Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization and Saddam Hussein's regime shared direct contact as early as 1998, according to top-secret Iraqi intelligence documents obtained by the Star.

The documents, discovered yesterday in the bombed-out headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's most feared intelligence service, amount to the first hard evidence of a link long suspected by the United States but dismissed as fiction by many Western leaders.

The handwritten file, three pages in all, relates to the arrival of a secret envoy sent by bin Laden to Iraq in March, 1998, apparently to establish a clandestine relationship with the Iraqi regime...
The remaining pages confirm bin Laden's agent arrived in Baghdad on March 5 and stayed a full 16 days as a guest of the Iraqi government at the Mansur Melia Hotel, one of the capital's premier accommodations.

The contact came less than five months before bin Laden became America's most-wanted fugitive in the wake of deadly bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa.

The White House has linked the invasion of Iraq to the war on terror maintaining that ousted Iraqi president Saddam harboured terrorists, including Al Qaeda operatives.

Bin Laden's name appears three times in the handwritten Iraqi file, but each of the references was concealed clumsily with corrective fluid and then blackened with ink, presumably by agents of the Mukhabarat.

But after the masking material was carefully removed yesterday, bin Laden's name was clearly legible in each reference. The translation of the document was confirmed independently by five Arabic interpreters.

Here is the key passage in secret papers discovered by Star correspondent Mitch Potter in the bombed out ruins of Iraq's intelligence service in Baghdad:
"The envoy is a trusted confidant and known by them. According to the above mediation we request official permission to call Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arranegments for the above-mentioned person to Iraq.

"And that our body carry all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his enovy an oral mesage from us to bin Laden, the Saudi oppoistion leader about the future of our relationship with him and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

Iraqi intelligence documents discovered in Baghdad by The Telegraph have provided the first evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime.

Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.

The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad...
The letter refers to al-Qa'eda's leader as an opponent of the Saudi Arabian regime and says that the message to convey to him through the envoy "would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

According to handwritten notes at the bottom of the page, the letter was passed on through another director in the Mukhabarat and on to the deputy director general of the intelligence service.

It recommends that "the deputy director general bring the envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden". The deputy director general has signed the document. All of the signatories use codenames.

The other documents then confirm that the envoy travelled from Khartoum to Baghdad in March 1998, staying at al-Mansour Melia, a first-class hotel. It mentions that his visit was extended by a week. In the notes in a margin, a name "Mohammed F. Mohammed Ahmed" is mentioned, but it is not clear whether this is the the envoy or an agent.

Turnea, British Intelligence did a study and found that yes there were contacts in 1998, but it didn't last since the two sides hated each other to much.

Western intelligence officials doubt the significance of documents showing Saddam Hussein's regime met an al-Qaeda envoy in Baghdad in 1998 and tried to arrange a meeting with Osama bin Laden.

"We are aware of fleeting contacts (between Baghdad and al-Qaeda) in the past, but there were were no long-term official contacts," a well-placed source said. "The documents do not take things further forward."

OBL detested Saddam Hussein, something you seem incapable of understanding

I hate Saddam and would never work with him. How dare he send me letters! And with insufficient postage no less!

It would have never worked, OBL and Saddam are at opposite ends of the spectrum culture wise from each other. It is like the Pope and the Southern Baptists forming an alliance, bigt time oil and water...
It is very shameful propaganda by GW to even suggest there is a link.

OBL and Saddam may have been "enemies" but remember the Iraq/Iran war? We hated Saddam but he hated Iran so that made him our friend. So why not the same with Osama and Saddam?

remember the Iraq/Iran war? We hated Saddam but he hated Iran so that made him our friend. 

Before the Iraq-Iran war we did not hate SH. We had our ups and downs with him but on the whole our relations were cooperative and the CIA helped bring him to power. We liked among other things his strong anti-communism.

As to the Iraq Al-Qaeda connection in one sense I'm surprised there isn't even more evidence of contact. We cooperated with the Soviets, who we did hate, to bring down Hitler. Temporary alliances with enemies when there are overlapping interests is the norm in international relations. I would guess that because SH had so much to lose by disclosure of the contact he decided to cut it short.

Okay...i'm having trouble putting this together: Why would we help saddam get into power? The Brits were in charge of Iraq. Weren't the Brits our friends? Why would we ever try to kick them out of power in any country? That makes no sense

the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown on July 14, 1958 in a revolution led by General Abdel Karim Qassim. King Faisal II and Nuri es-Said were executed, and Britain immediately thereafter abrogated the agreement to return Kuwait to Iraq.

News of the coup triggered an uprising of the poor and dispossessed in Baghdad. The crowds attacked the British embassy and other targets. The U.S. did not initially respond to the coup, but the political upheaval of the subsequent popular uprising pushed the new regime further to the left than it had originally intended. The new government lifted the ban on the Iraqi Communist Party, and that modest step toward democracy in turn mobilized the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. CIA director Alan Dulles assigned the job of incapacitating Qassim to the euphemistically named Technical Services Division (TDS) of the CIA. The head of the TDS in 1960, Stanley Gottlieb, initiated a program to assassinate Qassim. One failed assassination attempt in this context was made by Saddam Hussein.

Qassim continued to alienate the U.S. and Britain, and Britain further exacerbated relations by declaring its Kuwait colony free and independent in 1961. Qassim held a press conference on June 19, 1961 at which he declared that "Iraq regards Kuwait as an integral part of its territory." Following that press conference, Britain quickly massed troops in Kuwait with naval support in the Gulf. Kuwait gained admission to the United Nations in 1963, the same year that Qassim was killed and his government overthrown in a CIA supported coup led by the Baath Party.

Saddam Hussein's Rise to Power

By 1965, Saddam Hussein's cousin became Secretary General of the Baathist Party. In 1968 Saddam Hussein was made Deputy Secretary General and Saddam and his Baathist supporters succeeded in seizing state power, all with CIA backing. What followed was a slaughter of the left, including the murder and torture of Iraqi Communist Party members and trade unionists.

We cooperated with the Soviets like the example i stated in my last post. They hated Hitler and so did we but the thing is that we did not arm the Soviets, they held their own ground.

Okay...i'm having trouble putting this together: Why would we help saddam get into power? The Brits were in charge of Iraq. Weren't the Brits our friends? Why would we ever try to kick them out of power in any country? That makes no sense

We shipped large quantities of supplies to the Soviets, many of them millitary, often at great cost to us in loss of lives and material to German submarines.

Sure, there was contact between Iraq and OBL.  Big deal.  There was contact between us and Saddam; there might well have been contact between us and OBL back in his mujahedeen days.  The fact that there was contact doesn't mean there was friendship or alliance.  I've seen pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein's hand and smiling.  There has been contact between George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac, but we've heard ad nauseam about how the French aren't allies.  The fact is that when you play on the world stage you meet lots of people, and some of them are people you actually loathe.  What we need to prove is not contact but collusion, and there seems to be precious little evidence of that.

The handwritten file, three pages in all, relates to the arrival of a secret envoy sent by bin Laden to Iraq in March, 1998, apparently to establish a clandestine relationship with the Iraqi regime...
The remaining pages confirm bin Laden's agent arrived in Baghdad on March 5 and stayed a full 16 days as a guest of the Iraqi government at the Mansur Melia Hotel, one of the capital's premier accommodations...
Here is the key passage in secret papers discovered by Star correspondent Mitch Potter in the bombed out ruins of Iraq's intelligence service in Baghdad:
"The envoy is a trusted confidant and known by them. According to the above mediation we request official permission to call Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arranegments for the above-mentioned person to Iraq.

"And that our body carry all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his enovy an oral mesage from us to bin Laden, the Saudi oppoistion leader about the future of our relationship with him and to achieve a direct meeting with him."

While you choose to focus almost solely on Platypus' sentence about contact, turnea, you seem to miss the point of his post:


While there was two way contact, and a recognition of common goals, there doesn't appear to be any evidence of the collusion Platypus mentioned. Whatever the intent of the contact, it is secondary to what was (if anything) accomplished by the contact.