Part 4: Saddam's airline hijacking school

Aram Roston Investigative producer

On November 4, 2001, almost two months after 9/11, Ahmad Chalabi called a telephone number in Lebanon, according to Mohamad al-Zobaidy, who took the phone call at his apartment in Beirut, greeted Chalabi and noted his instruction. Chalabi’s code name in Zobaidy’s records was Our Big Brother. Take care of the two men in your custody, Chalabi told Zobaidy on the phone. Don’t let anyone see the men, he insisted. Don’t let them talk to anyone. Zobaidy nodded and reassured Ahmad Chalabi before hanging up the phone. Zobaidy knew how to keep secrets and how to make sure people did what he told them to do. He’s not a large man, but he carries himself as if he is. A veteran of the INC (Iraqi National Congress), he wears a rakish little goatee. And he lived the life of a secret agent, ranging across  borders to serve the organization’s needs. In fact, his own code name in the INC was Al Deeb, The Wolf. Zobaidy, who kept an immaculate diary, would later become bitter toward Chalabi and his INC, but in 2001 and 2002 he was still a loyal and dedicated secret soldier in its cause.

Chalabi’s phone call to Zobaidy puts Chalabi in the middle of one of the earliest and most significant propaganda operations run by the INC after 9/11: an elaborate series of claims that Saddam ran a school for training airline hijackers at a terrorist camp called Salman Pak.

It was Francis Brooke (Chalabi's  loyal American aide) who got the message out to Aras Kareem Habib and others right after 9/11: “Get me a terrorist and some WMDs, because that’s what the Bush administration wants!” He tells the story in various ways: “If you’ve got it, bring it on, because now’s the time” is the phrase he used in another conversation. Whatever Brooke’s specific instructions were, the INC campaign had two themes: to find Iraqi defectors who were prepared to make allegations about Saddam’s WMDs on the one hand and defectors who’d make allegations about Saddam’s links to terror on the other. All in all Chalabi’s people — defectors and sources — produced four major story lines about Saddam, all of them false, but all with worldwide media coverage.

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(The) story in the Times broke on November 8, 2001 — the headline was gripping, coming in those months after 9/11: “Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorists” — and it linked (Iraqi defector Sabah) Khodada’s and (fellow defector) Abu Zainab’s yarns together for the first time. “Two defectors from Iraqi intelligence,” wrote (reporter Chris) Hedges, “said yesterday that they had worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995.” The story cited both Khodada and Abu Zainab, whom it called  a “former lieutenant general.” Abu Zainab was evocative in his descriptions, calling the Islamists at the camp “a scruffy lot” who had trained in Iraq how to take over airplanes. “We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States,” Abu Zainab said in the article. “The gulf war never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.” The New York Times article pointed out that the allegations were “likely to fuel one side of an intense debate in Washington over whether to extend the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government of Afghanistan to include Iraq.”

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