, A SUDANESE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, spent the early to mid-1990s
amassing copious amounts of information on bin Laden and his cohorts at a
time when they were relatively unknown and their activities limited, author
David Rose reports. From the fall of 1996 until weeks before the September
2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the Mukhabarat made repeated efforts
to share its files on terrorists with the U.S. On more than one occasion
senior F.B.I. officials wanted to accept the offers, but were apparently
overruled by the State Department.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE MADELEINE ALBRIGHT and her assistant secretary for
Africa, Susan Rice, declined to comment for this story.

ACCORDING TO TIM CARNEY, THE LAST U.S. AMBASSADOR to Sudan, whose posting
ended in 1997, “The fact is, they were opening the doors, and we weren’t
taking them up on it. The U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan’s willingness to
engage us on some serious questions of terrorism. We can speculate that this
failure had serious implications—at least for what happened at the U.S.
Embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material
on bin Laden and his organization.” He tells Rose, “It was worse than a
crime. It was a fuckup.”

HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED? CARNEY CONTENDS that U.S. intelligence failed
because it became “politicized”: the message from Sudan did not fit
conventional wisdom at the State Department and the C.I.A., and so it was
disregarded, again and again. Rose writes that the simple answer is that the
Clinton administration had accused Sudan of sponsoring terrorism, and
refused to believe that anything it did to prove its bona fides could be
genuine. At the same time, perceptions in Washington were influenced by
C.I.A. reports that were wildly inaccurate, some the result of deliberate
disinformation.

ROSE REPORTS THAT, HAD U.S. AGENCIES EXAMINED the Mukhabarat files in 1996
when they first had the chance the prospects of preventing subsequent
al-Qaeda attacks would have been much greater. Gutbi al-Mahdi, the
Mukhabarat’s director general between 1997 and 2000, claims that if the
F.B.I. had taken his offer in February 1998, the embassy bombings could have
been prevented: “They had very little information at that time: they were
shooting in the dark. Had they engaged with Sudan, they could have stopped a
lot of things.” Rose writes that as late as the end of 1995, bin Laden was
not judged important enough by the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. for anyone to
mention him to U.S. Ambassador Don Petterson when Petterson talked to the
Sudanese about terrorism, an indication that the U.S. knew very little about
bin Laden’s organization or lethal capacity. “My recollection is that when I
made representations about terrorist organizations Osama bin Laden did not
figure,” Petterson says. “We in Khartoum were not really concerned about
him.”

SOME OF THE MUKHABARAT’S FILES IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS who played central roles
in the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998;
others chart the backgrounds and movements of al-Qaeda operatives who are
said to be linked directly to the atrocities of September 11. Among those
profiled:

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, another of those named on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted
list, who set the plot for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings rolling during two
trips he made to Nairobi in the spring of 1998 from Khartoum, where he was
apparently working for al-Qaeda. Rose writes that had the F.B.I. accepted
al-Mahdi’s February offer, it might have foiled Mohammed’s plans by stepping
in when he rented a villa in Kenya, gathered the bombers at the Hilltop
Hotel in Nairobi, or helped stuff a pickup truck with TNT.

Two men carrying Pakistani passports and using the names Sayyid Iskandar
Suliman and Sayyid Nazir Abbass, who arrived in Khartoum from Kenya a few
days after the 1998 embassy bombings and rented an apartment overlooking the
U.S. Embassy in Khartoum. They appeared to be reconnoitering for a possible
future attack and are believed to be members of al-Qaeda. They also stayed
at the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi—the base used by other members of the
embassy-bombing conspiracy. Sudan arrested the two men and offered to
extradite them for trial, but the U.S. did not respond, instead opting to
bomb the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which was found to
have no connection to bin Laden but made vaccines and medicine and had
contracts with the U.N.

Wadih al-Hage, bin Laden’s former private secretary, now serving life
without parole after his conviction in New York for his role in the 1998
embassy bombings, who was logged and photographed in Sudan. He is said to
have moved among bin Laden’s cells and across four continents—information
that surely would have been helpful in cramping al-Qaeda’s style had it been
grasped in 1996.

Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, a Sudanese born to Iraqi parents and an Afghan-war
veteran who worked for two bin Laden companies until 1995. Salim provides a
link to the New York suicide hijackers. From 1995 to 1998, he made frequent
visits to Germany, where a Syrian trader, Mamoun Darkazanli, had signing
powers over his bank account. Darkazanli has allegedly procured electronic
equipment for al-Qaeda. Both men attended the same Hamburg mosque as Mohamed
Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew the two planes into the World Trade
Center.

ACCORDING TO AL-MAHDI, THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE kept tabs on the entire bin
Laden “clique”: “We had a lot of information: who they are, who are their
families, what is their education. We knew what they were doing in the
country, what is their relationship with Osama bin Laden. And [had]
photographs of them all.” A senior official from Egyptian intelligence, who
has worked closely with the Mukhabarat, substantiates the account: “They
knew all about them: who they were, where they came from. They had copies of
their passports, their tickets; they knew where they went. Of course that
information could have helped enormously. It is the history of those
people.”

THE MUKHABARAT ALSO UNCOVERED A WEALTH OF information about bin Laden’s
connection to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, including the fact that he hosted its
founder, al-Zawahiri, in 1992. The group has since effectively merged with
al-Qaeda. Yahia Hussien Baviker, the Mukhabarat’s deputy chief since 1998,
says, “These files on the Egyptians could have been of great value to U.S.
intelligence. If we’d had communication with the U.S., we could have been on
the same wavelength. We could have exchanged notes.” A C.I.A. source tells
Rose, “If anyone in the world understands the Egyptian side of this network,
it’s Sudan.”

IT WAS NOT UNTIL MAY 2000 THAT THE U.S. SENT A JOINT F.B.I.-C.I.A. team to
Sudan to investigate whether it was harboring terrorists; the country was
given a clean bill of health in the summer of 2001. Just a few weeks prior
to the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration requested Sudan’s
information on al-Qaeda.

THE JANUARY ISSUE OF VANITY FAIR HITS NEWSSTANDS in New York on December 5
and nationally on December 11.