The Hunt for Iraqi ‘Sleeper Cells’

U.S. Agents Casts Wide Net For Potential Terrorists

March 6, 2003
By Lisa Myers

WASHINGTON, —  The FBI is conducting an intensive hunt for potential “sleeper cells” of Iraqi agents planted to strike in the event of war after two attachés at Iraq’s U.N. mission in New York were caught filming bridges and tunnels, U.S. officials told NBC News. At least 70 Iraqi nationals are under active surveillance, law enforcement officials said, and agents have spread out to interview thousands of Iraqi men in an attempt to track down hundreds who came to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War and disappeared.
     
THE STATE DEPARTMENT on Tuesday ordered the two Iraqi diplomats, identified as Nazih Abdul Latif Rahman and Yehia Naeem Suaoud, to leave the country by Friday night for “activities ... harmful to our national security.”

U.S. officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity Thursday that the men had been discovered filming bridges and tunnels, leading them to believe that the men may have been collecting information on potential terrorist targets.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Al-Douri, said the two men, who have the rank of attaché, were actually guards who lived in the basement of the Iraqi mission in New York. He said their activities were innocent.

The alleged target research revived memories of activities by Iraqi sleeper cells 12 years ago during the first U.S. military campaign in Iraq. In one instance in the Philippines, a bomb detonated prematurely, killing and wounding the Iraqis but injuring no one else.

Security experts said they expected Baghdad to try such tactics much more aggressively if President Bush ordered new military action against Iraq.

“They’re going to try to assassinate key Americans,” retired Gen. Wayne Downing, former chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said in an interview. “I think they’re going to bomb our interests as they can. They’re going to harass us.”

Richard Butler, former chairman of the U.N. special commission that was set up to find and dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, told NBC News that Iraq had “trained a variety of people in the obvious arts, so called, of terrorism, [such as] assassination, bomb making.”

“The Iraqis are very deeply attached to poison,” Butler said.

STRONGER THREAT
Since the Gulf War a dozen years ago, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has upgraded training for overseas agents at a base outside Baghdad, using a Boeing 727 jetliner to practice hijackings, intelligence sources said.

Law enforcement officials told NBC News that the FBI was conducting surveillance of at least 70 Iraqis in the United States and was interviewing thousands more in search of potential sleeper agents.

Overseas, they said, U.S. officials are aggressively tracking more than a dozen Iraqi agents. The sources said agents had been discovered conducting surveillance of U.S. facilities around the world, leading the State Department to issue warnings to U.S. embassies in Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere.

U.S. officials have also asked 60 countries to expel 100 to 150 known Iraqi intelligence agents, sources said, partly to stop attacks and partly as psychological warfare. The sources said most of the countries had agreed.

Military experts said that the Iraqi agents were not as dangerous as those of some well-known terrorist organizations but that they still posed a serious threat.

“The Iraqi agents are probably not as capable nor as creative as al-Qaida. They don’t have that fire in the belly. They don’t have willingness to give their life for Saddam Hussein,” Downing said. “But, having said that, we cannot ignore them.”

Lisa Myers is NBC News’ chief investigative correspondent.